Roly was the front page artist on the first issue of Cross Rhythms Magazine ever printed.
You can read the article here
Roland Johnson Bell is better known as Roly, if “known” is the right word for a rock gospel singer who seems to defiantly shun any trappings of fame and fortune.
Words by Tony Cummings, photos by Ian Bosworth.
Twenty perspiring eight-year-olds do their P.E. while Roly sets up his PA. Two tried and tested speakers, a battered Trucker PA, a couple of mike stands and a Yamaha keyboard which cost £900 new but which you could now pick up for £300; to the kids peeping excitedly through the assembly-hall window it might as well be a state-of-the-art 10k rig.
Their assembly is going to be different today and something of the aura of showbiz hangs in the sweaty air. Blue Coats Church of England Junior School, Walsall, West Midlands has an old building, a nice headmistress and an enlightened regime, enlightened enough to see that religious instruction doesn’t mean multi-faith free-for-alls and enlightened enough to allow a ‘rock gospel vicar’ (near enough) in to do their assembly on this cold winter morning. For Roly Johnson Bell, schools work, if not his bread and butter (he doesn’t get paid for it) is the focus of much of his work. Blue Coat is unusual in that it has its assembly at 11.30am. Usually Roly carried out his calling to “let the kids know there’s a God that loves them and that God’s called Jesus” at hours when only mad dogs and cockerels are awake.
As he sticks batteries into effects pedals, and gaffer-tapes leads into position Roly entertains me with tales of packing his hernia-inducing equipment into frost covered transits at 4am in the morning. “I’ll go wherever I’m asked to go…sometimes they give me petrol money, often they don’t. What matters is taking the message to the kids.” It’s nearly time to do that now. Roly, in dapper floral shirt and spiky haircut, works with quiet efficiency as the P.E. class leave and the kids, 350 of them dressed in grey (boys) and blue (girls), begin to file in. A brief introduction and Roly’s up and running, a human dynamo wrenching power chords from his flanged guitar over a backing tape loud enough to make the kids at the front wince “I found love, I found love, I found love, love in Jesus,” he roars in his wonderfully gnarled rock’n’roll voice. Later I learn that “I Found Love” is written by friend Steve Lister an ex-biker with a staggering testimony of deliverance. Simplistic the lyrics might be but every syllable exudes sincerity and the kids love the thunderous boogie rhythm, glancing shyly at their teachers to see whether it’s OK to nod a head in time to the beat. Roly begins to speak in a Geordie accent thick enough to need subtitles. “Whadyathinkmyjobis?” he asks the kids. As he unstraps his guitar, and moves to the Yamaha he rolls out the Truth in snappy, one-liners. “I’m a vicar but I don’t wear my collar backwards; I’ve not got religion, I’ve got a relationship”, “Just lately I’ve been learning what it means to be loved with an everlasting love”. A slow rather soulful ballad backs up the last statement.
Roly wrote “Everlasting Love” in 1984 but it’s still a favourite. He finishes with a prayer addressed to Jesus. At the end (15 minutes to the second) the headmistress asks whether the kids would like Roly to return. The screech of 350 voices laying their allegiance is the nearest to a pay cheque Roly will see this day.
Beaming he promises the headmistress he’ll phone to fix up a return visit and then begins the backbreaking slog of getting his gear back in the transit. On the drive back to his Walsall home Roly talks, excited as the schoolboys he’s been ministering to, about schoolwork.
“There are incredible opportunities in schools right now,” he says, “stupendous opportunities. Christians should be coming into schools in their droves. It is actually legislation at the minute that schools are to indulge in a daily act of Christian Worship. That is law now. Now maybe that’s not the best way of imposing it on people, but if we as Christians have been given that opportunity, we want our heads examining if we don’t take it.” Roly takes it. But it costs. For the last eight years he’s been ‘living by faith’ as he ministers the Gospel through song. Roly is a rock-gospel singer. But his is a world as far away from the Dove Awards as it’s possible to get.
“I’ve done a lot of schools work – assemblies, R.E. lessons, concerts outside of school time. Then my work ranges from hospitals, prisons, colleges, pubs, clubs.
“The toughest job I have ever done is singing in the Red Light district in Amsterdam.”
In the middle of most heinous area there are some wonderful Christian coffee bars, which seek to be agents for the Gospel in that situation.
“I’ve sung in Belfast. On the Shankill Road the work is so varied but again the bottom line is availability. If I am to remain available to do work, especially in schools, I can’t hold down a full time secular job as well.”
Not that Roly is some kind of evangelistic prima-dona waiting by the telephone for the next exciting call to spiritual battle. He has a wife and five children to support and even when he gets remuneration for his gospel ministry, the pay is bad.
“I will not leave myself available 52 weeks of the year because it says in the scripture ‘a man who doesn’t provide for his family is worse than an infidel and has denied the faith’. so I actually divide my time where I might go and do some part-time work. A guy in the church gave me some part-time work recently but I had to go to a place to shovel 200 used nappies into a black plastic bag in order to make money. Clearing out Council houses that were going to be relet in the town that I live in. I don’t want anybody turning round and saying I’m doing my music for the glory.”
The idea is laughable. Roly has paid gospel music dues, which would make many a pampered American rock gospeller wince. Though he has a diploma in theology and a clear Bible teaching gift Roly Johnson Bell has gone through several bouts of near homelessness, five churches and more hassles in the eight years since God told him to use his prestigious musical gift to communicate the Gospel than seems possible when looking at his lean, grinning face.
As we pull up at his house he launches into a riotous rough-and-tumble with his pre-school kids, delighted to greet their returning father. We sit down to a delicious meal of (free gift) vegetables and afterwards go into his front room decorated with a psaltry his wife Polly still occasionally plays. Roly was born in Newcastle in 1954 and became a Christian at a local youth meeting. But by the time he’d become a pro-musician at age 19 he was far from the Lord.
His turning point came in Jamaica where, playing with a band, he’d gone out to check out the local reggae scene. “Within two days of being there I was nearly killed. I was lured on a pretence out to some hill where a bunch of guys surrounded us. I was about to be robbed and killed. I remember it was the most fervent prayer I have ever prayed in my life, it went ‘God get me out of this and I promise you I will change’.”
And change Roly did. “I began a fervent search for the God whom I had forsaken and went through a lot of the fundamentals that really I should have gone through in my initial Christianity. I started facing up to the cost of following Christ, started facing up to repentance.”
Roly moved to the Midlands and joined a Christian rock band, the Blazing Apostles. But things didn’t go well. The band weren’t prepared to go into full-time Christian work and his wife, who wasn’t a Christian, became increasingly estranged from the zealous young Christian she found she’d married. Only God himself seemed to be making sense in Roly’s life.
“I joined this rather batty loveable Congregationalist minister Tom, and this became like a little interim in my life. He had a sort of inner urban mission going on in an area called Sparkhill, which is a very interesting area of Birmingham. Then my first wife divorced me and it was ever so strange. I had no intentions of getting remarried. The word divorce didn’t enter my vocabulary. I was a real stoic. God introduced me to my new wife, under Tom’s auspices, and we decided we had to make a choice between sort of Christian social-work, which was the sort of work Tom was involved in, or a Christian music ministry.
“We decided we’d go to Bible College to give that music ministry some foundation in the Scripture. It was the most demolishing and reconstructive phase of my life,” he said.
After Birmingham Bible Institute, and a spell as music director in a Midlands Pentecostal church, Roly become a full-time itinerant musician. Eventually he attracted the attention of the small Christian recording studio Fairmorn and got the chance to record a tiny-budget cassette album. A review in a Christian magazine at the time says it all: “Roland Johnson Bell presents ‘Such Love’ in a bewildering flurry of styles from simple praise to country hoedown to synth-led techno-rock. It is the latter, which works best. Perhaps the lapses in production control will put off some, but for sheer versatility Mr Johnson Bell deserves a little recognition.”
Perversely, Roly proved his versatility two years later when he recorded in yet another style -roots reggae. The Roly-composed, straight ahead evangelistic song “Does He Know Your Name” was done in a variety of styles, a credible (for a honkie) lovers rock pastiche for the top side, and authentic dub and toast (Jamaican rap) for the reverse (the toast supplied by the black bass player with backing band Revelation) and all pressed up on a 12-inch single.
If that wasn’t revolutionary enough Roly had unusual ideas about getting it to the public. “I was quite enamoured by Keith Green’s attitude with the ‘So You Wanna Go Back To Egypt’ album. A pay-what-you-can-afford basis. I felt that was a real piece of God’s wisdom. It says in the Bible not to treat people with different weights and different measures. And there’s very few ways you can do that when you’re embracing people who have different financial situations. But if you say to someone I’ll give you this album for what you can afford, you’re actually treating people the same way. I was most impressed with this.
“So I recorded ‘Does He Know Your Name’. The studio (at fledgling Big Feet Media) contributed the time for free, I got a loan from the bank to press it and it was sold through Christian magazines and at concerts I played with people paying whatever they felt they could afford. It was also emancipated from copyright restrictions so people were at liberty to copy it and give it to their friends. It paid for itself three times over.”
It bore amazing spiritual fruit too. The bank manager from whom the penniless Roly negotiated the loan became a Christian and rastas were seen grooving to it in the roots reggae shops and blues parties of Birmingham.
That same year, 1985, Roly recorded two songs for a ‘Live at the Spring Harvest Fringe’ album called ‘The Buzz On The Streets’ released through Word (UK), which Roly describes simply as “a very unhappy experience.”
In 1986 Roly began a project which was to become a near obsession and which is, this month, seeing fulfilment, after nearly five years of blood, sweat and backbreaking toil. It revolved around the loaded topic of copyright and worship songs. “In essence I don’t believe any worship songs need to be protected by copyright.
“There was a masterful article about copyright written at the time which actually provoked me into action. It made me want to start a system to make it easier for people. I didn’t see the big problem in releasing something from copyright. So the idea for Sound Doctrine came to me.”
Sound Doctrine was a company, actually a charity, set up to publish a praise and worship songbook. But with a crucial difference. All the 36 songs in the book, by numerous composers as well as Roly, have been contributed specifically by the composers with no copyright restrictions whatever. The songbook Gifts Of Song is to be distributed on a pay-what-you-can basis and carries with it exhortations to photocopy it and write the songs on acetate without any fees or any licensing schemes. The task of preparing the manuscript was monumental. With little financial backing Roly had to find intrinsically good unpublished praise and worship songs, and then, lacking the latest in computer technology, letraset by hand every crotchet and quaver of every song – no mean feat for a man who doesn’t read music! A few volunteers helped out but most of the work, hundreds of manhours, was done by Roly on his kitchen table. Gifts Of Song is out now.
“I believe God will honour it. It’s taken a lot of slog but there are some wonderful praise songs in it which the whole church needs to hear and also it’s a symbol to show that songs can reach the churches without having to go over the standard commercial rollercoaster.”
Roly makes no bones about being a radical. Uneasy with the money-changers he perceives in God’s temple, he treads a precarious path where albums (a new one is in the pipeline) and songbooks are offered in ways which would make a Word Record Club exec squirm while he still refuses to play at church events where a charge is made at the door. Aware that he has been perceived in the past as a man with a giant-sized chip on his shoulder he admits that he’s made mistakes (“plenty of them”) in the past. But Roly remains a radical and a visionary whether he’s playing to a group of inmates in a Midlands prison or distributing “Please-photocopy-this-book” praise and worship songbooks. Is he simply a lone individual bucking the system whereby the parachurch (non-local church ministry) initiates a great deal of the national ministry initiatives?
“I’m not unhappy that parachurch organisations exist. I’m glad they do, else little or nothing would be done in many areas. But I believe the church today needs visionaries to effect radical new methods of working – The Keith Greens or The General Booths (founder of the Salvation Army). Now there was a bloke who was right out on a limb and was really slagged off by his contemporaries. Yet he hung on in there knowing that what he’d heard was from God.”
Roly believes he’s heard from God. And after seeing and hearing this man at work, so do I