Roland Johnson Bell is better known as Roly, if "known" is the right word for a rock gospel singer who seems to defiantly shun any trappings of fame and fortune. Words by Tony Cummings, photos by Ian Bosworth.

And change Roly did. "I began a fervent search for the God whom I had forsaken and went through a lot of the fundamentals that really I should have gone through in my initial Christianity. I started facing up to the cost of following Christ, started facing up to repentance."

Roly moved to the Midlands and joined a Christian rock band, the Blazing Apostles. But things didn't go well. The band weren't prepared to go into full-time Christian work and his wife, who wasn't a Christian, became increasingly estranged from the zealous young Christian she found she'd married. Only God himself seemed to be making sense in Roly's life.

"I joined this rather batty loveable Congregationalist minister Tom, and this became like a little interim in my life. He had a sort of inner urban mission going on in an area called Sparkhill, which is a very interesting area of Birmingham. Then my first wife divorced me and it was ever so strange. I had no intentions of getting remarried. The word divorce didn't enter my vocabulary. I was a real stoic. God introduced me to my new wife, under Tom's auspices, and we decided we had to make a choice between sort of Christian social-work, which was the sort of work Tom was involved in, or a Christian music ministry.

"We decided we'd go to Bible College to give that music ministry some foundation in the Scripture. It was the most demolishing and reconstructive phase of my life," he said.

After Birmingham Bible Institute, and a spell as music director in a Midlands Pentecostal church, Roly become a full-time itinerant musician. Eventually he attracted the attention of the small Christian recording studio Fairmorn and got the chance to record a tiny-budget cassette album. A review in a Christian magazine at the time says it all: "Roland Johnson Bell presents 'Such Love' in a bewildering flurry of styles from simple praise to country hoedown to synth-led techno-rock. It is the latter, which works best. Perhaps the lapses in production control will put off some, but for sheer versatility Mr Johnson Bell deserves a little recognition."

Perversely, Roly proved his versatility two years later when he recorded in yet another style -roots reggae. The Roly-composed, straight ahead evangelistic song "Does He Know Your Name" was done in a variety of styles, a credible (for a honkie) lovers rock pastiche for the top side, and authentic dub and toast (Jamaican rap) for the reverse (the toast supplied by the black bass player with backing band Revelation) and all pressed up on a 12-inch single.

If that wasn't revolutionary enough Roly had unusual ideas about getting it to the public. "I was quite enamoured by Keith Green's attitude with the 'So You Wanna Go Back To Egypt' album. A pay-what-you-can-afford basis. I felt that was a real piece of God's wisdom. It says in the Bible not to treat people with different weights and different measures. And there's very few ways you can do that when you're embracing people who have different financial situations. But if you say to someone I'll give you this album for what you can afford, you're actually treating people the same way. I was most impressed with this.

"So I recorded 'Does He Know Your Name'. The studio (at fledgling Big Feet Media) contributed the time for free, I got a loan from the bank to press it and it was sold through Christian magazines and at concerts I played with people paying whatever they felt they could afford. It was also emancipated from copyright restrictions so people were at liberty to copy it and give it to their friends. It paid for itself three times over."

It bore amazing spiritual fruit too. The bank manager from whom the penniless Roly negotiated the loan became a Christian and rastas were seen grooving to it in the roots reggae shops and blues parties of Birmingham.

That same year, 1985, Roly recorded two songs for a 'Live at the Spring Harvest Fringe' album called 'The Buzz On The Streets' released through Word (UK), which Roly describes simply as "a very unhappy experience."

In 1986 Roly began a project which was to become a near obsession and which is, this month, seeing fulfilment, after nearly five years of blood, sweat and backbreaking toil. It revolved around the loaded topic of copyright and worship songs. "In essence I don't believe any worship songs need to be protected by copyright.

"There was a masterful article about copyright written at the time which actually provoked me into action. It made me want to start a system to make it easier for people. I didn't see the big problem in releasing something from copyright. So the idea for Sound Doctrine came to me."

Sound Doctrine was a company, actually a charity, set up to publish a praise and worship songbook. But with a crucial difference. All the 36 songs in the book, by numerous composers as well as Roly, have been contributed specifically by the composers with no copyright restrictions whatever. The songbook Gifts Of Song is to be distributed on a pay-what-you-can basis and carries with it exhortations to photocopy it and write the songs on acetate without any fees or any licensing schemes. The task of preparing the manuscript was monumental. With little financial backing Roly had to find intrinsically good unpublished praise and worship songs, and then, lacking the latest in computer technology, letraset by hand every crotchet and quaver of every song - no mean feat for a man who doesn't read music! A few volunteers helped out but most of the work, hundreds of manhours, was done by Roly on his kitchen table. Gifts Of Song is out now.

"I believe God will honour it. It's taken a lot of slog but there are some wonderful praise songs in it which the whole church needs to hear and also it's a symbol to show that songs can reach the churches without having to go over the standard commercial rollercoaster."

Roly makes no bones about being a radical. Uneasy with the money-changers he perceives in God's temple, he treads a precarious path where albums (a new one is in the pipeline) and songbooks are offered in ways which would make a Word Record Club exec squirm while he still refuses to play at church events where a charge is made at the door. Aware that he has been perceived in the past as a man with a giant-sized chip on his shoulder he admits that he's made mistakes ("plenty of them") in the past. But Roly remains a radical and a visionary whether he's playing to a group of inmates in a Midlands prison or distributing "Please-photocopy-this-book" praise and worship songbooks. Is he simply a lone individual bucking the system whereby the parachurch (non-local church ministry) initiates a great deal of the national ministry initiatives?

"I'm not unhappy that parachurch organisations exist. I'm glad they do, else little or nothing would be done in many areas. But I believe the church today needs visionaries to effect radical new methods of working - The Keith Greens or The General Booths (founder of the Salvation Army). Now there was a bloke who was right out on a limb and was really slagged off by his contemporaries. Yet he hung on in there knowing that what he'd heard was from God."

Roly believes he's heard from God. And after seeing and hearing this man at work, so do I.