'Holding Nothing Back' by Tim Hughes

A quirk of alphabetical filing takes me from one Tim Hughes album to another, skipping over ‘When Silence Falls’ (which I’m not going to get to for a long time at this rate). By the time of this, his third album, Hughes’ situation had changed significantly. No longer was he the new face on the scene, snapping at the heels of Matt Redman – he’d already become a major figure in Christian music, and not just in Britain.

The development in sound between ‘Here I Am To Worship’ and this are fairly obvious when you listen to them back to back. The arrangements are clearer and more muscular here, and Hughes’ voice – which had always been strong – is in very fine form. There is a sprinkling of new anthems throughout the album – the title track, and ‘Almighty God’ and ‘Happy Day’, for instance, and there other very strong moments – ‘Clinging To The Cross’ is lovely, and ‘God Of Justice’ is delicately arranged. There are other moments, especially towards the end of the album, where Hughes falls into the almost unavoidable trap of the worship songwriter – writing songs which wouldn’t quite work congregationally, but aren’t quite distinctive enough to make it on their own. The material is good enough to get through this problem, but it’s a problem never-the-less.

'Here I Am To Worship' by Tim Hughes

‘Here I Am To Worship’ is surely one of the most significant British worship albums of the last couple of decades. Tim Hughes’ (pretty much) debut was the point at which he emerged as a major voice within the world of Christian music, but it also seemed the point at which Matt Redman’s monopoly of the market was broken. (I should point out – that’s not a criticism of Matt Redman, but for a long time, it seemed like there was no-one else around).

The difficulty of this album was that by the time of its release, a lot of the songs were already quite familiar through Soul Survivor live albums, and so on. Hughes sidesteps this familiarity well by presenting fairly different arrangements of the better known songs – ‘May The Words Of My Mouth’ is a little faster and upbeat than previous versions had been, ‘I’ll Always Love You’ and ‘Jesus You Alone’ are raised a little higher through the pitches. String arrangements are provided, and there is a liberal sprinkling of drum loops (which now sound a little dated, but you can’t always predict these things). The key weapon in the arsenal is his voice – the backing tracks to the album are decent enough, but the voice soars over the top of them. Hughes can go from anthemic to gentle with ease, and his use of multitracked harmonising mark him out from his peers.

It’s the very end of the album which is maybe the most interesting. Covering Matt Redman’s ‘The Eyes Of My Heart’ is a brave move, as comparisons to Redman were inevitable anyway. Still, he chooses one of Redman’s lesser known songs, and it’s a very good version. The final track is his own ‘My Jesus, My Lifeline’, one of the first songs he shared with the world through a Soul Survivor album a few years earlier. Judged against the rest of the album, it’s not the strongest of his songs, but it’s a touching ‘back to basics’ moment that ends the album well.