As a merry & Godless vagabond raised in spiritual & economic impoverishment in an entirely secular household in the erstwhile South East Northumbrian coalfield wherein religion was effectively the ambient folklore of English culture, it's always struck me as notable that from the very beginning the music I reached out for was that which spoke of the infinite and the eternal. On one hand it might be the more well known of the two settings Vivaldi made of the Gloria (we had both in our house); on the other it might be Pink Floyd's Interstellar Overdrive. Certainly I saw no condradiction betwen the two as a nipper, and even now I hold them both in a similar lofty esteem as manifestations of an all-too evident human need to prostrate ourselves before the Greater Unknown which both defies and defines the parameters of our Lesser Known world.

When the Strawbs turned their focus to loftier concerns on Grave New World (I was 11 when a copy first found its way onto out turntable) I would pore over the various significances via the lyric booklet, pondering what relation, if any, the songs had to the Durer woodcuts which illustrated them. Visions of Alchemy, Damnation and Earthy Paradise transfigured my vision of the Lesser Known World, even unto opening my eyes, eventually, to the realm of Traditional Song and Balladry, replete with songs of Ritual & Ceremony which were, in any case, a feature of my so-called education at the time.

When I was twelve I might be found down at the local Arts Lab twiddling knobs on VCS-3s and EMS Synthis concocting electronic soundscapes awash with the Dark Imminent Menance of the Extraterrestrial, as I regarded it at the time. The following year I lost all my friends in a single evening when I played them the Third Ear Band album I'd brought back from London containing such wonders as The Egyptian Book of the Dead, Dragon Lines and Stone Circle. No matter, I would make new ones, many via the visionary mythos of the Planet Gong, replete with Flying Teapots, Pot Head Pixies, Octave Doctors and a Utopian Green World one might still tune into via Radio Gnome Invisible. Magma saw things a little differently perhaps, but they told a similar tale of a distant planet on which humanity discovered utopia but failed when they tried to bring it back home. Nothing so cute as a PHP in sight, but I defy anyone listen to Mekanik Destructiw Kommandoh and remain unchanged (or else unhinged) by the experience.

What chance did mere religion have in such a wondrous world? What chance does it have now when the doors of infinity remain firmly open and the Joyful Noise of Intergalactic Mission of Sun Ra still resounds in my heart with a musical catalogue so vast that I'll never get through in my lifetime? And what of those lesser seances to be found at your local singaround where a common faith brings together an otherwise disparate humanity in a communion of beer and song whose only doctrine is the human cause? And after an adolescence further enriched by the Nonesuch Explorer Series (which brought to my hi-fi the ethnic musics of Java, Bali, Bulgaria, Sweden, Japan, Africa & beyond) can I ever trust the blackened Christian heart that has elected by way of salvation to believe in a God that created humanity just to damn them for all eternity? Or any other religion for that matter which - manifestations of music (Music in the World of Islam anyone?), architecture and other Human Stuff notwithstanding - is ultimately just funny hats and hoo-hah. Still I say I elect not to believe in any God because I can't conceive of greater divinity than Duke Ellington - or Don Cherry, Seamus Ennis, John Coltrane, Davie Stewart, Johnny Dyani, Sam Larner, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Peter Bellamy...

When I was a child I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, and I thought as a child. Now I am an adult - it's not that much different to be honest - thanks to the music, which continues to deny me religion and long may it remain so!