Q. Metal Gnu: is it you?
A. Yea, yea, yea.
Q. Is your music anointed?
A. I know that most of the early albums were plastered with DBX Noise Reduction. That was the thing to do in those days since it was in the era before silent digital recordings. Does that count?
Q. Why do you record this stuff that’s no use to anybody?
A. Because it brings lots of lovely people together, no doubt out of pity, and they make friends. Isn’t that nice?
Q. What is the point of your ghastly last verse arrangements of hymns that make it so difficult for us to sing the tune?
A. Because it shows that with practice, good can overcome evil.
Q. Do you have worship at your church?
( A question frequently asked in the 1970s and 1980s)
A. Hopefully it’s only the tip of the iceberg; but God only knows. It all depends on what happens Monday to Saturday outside the church.. We certainly have a lot of noise, and lots of chords of E and B major which the Bb instruments don’t like very much – it makes for difficult transpositions.
Q. Do you have a worship leader?
A. Yes, I believe we do. But you can never see him/her. (Sorry we don’t know what gender he/ she is – we often have arguments about it.) But the good thing is she doesn’t draw salary from church funds but does it gratis! Sadly we occasionally upset him and she doesn’t turn up. Then we play our chords of E and B major even louder to make up for it.
Q. Should it be ‘O‘ or ‘Oh‘ ?
(a FAQ among proof readers for Christian worship song Publishers in the 1970s and 1980. Now they don’t worry about it any more).
A. In the English language as spoken by the blessed Apostle Paul in the time of the King James Authorised Version, ‘O’ was used as a form of address, or an exclamation of a number of varying shades of emotion. With the passage of time the variant form ‘Oh’ appeared as a substitute for ‘O’ when it conveys emotion. This was a deviation from the pure, inspired and infallible language of the King James Authorised Version of the Bible, but it did us the favour of separating the two uses. But Charles Wesley, bless him, stuck to the divinely inspired use of the English language when he wrote: O for a thousand tongues to sing! To clarify: in our time ‘O’ is used for addressing people, and may have reverential overtones. For example, you might say to your wife: “I will do as you say, O Mighty One”. Or, consider the well known hymn, O God our help in ages past, in which we address God and recount his mighty acts. This, in Latin, is known as the vocative case. Remember your declension tables? The nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive, dative and ablative….? Perhaps you’re not as old as me.
‘Oh’, on the other hand, in modern English (and especially the Post Truth Era which incidentally began immediately after the writing of the King James Authorised Version) is correctly used as an exclamation of emotion or surprise,(yes I grant you God can cause both), or frequently of negative emotion, as in, Oh no! Or as many people might say in some unexpected situation, Oh good Lord! Apart from taking the Lord’s name in vain the speaker is expressing either surprise or possibly something negative, or incredulity. It is in fact a rhetorical statement that does not expect a response; so they are in no way addressing the Lord or engaging in conversation but merely making an exclamation. But when all is said and done may be Freddie Mercury is right when he says: ‘Nothing really matters…. Any way the wind blows’, which definitely seems to be the case with us worship song writers – we seem to be susceptible to wind; hopefully the wind of the Spirit. (Is Freddie, without realising it, making a prophetic statement that we Christian song writers should take to heart?) In conclusion, language continually changes, very often because people are ‘ignorant’ (in the King James Authorised Version sense of ‘lacking knowledge’ and not in the modern Post Truth sense of having some negative attitude of belligerence or the like). Freddie, as far as I know, ducked the issue by avoiding writing any overtly Christian worship songs.
Gnu hoof-note: before you all write in; Yes, Freddie sang “Oh yes, I’m the Great Pretender”, but he didn’t write the lyrics. They were by a Mr Buck Ram, an American gentleman. He wrote them in 20 minutes in the washroom of the Flamingo Hotel. Who would have guessed?
Q. Why do you have MP3 files on your website and not something that is of better quality?
A. Being an audiophile, it pains the Gnu to publish his works in any format that cannot be played through his 1980’s “Realistic” hi-fi from Tandy. He is acutely aware that not everyone has access to such high-end equipment and may instead choose to listen via the Internet. There are therefore two reasons why he has chosen this road less travelled by true connoisseurs: file size and cross-platform acceptability.
Yes, MP3 is “lossy” and some will complain that they can hear the compression, but the benefits are the smaller file size – which means they download and play more quickly – and the universal acceptability of MP3 as opposed to .ogg, .wav, .flac, .wma, .aac, .aiff etc. all of which are lovely abbreviations and acronyms, but may not play on your Windows / Android / Apple thingies.
Q. Can I download tracks or whole albums?
A. Not yet, but watch this space. There are a few exceptions: for example, the instrumental version of Seeing The Crowds (Triple Counterpoint version) under “Bonus Tracks…” CAN be downloaded if you click on the three little dots. The Candlelit Carols may also be extracted from the ether if you try hard enough.
Q. Scooby Gnu – who are you?
A. “The Gnu is a species of wild ass and is called by Dutch settlers at the Cape the ‘Bastard Wild Beast’. The Gnu, though possessed of both horns and cloven hoofs has a body resembling that of a horse.”
(A Practical Treatise on the (humane) Management of Horses: Edward W. Gough, 1878)