My current predicament got me singing a song

My formative years were the 1980's. Music played a big part in my life at that time. My home town, Liverpool, was a mess. Unemployment crippled the city and Thatcher's Conservative Government took the brunt of the critiscism.

However, out of this blight, art, and especially music, flourished. In times of desperation, art is our saviour and the best art is produced. Liverpool's music scene in the 1980's was buzzing with new music and new bands. You were either in the synthesizer camp with bands like Orchestral Manoueveres in the Dark or the drums and guitar camp with Post Punk bands like Echo and the Bunnymen.

One band that stood out to me as offering something different were The Christians. They were a combination of blues, soul and gospel and with Garry Christian's rich, velvety voice and presence they had the perfect frontman.

I could never work out whether the Christians songs were political or religious. I think they were deliberately ambiguous and left it up to us to work out. Or maybe, like the rest of us, they also had problems differentiating between the two.

Anyway, the lyrics to Born Again can be seen as mixing both politics and religion. My first reaction when I heard this song was that it is about being unemployed, wasting time on the dole and then finding a way out of despair by finding a job and direction in life. But the lyrics could be equally about a person who is without religious direction and finds a way out of despair through God.

Good art can do that; it can be confusing and have multiple meanings. Good art makes the viewer/listener keep guessing and come up with their own interpretation.