‘Dangerous People’ by Noel Richards

I hadn’t listened to a Noel Richards album for many years – probably a decade – until I listened to ‘Calling All Nations’ a couple of weeks ago. I knew then that this was coming up, and it bothered me. It bothered me because I’d found ‘Calling All Nations’ such hard work, but I didn’t want that to be true for ‘Dangerous People’, as I was pretty fond of Noel Richards’ music back when this was released.

Happily, this remains a much better album than the one that followed it. It’s a little dated now, perhaps inevitably, and it’s welded so strongly to it’s stadium worship context that it’s difficult to comprehend it in any other setting, but it still has proper tunes, and an energy that ‘Calling All Nations’ was entirely lacking.

Interestingly, the album works best at either end of a scale. The most obviously ‘built-for-stadium’ tracks work well (‘Love Songs From Heaven’, ‘Keep On Praying’, ‘There Is No-one Like Our God’), though the lyrics don’t stand up to a great deal of scrutiny, presumably as they were designed to be sung in large groups and therefore accessible to all. At the other end of the scale is ‘You Are My Passion’, a mostly acoustic track which serves as a reminder of how effective a songwriter Richards can be when stripped of all the bluster – the Richards who wrote ‘By Your Side’ and ‘You Laid Aside Your Majesty’. The weak points of the album are where it falls between the two ends of the scale – ‘I Do Believe’, and ‘Have You Heard The Good News?’ (a song written by Stuart Garrard of Delirious who served a stint in the Noel Richards band) aren’t bad, but are reasonably unremarkable. Still, these are minor quibbles for an album which holds its own pretty well.

'Calling All Nations' by Noel Richards

What a contrast.

Imagine this. You're a well known worship leader with a heart to see stadiums used as worship venues. Your recent albums have been specifically tailored to provide music for such events, and over the last few years, you've relentlessly toured the country filling church halls and small venues building momentum for your plan. Then, after much planning and hard work, you fill Wembley Stadium. Then what?

If you're Noel Richards, you make a plan to hold a similar event in Berlin. Then, you get to work on your next album. But what it should it be like? You've done two albums of rousing stadium-style songs, so do you do another, or do you aim for something slightly more mature? The mature option is a sensible one, as there's a new wave of younger worship leaders snapping at your heels. So, a couple of years on, 'Calling All Nations' is released.

I'm not massively sure how the album came into my collection, but I'd not listened to it for a long time, a very long time. It's not great. It bobs along very tastefully, but there's nothing of any real excitement, and nothing that hadn't been done already, or wasn't being done better by someone else. I'd love to say there was some kind of saving grace - a really good song tucked away at the end, or a great arrangement, but... there's nothing. Even a guest vocal from Matt Redman sounds like it's being phoned in. By the end of the album, I was checking each track to see it it was the last one - never a good sign. It's a shame, because Richards was clearly passionate about what he was doing, and working with all the best intentions. You just can't really hear it.