It is Holy Week in the Christian calendar (the week prior to Easter), but as well it’s also – unusually – Orthodox Easter on the same Sunday as Catholic Easter, Passover began on Sunday just past, and Eid Al Fitr fell at the turn of March into April. So, this week I’m looking at religion in song.

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I’ve actually covered this subject a long time back, but with a different slant. The first time I looked at this, almost exactly sixteen years ago on /Tuesday Ten /068, it was more about criticism of religion. This time around, it’s more about artists who use their faith – or in same cases, a lack of it – in song, around particular elements of their faith, or songs inspired by passages in holy books.

It perhaps wasn’t quite originally intended like that – and when I asked for suggestions in 2019, I asked specifically for “songs that reference elements of a holy book (i.e. the Bible, Torah, etc)”. It turned out there were an awful lot of suggestions – maybe more than I’d bargained for – and what I ended up using were songs where there were interesting backgrounds and links, and in pretty much all cases the question of faith has been discussed.

As I’ve noted before, I’m not religious: I realised I had no interest in religion relatively early – and my dad is an avowed atheist – but I’m of the view that I respect other’s beliefs (with the distinct exception of where those beliefs will directly and adversely affect others), and if others are religious, that’s their call. Not to mention, if I’m in a place of worship or religious significance for whatever reason, I obey and respect the rules of where I am: it’s their house, not mine. It is possible to be respectful but offer critique, of course, and I will continue to do so.

So, yeah. This week’s /Tuesday Ten took me out of my comfort zone a bit, and required a bit of research to get things right. Of course, if I’ve got things wrong, there’s the comment button and I’m happy to correct as required.

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A quick explanation for new readers (hi there!): my Tuesday Ten series has been running since March 2007, and each month features at least ten new songs you should hear – and in between those monthly posts, I feature songs on a variety of subjects, with some of the songs featured coming from suggestion threads on Facebook.

Feel free to get involved with these – the more the merrier, and the breadth of suggestions that I get continues to astound me. Otherwise, as usual, if you’ve got something you want me to hear, something I should be writing about, or even a gig I should be attending, e-mail me or drop me a line on Facebook (details below).

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/16 Horsepower
/Black Soul Choir
/Sackcloth ‘n’ Ashes

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David Eugene Edwards is an unusual figure in alternative music in many ways, with both 16 Horsepower and his more recent project Wovenhand having dark, almost gothic tones but being very much rooted in biblical tradition and using his songs to tell tales of redemption and despair within his faith. In addition, being the grandson of a Nazarene preacher that he saw at first hand, he took inspiration from that as well as using comparatively ancient instruments that bring in sounds quite unlike any of his peers.

The rollicking Black Soul Choir, an early song from 16 Horsepower and one of their signature songs, is – as far as I understand it – about souls of the damned coming together and finding salvation through song, by telling the truth and being redeemed in the eyes of God: the matter of redemption being explored in the Gospel of John.

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/Gavin Friday
/The Church of Love
/Ecce Homo

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I was, perhaps unsurprisingly, not short of options when it came to songs from Gavin Friday: his catholic upbringing and religious undertones to his songs meant that there were few songs I wouldn’t be able to feature. But the excellent recent single from Ecce Homo (which apparently also bases songs around the Gospel of John) – his first album in thirteen years, and only the second full album since Shag Tobacco in 1995 (!) – shines a bright light on inclusivity in the church, or more the lack of it.

Far too many Christian denominations – never mind other religions – see LGBTIQA+ as sins (the list
affirming LGBTIQA+ people is not particularly long, it has to be said), and so the rainbow lighting onstage last week for this joyous, inclusive song (key line: “We pray in our own way / No Pope, no Rome“) was something of a celebration of a marginalised grouping that suggests you can pray to a God, but you don’t have to follow the herd to do so. Find your own way if you see fit.

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/Diamanda Galás
/This Is The Law of the Plague
/Plague Mass

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It’s fair to say that Diamanda Galás is a unique phenomenon in music: a striking, intense vocalist with at least a five octave range that results in awe and terror when listening to her music. Genuinely, there’s nothing quite like her. Many of her songs are dealing and fighting for victims in various senses, and mostly notably around AIDS victims – something she has fundraised for and supported for decades (partly inspired by her brother, Philip-Dimitri Galás, dying of AIDS in 1986). There was a trilogy of albums around AIDS and those suffering from it in the mid-1980s, and songs from those were performed at an extraordinary performance at Cathedral of St. John the Divine in NYC, which was released later as Plague Mass, and specifically took aim at the Catholic Church and their historical indifference to those suffering with HIV and AIDS.

One element of the disease in the 1980s was the “fear” of AIDS transmission before it was fully understood – and when the Christian Right were, seemingly deliberately, letting the disease rip through communities they cared little about – and this dramatic, overwhelming song quotes Leviticus 15 that deals with the unclean and transmission.

It took the death of the “macho” Rock Hudson from AIDS and then, remarkably Princess Diana challenging the stigma before attitudes began to change, although sadly to this day the Catholic Church refuses to lift the prohibition on condoms that would do so much to help transmission.

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/In Strict Confidence
/Babylon
/Holy

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In Strict Confidence are a band who’ve used the sacred and profane in their lyrics and imagery across their entire career, and the album Holy was perhaps the pinnacle of that. The track Babylon, a swooning, elegant dancefloor-bound single, tells at part of the story of the fall of Babylon, as the Angels flee the city for Heaven while the unifying process of the famous city by way of the Tower of Babel is halted by God. I’ve never quite understood this: it certainly works as a (too?) neat explainer for the multitude of languages across the world, but why would a just God deliberately intervene to stop a process of peace and harmony? Maybe I’m just misunderstanding it. Either way, Babylon is referenced in history and multiple religions, and as is often the way, there are various interpretations…

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/Rotting Christ
/זה נגמר (Ze Nigmar)
/Rituals

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Rotting Christ have had various protests aimed at them over the years – their name is going to piss off Christians in particular from the off – but a number of their albums have revealed them to be curious and wide-ranging in their interests. Especially amid the staggering power of Rituals, an album where they explored and took inspirations about rites, belief and actions from religions across the world. It’s an album that is written and sung in their native Greek, as well as English, French, Latin, Sanskrit, Orcish (no, really)…and Aramaic.

That latter language is used on the excellent, omninous stomp of זה נגמר (Ze Nigmar), the title of which translates roughly to “It is done”, and is also a reference, apparently, to the Stations of the Cross, which is part of the Christian tradition in particular on Good Friday.

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/The Tiger Lillies
/Banging In The Nails
/The Brothel To The Cemetery

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Speaking of Good Friday, this might be the only song I own that is specifically about the crucifixion of Jesus. One of my favourite songs from the band, this dark moment is taken to a very different place by this most curious of bands. The song takes place from the perspective of the man crucifying Jesus, who takes great pride in their work and is rather clearly very happy to be doing this job. He even takes credit for the Crown of Thorns! This is also, it should be added, an almighty earworm that you probably don’t want to be singing out loud at any religious event this coming weekend…

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/The Pogues
/If I Should Fall from Grace with God
/If I Should Fall from Grace with God

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All too often in history, religious differences have been the root cause of war and conflict, and there was absolutely a religious dimension to The Troubles in Northern Ireland, which began with campaigns against discrimination of the Catholic-minority at the time in the province (something that over fifty years on, has now flipped, with Catholics being in the majority as of the 2021 census), and only officially ended thirty years later with the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.

Unsurprisingly, there are various songs dealing with the subject, but I’ve decided to go with the 1988 Pogues single from the album of the same name, a charging folk-punk track that deals with an Irish Nationalist killing a British person, and musing on how that would affect their relationship with God if they have done something that they believe to be righteous. The question is never resolved in the song.

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/Shiva Burlesque
/The Black Ship
/Shiva Burlesque

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Like many kids, I went to church occasionally: mostly thanks to being at Church of England Primary Schools (amazingly, daily worship is still required by law in England and Wales, although apparently it’s a long time since it was monitored) where occasional trips to church were required, and I only stopped outright when I was about ten or eleven, when my (religious) maternal Grandfather accepted that I didn’t want to go.

I suspect like many of my age, we found it deathly boring. As did the protagonists in this marvellous Shiva Burlesque (the predecessor to nineties alt-roots-rock band Grant Lee Buffalo) song, where they escape the drudgery of church services for the docks, where they’d sing for change and dream of places afar, before stowing away and ending up in a shipwreck. Be careful what you wish for…

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/Cardiacs
/Dog Like Sparky
/Sing to God

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It’s amazing to think that this cult band supported Blur at Mile End in 1995, at the height of Britpop. Dog Like Sparky is a chaotic amalgam of vaudeville knees-up, art-pop, oompah and comes across as about eight songs all at once, all the while apparently promoting belief in the wholesome relationship between human and dog as a more appropriate belief system than mainstream religion. Or maybe it’s just a nonsense, theatrical pastiche that just happens to have a gloriously silly, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it mocking of religion at its heart:

“Defenders of the world we make believe in / Put your hands on the Holy Bible and scream ‘wank!’”

Either way, it is a fabulous song. Tim Smith never got the fame he perhaps deserved, but remained a cult figure until his death in 2020, twelve years after a heart attack and stroke that left him unable to move or speak: the wide range of artists that paid tribute at the time – from Mike Patton to Pitchshifter, Steven Wilson to Shane Embury of Napalm Death, among many others – gave an idea of the vast influence Smith had.

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/Frank Turner
/Glory Hallelujah
/England Keep My Bones

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I seem to be going through a phase, again, of using songs from this album, but they just work.

A lifelong Atheist, he attended Eton as a child and thus attended church every day, and is the grandson of a Bishop, but here he celebrates the power of music and community without having to rely on religion, having experienced both. This song ends up being the amusing oxymoron of an atheist spiritual, I guess: seeing it live, sung amid a crowd of hundreds or thousands, is like most Frank Turner songs, an extraordinary and uplifting experience.