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With Joseph's throat ragged and raw his voice screams louder and more powerfully, inciting us to follow...

Martyn Joseph’s passion knows no bounds. Tonight he has been gigging for so long that his voice is ragged and raw adding a little more angst but a lot more pain for “the concerned for his throat” listener and surely to the man himself. So he will cut the set and play the ballads and save it for Birmingham on Saturday. You must be kidding! Maybe it was the acuteness of my awareness but it seems he stretched his larynx even more than normal and when he walked away from the microphone and hollered two songs (Change Your World and U2’s Stuck In A Moment) walking around the crowd you realized that you were in a room with a man who is so driven by his vision of art and life that playing it easy is never an option.

The older he gets the more apologetic the Welshman becomes as to the downbeat nature of the songs encouraging his crowd to go and find some reason to live in the short interval between his sets and starting a new song about a man left for dead on the Himalayas and bursting out laughing at the darkness he seemed to be enveloping his paying audience in! There is the frequent and hilarious chat between songs and in the end it is never the darkness that you leave with. It is always hope and a hope that is given new vigor to rage against the darkness and shed little shards of light wherever possible.

As on his new song, and there were enough new songs to suggest a studio album soon, ‘Til The End about the MST land reformers in Brazil we are told of Oziel Alves, a teenager murdered for his stand on injustice and end up it is as if we singing along with a resurrected Alves and believing that victory for the oppressed is so near at hand. One thing is for sure you are asking what you can stand with ‘til the end!

No, Martyn is not about entertainment or celebrity. There is a bigger purpose. Let us laugh at the jokes but let us remember the world and the overlooked and out down in our midst and learn to empathize and weep and crusade for them whether they are the friend who committed suicide (Good Man beautifully linked with Springsteen’s Two Steps Back), the prostitute (Working Mother), the unemployed (Please Sir), the abused wife (Half A Man), the refugee (The Good In Me Is Dead), the follower of the God who became one of us and gets misrepresented (Liberal Backslider) or whatever other abundant people are made alive before us.

In the end as Joseph stretches his voice to the very limit of its human boundaries you find a simile for the entire exercise. Joseph is the voice we long to hear from the pulpit or the satellite Church charades. Here is the passion, commitment, honesty, reality, relevance and strength of belief that doctrinal definitions and “Bible in a bubble while the world goes to hell” sermons can never conjure. Joseph bursts the bubble and lets the Bible drip all over an aching world to call us at this pub altar to follow another way, a deeper way, a better way, a loving way, a God inspired way. It is just like Church but who are we kidding. This is Church. We wish Church was just like this. Maybe then the world would be changed. In the meantime… ‘Til the end!