With their new album 'Shout' promising to make an impact in the dance scene, and an unerring vision for Holy Spirit revival, 65DBA are set to achieve great things for God. They spoke to Karl Allison.

We've been praying for revival for yonks!" says Shaz. "We're very excited about what's happening at the moment." 65dBA have a lot to be excited about right now. They've been busy giving the Holy Spirit yet more vehicles to work through with a new album and a new tour, both under the title 'Shout'. I travelled to their home studio in Bristol to meet three-quarters of the band - singer Shaz Sparks, drummer Phil Ball and keyboards man Robbie Bronnimann.

"You know the story of Bartimaeus?" asks Robbie. "He was shouting after Jesus because he really wanted to be healed. Everyone else was telling him to shut up but he wasn't afraid. Well, that's the theme of the album's title song. As Christians we need to be shouting after Jesus and there's no time left for sitting around and being apathetic about it."

The new album crackles with life and certainly sounds like a leap forward from their 'Great Awakening' debut. They've settled into a dance groove and they're happy with it. "The 'Great Awakening' was a concept album that NGM did," explains Robbie. (NGM is New Generation Ministries, the evangelism and teaching ministry run by ex-Heartbeat people Ray and Nancy Goudie, which gives a platform to 65dBA.) "The 'Great Awakening' was about trying to bring on the whole church. It wasn't evangelistic and so a lot of different styles were explored on it. It wasn't really at the heart of what 65dBA was developing into. This new album is very much more a 65dBA album. It's much more evangelistic and much more reflective of where we're at."

But let us backtrack somewhat and discover how it all began. And the inevitable question must be asked. Why is the band called 65dBA? Robbie explains: "The first concert the band did was in an open air marquee in the middle of Swindon. Some guys from the Council came round and set the noise restriction level at 65 decibels." This would present serious problems to any band that plays at a volume above speaking level but Robbie quickly adds that this measurement was taken from a few blocks away!

Phil explains the origins of the band: "Ray and Nancy Goudie were connected to a church in Swindon that wanted to set up a youth event called 'The Gap'. An advert was placed in lots of different Christian magazines asking for anyone who could" sing or play instruments and who wanted to do evangelism for a year. The band was put together from this and sent to Swindon to work for a year in schools to lay the foundations for the youth initiative."

Eventually, the whole NGM set up moved to Bristol and another 'Gap' initiative was established there. And with the move came a change in direction for the band too, with less involvement in the schools. "As the organisation has grown, other bands have come on board who fulfil those roles," explains Robbie. "65dBA have become more of the public face of NGM. We're more of a band unit now, although we still very much carry the heart of what NGM is trying to say."

The commitment of the band members to NGM is total. They are all full-time and work beyond the band. Shaz is involved in press and publicity, Robbie acts as producer in the studio, Phil runs the affairs of the other teams (Re...Fresh and Jimmy Ragstaff are involved in schools missions most weeks) while guitarist Danny Budd puts much of the tour together. And they all clearly feel the benefit of this involvement. "We're all very much at the heart of NGM," states Robbie. "We all pray about what we feel it's right to be doing and it's not dictated to us by a record label. It's very much what Ray and Nancy feel the vision is."

"They really are NGM," adds Phil. "Our job is really to serve the vision they've got and the vision is to prepare for revival. To excite people about Jesus. That common thread runs through everything we do."

"We just go for whatever God's saying at the time," says Shaz. "We want to see revival and that's the main thing that spurs us on, but how we communicate that and what we do through our music could change. If God said the ministry is to shut down now and the bands need to close then that's what we'd do. It would be hard, but we're not just about being a band; it's deeper than that. It's about God using what we do."

But right now it seems that God wants the band to keep on making music for the 90s. In making 'Shout', 65dBA have taken their place alongside the Worldwide Message Tribe as the leading lights in British sanctified dance music. It should therefore surprise no one that the Tribe's Zarc Porter was heavily involved in the making of the album. Not only did he co-produce, he also co-wrote most of the tracks with Robbie and Ray Goudie. Robbie explains how this link-up came about: "We heard Take A Long Hike' by the Worldwide Message Tribe on a tape somebody gave us. It just really stood out to us as something that was where it's at and wasn't two years behind! We wrote to them and told them we really enjoyed their music. We finally met up a couple of years ago at the Cross Rhythms festival when Danny got chatting to Zarc. So when we started thinking about this album we thought it would be great to get a Christian who's in the know to come and work alongside us. So Zarc came in and did pre-production programming with me and oversaw the album because it's the first time I've done something like this."

The result is a fine collection of songs in a variety of dance styles, which occasionally allows Zarc's influence to show through. Some of the keyboard lines sound a lot like Howard Jones, but Robbie insists they realised this! "Actually, those keyboard ideas were coming out a lot in the dance music at the time we were recording, but we did all say it was our 'Human's Lib' keyboard line because it was so like those old Howard Jones lines."

The concentration on the dance genre has also served to open the band up to new ideas for advancing the Kingdom. Its power and potential was revealed to them at this year's Soul Survivor festival. Shaz recalls: "At Soul Survivor we did our remixes over here for the first time and there were people just praising God. They were even kneeling before God during "Purify" and that was just so brilliant. We don't just want to play nice music that's trendy and hip and gives people a good dance, we want to affect people." This must be the ultimate thrill for any group of Christian musicians - to see the boundaries of performance and worship blur into one glorious God-glorifying whole, to see people come to a concert and experience church. And so there are new, more ambitious plans being laid. White label remixes will be sent out to the clubs. Maybe God will work his miracles there too. And there's a new project on the way too, designed specifically to hit the clubs.

"Ray and I started thinking about it when we went to the States," says Robbie. "We went to a couple of secular clubs and noticed that a lot of people were out of their heads even when they hadn't taken drugs. They were just getting out of their heads on the music. With so many of these bands there is just such a bad spirit behind what they do. So we are about to start a project to make an ambient album that is just dripped in God's Spirit. We'll be in the studio singing in tongues and just doing things in the Spirit. We want it to come out so that people will put the album on and the presence of God will fall, whether it's in a club or in their sitting room."

'Shout', however, is the last album that the band will be releasing on Integrity. They're committed to the label for the life of this album, but then 65dBA will be looking for a new home. (Robbie: "We still like them and they still like us, we're just in a different place to them right now.") It may even be that the band sets up their own label as an outlet for Christian dance music. So, equipped as they are with very impressive studio facilities, 65dBA may be about to emerge as pretty significant players in the British CCM scene.