‘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.