The Gospel According to Mr Niz
My name is Joe Nisbet Jr and this
is the first time I’ve sung on a recording.
At the end of May this year I
went into Castlesound Studios in Pencaitland with 13 songs and a handful of
chums. It took four days to finish the record, but 30 years to start it . . . .
.
My dad was an evangelical
preacher, and when I was a boy my first American tours were with him as he
preached every night for 2 months across the south from Texas to Carolina –
always with unaccompanied singing, full of passion and belief. It was the
beginning of a lifelong fascination with the classic sound of the black gospel
quintets of 40’s and 50’s.
The commitment and excitement of
that music stayed with me while I played the fool and the guitar with punk bands
and 80’s pop acts, most hedonistically with China Crisis, until I recognised
the same glorious noise when I heard The Proclaimers’ first record.
Over the next 15 years I worked
closely with Charlie & Craig on 4 albums and hundreds of shows until things
came to a natural conclusion in 2003.
Since then I’ve been playing
guitar for all sorts of people – mates in pubs, hotshot session bands, folk
bands, rock bands, profitable bands, fantastic young bands you haven’t heard of
yet, and established bands you certainly have heard of.
Most influential, however, have
been Dick Gaughan – playing with him has taught me how to hear the flexible
internal rhythm of a song - and Justin Currie, who encouraged me to sing
harmony with him, and insisted that I sing a lead vocal in public.
So it was those two outstanding
singers who finally answered the question that had held this project back for
decades – who was I going to get to sing on my gospel album?
I decided to do it myself with
the sparest possible instrumentation, discarding all the harmony, tambourines,
hallelujahs and other distractions from the song itself. No celebrity soloists,
no choirs of pop stars, just my personal gospel.
One Sunday morning in the early
nineties, I was nursing a shocking hangover in Dallas along with Nico, who
plays the string bass on the record. We went into the hotel bar where a gospel
lunch was in full swing - “We could play that stuff,” he said .
I still don’t think we could have
back in those careless days.
But twenty years later we could,
and here it is - it probably won’t save your soul, but it might just save mine.
Joe Nisbet Jr
