One of the most unexpected releases for many a year was N-Soul's recent remix album of Jesus Music legend LARRY NORMAN. Mike Rimmer spoke at length to the man who almost single handedly invented Christian rock music.

How did you approach it? "We didn't have any of the music at all, and to tell the truth I hadn't even heard the song before. We had absolutely no idea what it sounded like! That may be one of the reasons why it came out so strange, because we didn't have a point of reference. First we got the vocals and I spent several days trying to find the rhythm. With the vocals the way they were it was very hard to find what kind of rhythm Larry was singing it! We tried different approaches to the song. I had been listening to a lot of 'Goldie' which has a lot of break beating dubbed stuff. I thought t would be interesting to do something like that too. I was watching the X Files at the time because I'm a big fan! So we just played up on the UFO vibe. We definitely had sci-fi influences! We tried to take the song and make something completely different that wouldn't resemble the original, except for the vocals! I didn't quite mean for it to stick out but I guess that's not a bad thing."

JOEY BELVILLE
Jest known for his work under the band name Echoing Green (most famous song "Defend Your Joy"). Joey remixed "Sweet Songs Of Salvation".
Getting started: "They gave me the vocal tracks, some of the drums and bass and then he sent me the whole track so that I could listen to it. At the beginning of the song you hear old drum and bass and that's from the actual song. I sampled that and put it in and threw a hard beat on top of it. The remix is a little bit aggressive for us. I usually don't do full on techno stuff and that song is a very straightforward dance song. But it was a lot of fun! We recorded the song in a friend's bedroom! It took us about two nights."
Joey on Larry: "I think it's definitely because of the message. He pretty much invented Christian music. The songs are all truths. They're timeless in the same way that the Bible is timeless. The whole remix album is just updating it for kids in this generation who don't enjoy the classic rock sound."

BRIAN HARDIN
A producer and recording artist, he produced the debut album by Nouveaux - 'Beginnings'. His album 'Wonder In Blue' was released by N-Soul. Brian remixed "I Wish We'd All Been Ready".
Job specification from Scott Blackwell: "He told me that he wanted it to be a little loopy! The more I got into the song the more I really wanted to stay true to the lyric instead of making it a really musical piece. Of all the songs Larry's ever done that one's a classic and I didn't want to butcher it. It was eerie to be using a vocal from 20 years ago on a brand new track."
Approach: "All I had to go with was the original vocal and I wanted to somehow be able to stay true to his vocals and recapture some of the retro vibe. I didn't want to make it a techno beat, so I kept the live drums and the acoustic instruments."
Brian on Larry: "I've admired his music for a long time. I met him before I made the track and spent some time with him. He's quiet and very intense. He's amazingly creative. Regardless of how old he is, he manages to stay as close to the edge as he can."

PAUL DEXTER
Owns a recording studio in California and has worked on a lot of Scott Blackwell's projects, eg, Gina, Limit X and Private Boys. Paul remixed "God Part 3" and "Why Should The Devil Have All The Good Music".
Approach: "Scott asked us to do them rocky with live drums and some grungy guitar. So we did! It's a really simple three-piece power combo with Larry's vocals on top. It was a lot of fun because Scott said for us to go for it, make it really heavy and pound away, but I don't think he quite thought we would. He liked it though."
The musicians: "All the power comes from Frank Sandoval's guitar! The drum player Steve Latination, who plays with Clash Of Cymbals, did a great job too pounding away. He's the hardest hitting drummer we could find. I played bass so that's the extent of the three parts."
Challenges: "Remixing is something I've never really done. I very loosely call these songs remixes, but technically they are. I'm into all the old analogue equipment. I have to use a lot of computers sometimes - in this case we had to transfer a load of vocals up to the tape and drop them in over the music. All of this material was done without a click so the vocals would wander all over as did all the instruments. But we had it easier than the rest of them because we were only using vocals."
While Larry Norman fans have been waiting for that new album, the void in the release schedules has been slightly compensated by two projects in the last year. ForeFront's multi-artist tribute album reminded many people of the debt that CCM owes to its founding father whereas a more recent album has brought the man's music skipping and jumping into the dance beat obsessed '90s.

It is an adventurous recording artist who surrenders the master tapes of his music (some of it over 25 years old) to a bunch of young remixers half his age to update for a new generation of music lovers. But then Larry Norman's entire recording career has been a series of surprising and bold moves. He's made a virtue of unpredictability!

Believe it or not, a pre-release of 'Remixing This Planet' was the main in-car entertainment for my wife and I during our honeymoon last summer! It was a curious musical experience to hear familiar and favourite songs re-interpreted and re-recorded in such a diverse and creative fashion. Back at work, it wasn't long before I donned my Sherlock Holmes deerstalker and set off on the arduous search for the talents behind this fascinating release.

I wondered how Larry felt about other people interpreting his songs. He explains, "I thought they had quite interesting readings of different songs. It was interesting to hear the different styles of the groups performing them. I think the ambience of the songs was true to the meaning of the message to begin with. I like all the songs and I think everybody did a good job. It was different from how I imagined it would be because I've bought tribute albums in the past and not liked the way they've sounded. I don't feel that way about this album, maybe because it's better or maybe because it's my music, so I can't have that objectivity."

Larry continues, "I wasn't involved in the ForeFront tribute album and I wasn't directly involved with this one. It's fun to listen to the choices that were made on the album. Somebody else would choose different drums to layer on top of the vocal track. If you gave one song to 10 different mixers there would be a lot of variables. In our studio we've actually done a lot of remixes. We haven't taken the dance approach - we've taken a remix approach to different sections of the song. I think my next album will surprise a lot of people just with the way we've done the record."

'Remixing The Planet' has been a big enough surprise for a lot of Larry Norman fans. Scott Blackwell describes how the project was initiated. "Larry called me about two years ago after I'd done some DC Talk remixes. He was out doing some gigs with them on the road. He said it would be a cool idea if we could get together and maybe try to remix some of his music. I presented the idea to our distributor over here and asked them if they thought there was a market for it. After talking about it we decided to go for it. Larry lives in Oregon, which is about two hours on a plane north of LA. I flew up there, we filled a station wagon full of old master tapes, went to a local studio and I made a DAT of about 25 songs. I made source tapes for the other remixers involved and gave them the direction we wanted to go in."

Blackwell sums up the direction of the album: "We didn't want to do all house mixes. We wanted to do a really wide variety of remixes. In some of them we kept the live rock element and just replaced the tracks, which is what we did with 'God Part 3' and 'Why Should The Devil Have All The Good Music'. I wanted those to be straight forward young, aggressive rock."

I wonder what Larry thought of the end result. He ponders and then replies, "I think they did a good job on 'If The Bombs Fall'. That's a song that I've never released officially. It was released once on a limited edition album but not on a major album. A lot of people don't know it, but I thought that even if they were unfamiliar with it, it comes across quite nicely as a song in its own right."

He is less sure about the rock tracks on the record. "The song 'Why Don't You Look Into Jesus" doesn't sound like a remix; it sounds like a rough mix track that I'd created to begin with. Maybe you could say that the drum sounds a little deeper here and there, but it's not really a dance remix. On 'God Part 3', the guitar is the same. It's still quite frenetic, which is fine because it was meant to be in the first place. It has a nice final effect to it. They did a good job!"

And is there anything on the album that Larry definitely doesn't like? He points to "Fly Fly Fly" but not because he thinks it's been badly remixed. Explains Larry, "Oh, I never liked that song anyway! That was just a B-side I recorded under duress. I would never have recorded that, but I think that by the time 'Only Visiting This Planet' had been out and sold its majority of sales, MGM was quite worried that somehow this Jesus rock was not only offensive, but it also wasn't very commercial. So they tried to make 'So Long Ago The Garden' a little less religious and a little more general. As far as the remix version of 'Fly Fly Fly is concerned, it's pleasant. I think it even had other lyrics on the remix version." Larry Norman anoraks (and I confess to being one!) will spot that the vocal is taken from the rare "Australian' version of the song, not the ones found on 'So Long Ago The Garden'.

One song on the album stands out as being a little different from the rest and that is "UFO". When I originally listened to the album with Admiral Cummings, we played a game of guessing what the songs were before the vocals started. With "UFO" we were more than halfway into the song before we could identify it. It is clear from talking to Larry that he too is puzzled by the remix, as he explains, "I didn't understand the remix of 'UFO'! I've listened to it several times and I don't know what idea they had! It doesn't have any lyrics and it doesn't go anywhere particularly musical."