Two of the most articulate voices in Christian music have just hit the CD racks. Tony Cummings spoke to acoustic duo SHATTOCK AND RUST.

Shattock And Rust

The release by Alliance Music of the Shattock And Rust CD 'Forgiven Like This' brings to the public the second strings of two very formidable bows. For Geoff Shattock is an evangelist and Bible teacher who has recently pioneered the highly praised 'Breakthrough' course in evangelism for the London Baptist Association while Godfrey Rust is a much loved poet whose 'Breaking The Chains' book for Word Books has been an excellent seller. So how come a 37 year old theologian-cum-evangelist and a 41-year-old copyright-society-executive-cum-poet are broadening their horizons even further to enter the youth-dominated world of Christian music?

"Our musical partnership has been established for 12 years," explains Godfrey Rust. "We've played about 200 gigs down the years ranging from intimate gatherings to the Royal Albert Hall. For a long time it was amazing to us that our music continued to attract an enthusiastic audience. After all, we're certainly not young and our most obvious musical influence is Simon And Garfunkel who aren't exactly considered the cutting edge. But we've found our particular musical style, with its emphasis on the lyrics - both Geoff and I write songs where we try and make every line count -strikes a chord with a wide variety of people."

Judging from the quality of 'Forgiven Like This' that audience is set for expansion. In a thoughtfully conceived, acoustic orientated setting put together by producer John Pantry, Shattock And Rust sing articulate, thought-provoking songs which manage to avoid both the banal sloganeering of many evangelicals at song and the obscure metaphors of Christians bottling out of spiritual communication. Among the several riveting compositions on 'Forgiven Like This' is "Barabbas", a Godfrey Rust number. "It was inspired by a childhood memory," recalls Godfrey. "My mother told me how when she was a child she heard the story of Barabbas at church. She was so shocked by the fact that the crowd shouted for Barabbas rather than Jesus that she burst into tears. I took that as the starting point for the song. The song developed along a number of routes. One of them was that actually, the crowd's choice was really quite logical when you really looked at what was going on. Not only did the crowd make what in their terms was the safest and most sensible choice, but actually that's what people go on doing now. If we were there we probably would have made that same choice as well. The song is really starting from a childish outrage at what is quite clearly a terrible decision and then realising that the whole world is stuck with choosing Barabbas instead of Jesus."

Another compelling song on 'Forgiven Like This' is a Geoff Shattock composition "Kind Of Magic", which takes an unflinching yet compassionate look at the AIDS epidemic.

The emotions for the songs came out of a combination of experiences. One was Freddie Mercury dying. "I wrote the first two lines a couple of years ago and had never been able to get beyond them. I was stuck. I'd got the tune but the words were slowly coming, which is unusual. I really wanted to write a compassionate song about AIDS. The information for it came from a Channel 4 documentary programme called 'The Plague'. In it there was a man talking about his friends who had been good healthy strong men. Now they were all dead. I tried to write with compassion because my church background is "gays with AIDS are moving around in a cesspit of their own making" sort of thing. I really wanted to write a song that said 'Where it will lead God only knows', because so many people are arguing about the answer to AIDS. I just wanted to leave it at that point."

The title track, another of the seven Shattock compositions on the album, works on two levels. "On one level it is a song about various different things people get into, and think they can never find forgiveness. As I was writing 'Forgiven Like This' it struck me I could write the song about various different covenants, the first verse being about Noah. The second verse is about Abraham, the third verse Moses, the fourth verse David and the fifth verse is about the New Covenant." Geoff continues with a quip, "The song has a commentary to go with it. The album is gonna cost you £11.99 and the commentary is £25.00!"

The history of Shattock And Rust goes back to 1982 when London Bible College-trained Geoff Shattock who was writing performing songs as part of his evangelistic presentation met poet and occasional singer Godfrey Rust at St Andrews University. After becoming a Christian at 14, Godfrey had drifted into the spiritual wilderness before returning to faith in 1980 (many of Godfrey's experiences were subsequently chronicled in his autobiographical poem sequence 'The Sailing Of The Ark' published in 'Breaking The Chains'). The evangelist and the Gallup Poll executive (Rusts's occupation at the time) found an immediate affinity and began singing together.

The gigging opportunities began to expand as the duo found there was a receptive audience for their increasingly incisive songs and a laid-back and laconic stage act spiced with wit and poetry. In 1985 the duo recorded a simple voices-and-acoustics tape 'Facts' to sell at their concerts and four years later recorded a second, more ambitious album with veteran producer John Pantry. The Rock Beneath' and its predecessor have sold 4,000 copies, an exceptional quantity for privately recorded tapes. With demands for a new recording increasing all the time, earlier this year the duo set to work and after "surprisingly untraumatic" sessions at Eastbourne's ICC studios recorded their first commercially distributed album.

When asked about what motivates him to write songs and make music Geoff Shattock is quite emphatic. "If there's a unifying note it's that I'm trying to say something Christian. More specifically I'm trying to get people to think about Jesus. There was a time when I would pick a very rigid approach to that and say 'Right, I'm going to write a song on the Resurrection and another song on the Cross and another song about John's view of the last week of Jesus' life. I still believe in that and occasionally do it. But I have this sort of passion for combining message and music, rather than just like worship songs, and trying to craft songs so that Christians will enjoy them and non-Christians will be intrigued by them too and learn something through the music. I've had this mixture of things in my life - I'm an evangelist, I'm a trained scientist, I have an artistic element to my character, I'm a theologian and I'm a preacher - so all these things come together in music. I have a logical approach to the lyrics, but also, I suppose in this album more than any other, I tried to be a bit more poetic, a bit more subtle."

Not for Shattock And Rust simplistic "Come To Jesus Come To Jesus" songs. Comments Geoff, "I think evangelism is a very complex business. I mean communicating is complicated. I think there is an element in which we can make becoming a Christian a simple step. But I think evangelising's complicated and I spend hours making it more complicated for churches because the more complicated it is the better they do it instead of, 'Here's the pastor and the teacher and the Bible studies' and that's it. Listeners will benefit from hearing realistic illustrations and I think our music contains things people can relate to."

Godfrey comments, "I think there was a time when we first started out we were more overtly aiming at the non-Christian in the audience. Eventually I felt we were creating a straw man. We were actually imagining somebody that probably wasn't there and in the meantime there were a whole bunch of people who WERE there, many of whom were Christians, some of whom weren't, all of whom could be moved on spiritually by what was going on. I think maybe five years ago we began to think 'Hang on, this is ministry and whether people are Christian or not, or if they're somewhere in between in the process of moving from one to the other, is less important than whether they're moving on with God.' Divorce evangelism from all other aspects of truth and you've got a very empty form of evangelism. So if you are truly evangelising you are ALSO going to be reaching a Christian. All of us need to be constantly reinforced with the Gospel."