Stocki Interview about his Taste in Music

TREVOR: So, Steve tell us a little bit about faith and music as you were growing up.

STOCKI: Well, I was born in Ballymena and grew up in a home where there was no record player and my parents were not Church goers but they sent me to Sunday School.

My cousin, Sharon got me into music at about the age of eleven and I am sorry to say that it was Donny Osmond! That got me listening to the radio and watching Top Of The Pops. I got a record player for Christmas when I was eleven and bought my first singles – Elton John’s Crocodile Rock and Cat Stevens I Can’t Keep It In (not as embarrassing as Donny!). From there we moved on to T. Rex and The Beatles in my early to mid teens.

I had decided there was no God as a six year old. It was a question asked in a TV show that I was watching before the soccer came on. I was a pretty committed atheist from then on. Looking back I think that was an interruption of grace in my life. That moment in front of the TV is as clear as a conversion moment. I think God was jolting my future with a strange tactic that became effective some 10 years later. As a seventeen year old I asked God to reveal himself but only if he was there! Some things happened to convince me he was not only there but was interested in doing something with my life.

Up until then I guess music had filled what Augustine called the God shaped hole. The Beatles were very much god figures in my adoration, consolation and shaping of worldview. Yet, as Larry Norman once sang, “The Beatles said All You need is love and then they broke up!” Jesus, I discovered very quickly, suggested answers to the questions my musical heroes were asking. And music and faith have been interwoven in my journey ever since.

TREVOR: What did coming to faith do to your record collection?

STOCKI: Well, I had to wrestle with it for awhile. I didn’t do what a lot of friends did and throw out their albums and have to buy them again later, when they had come to their senses, but I did go through a phase where I wondered what I should listen to. Some bad Christian stuff replaced Lynyrd Skynyrd for awhile.

TREVOR: So what music do you most enjoy?

STOCKI: In some ways that is very varied. There are 10,000 songs on my Ipod and that is only because I keep to that number (I could fill a couple of Ipods!). So, on there, there is a variety but in some ways it is a little narrow. I mean there is a bit of folk, a little jazz, a lot of songwriters, some rock and all of them need a twist of pop. I don’t like my jazz or country or folk to be too pure.

If you were looking for names then it is The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and U2 but truthfully I listen to a lot of the lesser known acts like Bruce Cockburn, Over the Rhine, Iain Archer and Duke Special. This week it has been a lot of Cockburn as he played in Belfast last week, Eddi Reader’s whose latest album Peacetime has a few deeply spiritual things happening, The Shins new album and a new band I just discovered The Hold Steady.

The Hold Steady sums up what my criteria are. They are a New York Indie rock bar band feeding on a diet of mid seventies Springsteen, all wordy with great social commentary and a spiritual soul. There are three lights that have to light up to be real Stockman approved. The first thing is that it has to be good. Christian writer Madeleine L’Engle said that good art was good art and bad art was bad art no matter how good the intention of the message was. Lots of Christian music might have good intentions but it is awful and therefore no glory is given to anyone never mind the God they blame for playing it! Secondly it has to have good lyrics. Instrumentals on the most part don’t do anything for me so Mozart I’m afraid won’t be on my playlist. The third light is that spiritual twist. I don’t necessarily have to agree with it, though I struggle with songs that are anti-God, but it has to be saying something about the reason we are here, the condition we are in and how we might deal with our human foibles. There are a lot of songs out there dealing with all that and they are on my Ipod. The Hold Steady switch on each light just now.  

TREVOR: What music irritates you?

STOCKI: Oh my word, can I be honest in a Baptist Church?!!

First, I’d like to say that pop music for the sake of pop music; Pop music that is manufactured to sell records or just be on the radio to set up the listener for the next commercial. Pop Idol and X Factor would not be big favourites! And I think I should add here that all my judgments are not for the sake of it. There are pastoral issues that raise my irritations. I have students who are very intelligent and forming very sturdy Christian world views and are listening to this shallow pop nonsense. It concerns me. If we eat junk food all the time it will not be good for us no matter how much exercise we are doing. And so with music; Pop is the junk food of our aesthetics and I would be very influenced by the Canadian art thinker Calvin Seerveld and his idea of aesthetic obedience. If Jesus is Lord he is Lord of all and thus the music we listen to. I believe that when we indulge in art it affects us for good or for bad. We should not only dismiss was it is bad. We should cut out what is not good. Pop for pop sake irritates me.

To go on from there sensitively, modern worship music irritates me for the same reason. I think that it is a reflection of pop music. The old hymn writers wrote hymns for specific services, sermons, events. Today’s worship writers write for CD’s and the industry is about selling merchandise. I think that that affects the art of worship songs and it has been detrimental. The lyrics are narrow in theme. For example there are not many that mention Jacob wrestling with God and going away with a limp. You don’t want to hear anything like that as you listen to that lovely positive CD on the way to work in the car stereo. I also think there is too much repetition on themes and lines that I wonder, five songs into a worship service, if we are still on the first song.

I think it needs a strong critique but that the Christian industry would be an obstacle to a real honest investigation. If I wrote a book that critiqued it no Christian publisher would publish it as it would be sold in the same shop as they are trying to sell the albums I would have under the microscope so sales might be damaged etc. Sorry but you asked!

TREVOR: So what kind of music challenges you?

STOCKI: Well first let me confess. I am an anorak when it comes to what I watch, listen to or read. In the cinema I am jotting down quotes from movies on the back of check books etc. I watch, listen and read very intently, seeking to think about how what I am watching, listening to or reading caresses and collides with my world view. My world view is Christian and everything goes through the sieve. So the music is always in conversation with my faith in Jesus and what I read in Scriptures. I think that music has played a huge role in my spiritual development by provoking questions that I then wrestle with from my faith perspective.

So I think something like Live Aid changed my life in 1985. I remember thinking how music was making an impact and saving people’s lives and had to bring Bob Geldof’s motivation face to face with my Christianity. This was a guy whose first single with The Boomtown Rats talked about not wanting charity with the title Looking After Number One. He then selflessly fed the world while those of us who believe in loving our neighbours as ourselves were looking after number 1.

There was a rich seam of politically inspired stuff in the mid eighties about apartheid, native America Indians, Central America. It fed my mind and I have to say I heard little about it from Presbyterian pulpits. So I had to caress and collide it with the Scriptures and found Jesus very interested in the same stuff. I guess then John Stott’s book Issues Facing Christian Today helped me bring it into the centre of my Christian thinking.

An example of how a song challenged me would be listening to Jackson Browne in Botanic Gardens singing Alive In the World. He was saying how he didn’t want to live behind some wall but be out there in the world and I was asking myself what he would know in his Californian mansion.  Then it came back and judged me. What would I know behind the wall of my theology or Church? I needed to be alive in the world. It was the Jesus way coming from someone who has not professed the same faith as me. I wrote my second book The Rock Cries Out about such artists and such challenges to my faith.

TREVOR: Your first book was about U2 and if you press Steve Stockman into Google it is mostly linked with Bono and U2. How did you get interested in them?

STOCKI: Well, I came to faith in Jesus in 1979 and coming from a music obsession I looked around for singers and bands who shared my faith. It was the same year that Bob Dylan had a conversion and released Slow Train Coming. That was so cool. When I wanted to chat to my friends about my faith I didn’t have to give them a second rate Christian album, I could give them Bob Dylan. There was another English band After The Fire who were charting and then someone mentioned these guys from Dublin who had a faith. They played the Mandela Hall at Queens when it was still the McMordie Hall but I was still at school and didn’t get. Then in my first month at Queens University in 1981 I got a few birthday tokens and spent them on the October album that was just released. I took it home and from the first track Gloria on it just blew my mind. It was euphoric spiritual music, like worship music and it fired my faith. I have been journeying with them ever since.

TREVOR: Finally and quickly, what music inspires you? Is there a song that sums up where you are right now?

STOCKI: Actually yes. Bruce Cockburn’s new album has a song called Mystery. He has this ability to sing challenging stuff that rocks your view of the outside world and on the other side song very personal spiritual stuff too. In Mystery he sings, “Infinity always gives me vertigo/And fills me up with grace.” It seems to me that he is speaking of the fear of bring in the gaze of the God of the Universe and yet when you think it is terrifying to fall into the hands of the living God that God interrupts with grace. The last lines are “Come all you stumblers who believe love rules/Stand up and let it shine.” Last Sunday I was walking to Church. My wife is the Family Worker at our Church and so she had gone on early with the girls and I was walking down on my own. It is only five minutes and I stuck this song on the Ipod and by the time I got to Church I was ready for worship. Music for me is a form of prayer, praise, meditation, learning, untangling, firing up. Cockburn does all of that and is that perfect three lights I mentioned earlier. Great music, literate poetry and Christian content.

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