Tony Cummings spoke to Chris Llewellyn, lead singer with "folk on steroids" band REND COLLECTIVE

Chris: We have one half-decent mic we use for pretty much everything. The nice thing for our sound is nobody's expecting it to be a hundred percent polished. We just make do for whatever we get; we're still a bit rough around the edges.

Tony: One of the reviewers said 'As Family We Go' is much more polished than the previous albums. Would you agree with that?

Chris: On the scale of pop-music, it's not very polished at all; but on the scale of folk music, I guess it is quite polished. There's probably something to be said for the resurgence of '80s sounds, synth sounds, never present before, that maybe sparkle things up a little bit.

Tony: In what places were you at when you were recording tracks?

Chris: We were out on the road with Chris Tomlin on his Love Ran Red tour of the States. Between February and May we would wake up in the morning, go straight to the studio - you still have to call it the studio. We sat in front of the microphone and tried to hash some things out, then we'd change into our bowties and go out to play for 20 minutes before Chris came out. We'd go straight back to it after that; those were long days, I'll tell you that: 10am to 10pm.

Tony: Being on the road is tiring enough. You must have been at the point of complete exhaustion.

Chris: Music's turned into a working class thing now: it's hard work or nothing.

Tony: Were there any incidents during the recording of 'As Family We Go' which stay in your memory?

Chris: Just as we were coming to the end of our recording - or we thought we were coming to the end of it: two weeks from our deadline - we had our equipment stolen. We were in Gareth's house - his rental in Atlanta; we were getting ready to put the final tweaks on things. It was probably the most professional set-up we've had, and somebody broke in. They stole our equipment, a number of guitars, and unfortunately they took the laptop and the hard-drive that the laptop was backed-up to. We lost a good portion of our music - probably 50 percent of what we had done - and we had to start almost from scratch: we had to do everything again in two weeks.

Tony: When you look back now, do you think the new recordings are not quite as good or better than the ones you did before?

Chris: They're definitely better. The truth is, we probably never would have revisited some of the parts that could have done with revisiting. We're not really concerned with polish sometimes; that can be to your advantage and to your disadvantage - especially when you've got such limited ability in your band as we do. We find it's important to go over things a couple of times: a second go never did anybody any harm in Rend Collective.

Tony: Of the songs you've so far gigged around, which ones would you say have been making the most impression with the audience?

Chris: There's a song on the record called "Every Giant Will Fall". It's been an amazing thing to watch the Church take hold of it. We started playing it at Soul Survivor Momentum. Every time you lead worship in church, but maybe especially for young people, people are carrying scars, and it's amazing to be able to lift up a battle-cry in that situation, see people proclaiming in faith that every giant will fall, every mountain will move, and nothing's impossible with our God. At Soul Survivor Momentum that did become an anthem for a lot of people. That's the point for us: whenever it gives the Church a message that seems to be beyond time, a message that the Church wants to sing, that's a real victory for us.

Tony: That takes a while. It can take a year or two for a song to do its work through all the Church internationally. I'm sure you've found songs on your earlier albums you were thinking of dropping from your sets but are making lots of impact in lots of churches.