Description
The self-titled four-track 7-inch vinyl EP by the British gospel beat group The Venturers was independently released on Venturers Recordings in 1960.
It was the British, not the American Church which first spotted the potential of wedding post-rock n roll popular music styles to the Gospel message. With little or no financial investment from the Church establishment or older Christians, this movement slowly but surely grew from beach missions and coffee bars to concerts at the Royal Albert Hall in London.
In March 1958 the Daily Mirror was writing about The Venturers, a skiffle band formed at Spurgeon’s Bible College, with the headline ‘Dig These Hep Cat Preachers!’ In February 1964 guitar-toting Salvationists the Joystrings made the lower reaches of the UK pop charts. And in October 1965 a homemade 200-circulation magazine, Buzz, had sprung up to report on evangelist beat groups. The mag was created by Musical Gospel Outreach (MGO) but went on to become Premier Christianity magazine.
With their popularity increasing The Venturers decided to record again. Remembered Doug, “The recording session in Eltham College Chapel took place late at night in order to cut out the noise of any passing traffic. There were times when, after a passing car was heard we were told ‘Sorry guys, you have to do it again.'”
Despite the recording challenges, four songs were recorded and released on an EP, ‘The Venturers’. It was issued on the group’s own label c/o Spurgeon’s College. It contained the group’s arrangement of the old spiritual «Joshua Fit The Battle Of Jericho» and an original song «Can It Be True». Doug Hollidge explained how the band found the song. “It came to us in such a beautiful way. One of the classic outreach occasions taken up by The Venturers was every Monday lunchtime going up to Tower Hill – the open concourse where anyone could stand on a box and say whatever he or she wanted to say to a crowd of lunchtime hecklers, who were businessmen and dockworkers. The Venturers would go of a Monday lunchtime, play and sing, preach a bit, answer questions, get heckled. If you start talking philosophy, there were greater philosophers in the crowd, and they’d damn you down; but as soon as you started talking about personal witness – what Jesus meant to your life – then you had control of the crowds, and beautiful responses to that sort of thing. At the end of one of these meetings, this brown-robed friar, besandled, with a briefcase under his arm, said, ‘Like what you’re doing lads. I’ve written a few songs; would you like to see them?’ I have, to this day, the copy of the songs that Brother William, Society of St Francis, gave us. The group looked at these songs; they were heavily of the tradition of the Society of St Francis. This particular song that came to be recorded by a number of people, «Can It Be True», in its original five verse setting was heavily Eucharistic. Brother William was not toying with the idea but was very sensitive to the idea of the discovery of Jesus as you handed the bread and the wine in the rite itself – because that’s where Jesus was to be discovered.”
Doug continued, “We told him we loved the sentiment of the song, but we wanted to redirect it. So we changed the five verse setting to a three verse setting, which totally majored on the living experience of the historical Jesus becoming relevant to individual lives – ‘Can it be true, the things they say of you?’ – and the song evolved into ‘Yes, of course it can be true: you came to this earth and we can respond to you.’ All the words are Brother William’s, but they’re in a different order and the music is exactly as Brother William wrote it. He realised we were a group that was presenting the Gospel and he okayed the song as we rewrote it. When «Can It Be True» was finally published in Youth Praise 1, the copyright acknowledgement was ‘Brother William, SSF; this arrangement only by The Venturers’. Our one claim to worldwide fame is that when Cliff Richard recorded the song, it was The Venturers’ arrangement he sang.”
The track on ‘The Venturers’ which most upset the Church’s conservative elements was «John 3:16». One reviewer described it as being “introduced by clicking fingers followed by a tune that has a rhythm and blues flavour about it.” Explained Hollidge, “Mike Wood, having come into the group, wrote in a bluesy, soft rock style. Mike took John 3:16 and set it to a rock beat with verses. A lot of flak came our way as we sang that one. We were still at college: a number of occasions we were hauled into the principal’s study. A very convivial George Beasley-Murray – who was very much on our side, because he was an evangelist at heart – said, ‘Guys, the college is losing money because of what you’re doing’. This was to do with the strict historic support of the college coming from certain areas within the Baptist family, not only in the UK but worldwide, were to look askance at this public appraisal of college life in this incredibly daring setting of music. George would say, ‘Look, I want you to continue but I want to know where you are’. So he took the flak for that, and the college went on losing money.”
As it turned out, Spurgeon’s College lost money as some of their regular donors cancelled their standing orders but made quite a bit back through the sales of ‘The Venturers’ EP. Recalled Doug, “Keith Clarke and Roger Watkins were in charge of the marketing of the records. They made contact with Christian bookshops throughout the country. Roger says he was constantly wrapping packages of 10 or more and taking them down the hill to the South Norwood Post Office. It was acknowledged by the ‘trade’ that they became the highest selling Christian records of the day.”
[Excerpt from Tony Cummings’ article “The Venturers: Britain’s pioneers of contemporary Christian music”, featured on Cross Rhythms, 12th August 2015]
7-inch vinyl EP tracklist:
Side One
A1. “Joshua”
A2. “Can It Be True”
Side Two
B1. “John 3:16”
B2. “How Long”
Striking The Right Note: The Story of The Venturers, by Doug Hollidge
As someone with a longtime fascination for the history of Christian music of all types and eras, I was delighted to learn of this book’s existence. The Venturers were a hugely important group in the development of contemporary Christian music in Britain and it has long frustrated me that their contribution has been all but ignored on the world wide web. Evolving from the Baptist theological training college Spurgeon’s in the mid ’50s, by 1958 they were shocking Britain’s media with their determination to present evangelistic songs in “contemporary” forms, at first skiffle and folk spirituals and by the early ’60s electric beat music. They got considerable flack for doing so but the fact that the Daily Mirror ran a story on them in 1958 headed Dig These Hep-Cat Preachers and that their EPs ‘The Venturers’ and ‘The Venturers Again!’ were best sellers in the UK Christian bookshops shows their ability to rise above the criticism. Doug Hollidge was a member of The Venturers and after decades of service as a Baptist pastor and at age 75 has put together this book chronicling the band’s story. It’s very much a scrapbook dominated by photos and cuttings rather than a band biog but is still an invaluable contribution to the painfully few books dealing with an era when singing «Joshua Fit The Battle Of Jericho» or The Venturers’ “hit” song «Can It Be True?» on the beach at the Isle Of White or Weymouth was about as radical as you could get. So ‘Striking The Right Note’ is recommended for Christian music collectors and students of postwar church history. [Tony Cummings, Cross Rhythms, April 2015]
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