The Reps - What You Gonna Do About It/ Back Of My Mind

Rare exponents of Christian New Wave with a mighty earworm of a tune

Label: Ramp Records

Year of Release: 1984

Whenever Christian music is mentioned, most of us are probably guilty of imagining deeply middle of the road fare, whether its the kind of syrupy Christian rock that leaked out of American airwaves in the eighties, or earnest performers singing tearful ballads about the majesty of Jesus. 

While it's true to say that the artists who have attracted the most media coverage tend to be wholesome individuals with slick production values, in actual fact Christian youth events have been pulling in all kinds of acts for decades now, with contemporary rock artists like Delirious? even breaking through into the mainstream with minor top twenty hits in the late nineties. Spinning back even a couple of decades before that, popsike hero John Pantry even saw fit to sprinkle some psychedelic fairydust over Christian folk group Parchment to good effect. 

In the eighties, The Reps - who, lest we forget, we've covered on this blog before - were another of the Christian circuit's stalwarts, taking hooky, insistent New Wave songs about their faith up and down the circuit, and playing school halls in an attempt to take their message to the kids (which is how I found out about them). Writing songs which were spiky, fizzy, energetic and lyrically subtle, their aim seemed to be to trojan horse the Christian message into some contemporary(ish) sounds. Such behaviour obviously resulted in little coverage from the music press, but that was probably never the intention; what the group instead did was show a modern side to Christianity which a lot of younger people wouldn't necessarily have been exposed to before.

And make no mistake, "What You Gonna Do About It" is a nagging little disc melodically (but not lyrically) speaking. The fact that I saw them live once and carried this tune in my head for the next few decades of my life before ever finding a physical copy of it speaks volumes. The group crank up the guitars, pull out every poppy New Wave trick in the book, repeat the chorus incessantly and depart as quickly as they arrived. A number of punk collectors have made the mistake of talking about this as if it were a genuine provincial DIY artefact in the past, and it's not difficult to understand how they were tricked.

Sadly for The Reps, they never converted me to their religious cause but I'm sure they saved a number of other souls in their time. They're also a fascinating example of the many facets a somewhat sidelined religious music scene has - a quick glance at the sheer size of the crowd Delirious? pulled at their Big Church Day Out gig highlights a huge movement which nonetheless probably only exists in the peripheral vision of most music lovers. 

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