HHaving existed in many shapes, sizes and styles for more than 50 years, Gavin Bryars’s Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet is the closest we have in this country to an underground national hymn. It’s a work of experimental classical music that is as accessible as any pop song. Its fans range from devotees of religious ecstasy to devotees of the other ecstasy. Beautiful, mournful and mysterious, it’s elegiac with a capital “Eh?”
For those yet to come under its spell, the piece revolves round a 26-second loop – an offcut from a 1971 documentary – of a frail, elderly, homeless man in London’s Elephant and Castle, singing lines from a half-remembered hymn: “ Jesus’ blood never failed me yet… this one thing I know, for he loves me so.” After minutes of this solo vocal eerie, Bryars – with incredible focus and delicacy – introduces a swelling orchestral pattern to accompany the fragile voice.
As with other great works of minimalist music, the orchestration changes almost indiscernibly over its indeterminate length. The effect is heart-bursting in its beauty but without even a sliver of schmaltz. In a loose narrative sense, the frail, forsaken man is given a dignity and a sense of comradeship from the supporting musicians. But it’s all things to all people. The only constant tends to be a lump in the throat.
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While the piece is synonymous with repetition, over the years it has become an understated triumph of reinvention too. Yorkshire-born composer and double-bassist Bryars, who is 79 this year, is in no way precious about his status as a crowd-pleaser. Its next performance by him will be at Sonica, a celebration of visual sonic art organized annually by Cryptic in Glasgow. Bryars will perform Jesus’ Blood accompanied by large-scale digital landscapes made by artist and computer engineer Alba G Corral, who will respond to the music in real time.
No two performances are alike. “I reinvent the piece every time I perform it,” says Bryars. “For most of its life, I’d write parts for the musicians I had available.” This has led to Jesus’ Blood being orchestrated for a 32-piece choir in Australia, an ensemble of tuned percussionists in Lyon and even for 30 novice violin players from a primary school in Dundalk. (“They were more or less in tune,” recalls Bryars with happy pride.) A version featuring medieval instruments is being worked on for a performance this summer.
The open-ended length of Jesus’ Blood also means it has reflected changes in technology over the decades. The first live performance in 1972 ran to approximately 30 minutes, which was the maximum length of reel-to-reel tape available to replay the vocal loop. When it was recorded for Brian Eno’s Obscure label in 1975, it shrank to 25 minutes, so it could occupy a side of vinyl. A 60-minute version later emerged for cassette, and by 1993, compact discs allowed Bryars to expand it to 74 minutes for a Mercury-nominated version that featured Tom Waits.
Easily the most audacious live performance to date was one that lasted 12 hours – from 8pm to 8am – at London’s Tate Modern in 2019. As with the forthcoming performance at Sonica, it was held in an unseated, free-roaming environment. Some stayed all night and slept; a few meditated; many cried. The song’s 26-second loop would have been replayed 1,656 times during that one performance. Miraculously, despite Bryars estimating he has heard the refrain in the region of a million times, he did not grow tired of it. “I’ve found I don’t have the concept of boredom at all. When we did the 12-hour performance, I worried that it would kill it for me. But three weeks later, we performed it again and it was still there. When that voice starts at the beginning, I still get a little tingle.”
Thankfully, audiences show no signs of getting bored, either. Jesus’ Blood is a ritual that many use to assess themselves at various points in their lives. According to your own relationship with age, with life and with death, every listen somehow unlocks a new reaction. From Bryars’s own experience, these can be wildly varied: from visceral dislike (“I’ve seen people loathe it intensely”) to the Canadian couple who had broken up on a trip, but drove home to a radio broadcast of Jesus’ Blood and decided by the end to get married instead.
The fact that it’s based round a loop has always given the piece an association with dance music. It has been played on radio stations as nonsense as Radio 3 and Rinse FM. Ambient DJ pioneer Mixmaster Morris played it on Sunday mornings at Glastonbury in the 90s, while DJ Man Power once played it at Pikes Hotel in Ibiza, the hedonistic location for Wham’s Club Tropicana video. His first encounter with Bryars’s work isn’t untypical: “The first time I heard it was after a festival – five young men packed into a Ford Focus at 5am, listening to the 74-minute version in complete silence.”
Yet the deepest association the piece has is with homelessness. When Bryars performed his 12-hour marathon, his ensemble was joined by 60 fledgling musicians who had all had experiences of that world. At London’s St Martin-in-the-Fields church, he performs it at an annual act of worship for the capital’s homeless people. “There’s a moment in the service,” he says, “when they read out the names of every homeless person who has died in London that year. The act of naming them is very powerful. They are no longer anonymous.”
When Jesus’ Blood was nominated for the Mercury prize in 1993, the Daily Star “decided to do a story about how I was exploiting the homeless”, he recalls. “They were going to find the man.” They didn’t get far. Bryars had tried and failed 20 years earlier. No footage of him existed. Nobody has even tracked down the finished documentary. The total anonymity of the singer gives the piece an even more profound sense of tragedy and mystery.
“The cameraman remembers him being old, unshaven, fragile yet cheerful. What I found in the old man’s voice wasn’t religion – it was humanity. There’s a certain nobility and optimism in there, things people rarely associate with someone living on the streets. I think that’s what brings people into the piece. It’s all in his voice from him.”
Gavin Bryars conducts a visual concert at Tramway, Glasgow, with the RSNO, on 12 March. Details at sonic-a.co.uk
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George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism