Most of the songs on this CD had their beginnings at Portland SUFM, a summer program run by Scripture Union. Jon wrote the songs over a number of years, because he felt that there was a lack of good music for older children and young teenagers. He was right (until now).

The first stage in this project was a recording of three songs in November 1995. This was done one afternoon at Westgarth Baptist, by Jon, Tim, and Ange, along with Mark Chislett on drums and Graeme Howlett on guitar. The songs were “Jesus My Best Friend”, “Amen Song” and “Jesus 4 U & Me”. We were also planning to record “Rockin’ for Jesus” but we ran out of time. It didn’t get onto the CD anyway.

We hope that the demo will be worth a lot of money some day.

Most of the songs existed in one form or another at this stage. However, it was at this time that Jon & Mark co-wrote “My God is with me” and “Children of the Lord”. Once the songs were written, Ange and Tim joined Jon and Mark and so began the process of moulding the songs into some sort of recordable shape.

Rehearsals continued for many months. Many, many months. Finally, towards the end of 1996, we felt ready to make a demo, as the first step towards a full recording. We spent an intense afternoon at West Preston Baptist and managed to record most of the songs that ended up on the CD. Time constraints meant that we ended up using the original demos from 1995 for some of the songs, but we were pretty happy with the way the songs were coming together. At this stage we still naively thought that we might get the CD out in time for Christmas. And in a way, we were right. We just weren’t too specific about which Christmas that would be.

The period between making the demo and Christmas would probably have been a good time to start recording. However, the usual end of year distractions, like Mark's holidays and Tim's final Law exams, kicked in once again. Our rehearsals became a bit infrequent, and stayed that way until early 1997 when we all got back from holidays and remembered that we were working on a CD. Jon, of course, had not been idle, and by the time we got going again he had lined up Dave Carr to produce the CD.
Recording started early in 1997 in a little room in Collins Street Baptist church. There were a few hiccups, where we discovered that songs that had sounded good throughout a year of rehearsals suddenly lacked something when we came to record them. But, with a few extra rehearsals, often an hour or so before a recording session, we got the bass and drums down on all the songs except “My God is With Me”, which is piano based, and “Strength Peace Love” which hadn’t been written. Jon and Dave put down the guitar tracks over the next couple of months, and then came the fun part..... keyboards. We got that done pretty smoothly in the end, and we also managed to find time to put bass and drums on the other two tracks.

The next thing to do was to put some brass on “Amen”, “Jesus 4 U & Me” and “My Best Friend” Tim Fisher wrote the brass arrangements, and we managed to find enough good brass players among our friends, and our friends’ friends, and our friends’ friends’ friends to produce a very tight sound on a very small budget. We are very grateful to everyone who gave up their time to help us out. By this stage, we had moved the operation to a “real studio”, which was thrilling for those of us who had never been in one before, and expensive for those who were generously funding the project.

After the brass came the final stage (more or less). Janine Maunder agreed to help with the vocals, and again we discovered that we know a lot of talented people. These people very generously gave up their time to help us out, and I think the results speak for themselves.

Once we had that much done, it seemed to get a bit easier, at least for those of us who didn’t have any more recording to do. Jon, sensing that we might actually get this thing finished, worked tirelessly to organise everything else that had to be done, like adding sound effects, organising the mastering, and starting to think about how to promote the CD when it finally appeared (we like the songs, but we don’t want to buy 250 copies each). Meanwhile, Simon Adams was designing the cover, and production of the songbook was also progressing behind the scenes.



Written By : Tim Whitehead