Recent reports on abuse scandals linked to the Church of England bring unfortunate reminders of an earlier scandal, Sheffield’s the Nine O’clock Service (NOS). The central instigator of the NOS, Chris Brain, is shortly to stand trial on one charge of rape and 33 counts of indecent assault relating to 11 women.
Rupert Loydell was brought up attending a Baptist Church and experienced a fairly traditional nonconformist faith. Although he has become sceptical of dogma and conviction, he continues to explore the motivations for belief both in his poetry and his writing on culture. In The Salvation Engine he grapples with the frightful mix of personality cults, religious populism, liturgical experiment, rave culture, and lack of safeguarding and accountability, which allowed abuse and manipulation to thrive in NOS.
Like Ed Gillett in Party Lines: Dance Music and the Making of Modern Britain, the voices which speak in The Salvation Engine acknowledge “the NOS’s profound appeal: spiritual uplift and utopianism, all set to transportive music”. So, in ‘Touching Distance’ (as, too, in poems such as ‘Deeply Sorry’ and ‘Shining Brightly’) we move from positive to negative experiences:
from
Existential dilemmas
were welcome in the cathedral, prompting
blinding displays of apocalyptic gospel,
tectonic shifts of techno-ambient hymns,
congregations high from dancing lights.
to
thundercrash
riffs trigger flashbacks tonight, along with
detailed disclosures of wild behaviour.
A cataclysm of murderous noise lubricates
conversations about emerging dark manias,
slow-burning psychosexual abuse.
‘A Gleeful Leaving’ and ‘Rap Messiah’ focus on the dangers posed by charismatic spiritual gurus who are allowed to operate without constraints or accountability:
The burden of safeguarding
was put aside, one ticket admitted you
to hurt children, young women and men,
archival footage and mixed-media collage.
For the guru:
Hell is being shut inside an alien heaven
unable to even compose a goodbye note.
Today he will be all by himself in paradise.
For the victims:
I am in a dilemma with regard to narrative,
am alienated from my own story. Sometimes
I just sink into the day, numb and sobbing.
There is anger and frustration expressed at repeating patterns of abuse:
Haven’t we been here before,
watching the embers of megalomania and reason blow away?
The spell is broken. Lucidity hits. We’ve been treated like dirt.
and there is a degree of hope explored among those who were victims:
Storm clouds and strong winds prevail,
I expect to find misunderstanding,
befuddled glances and wary responses,
limited versions of ourselves, the dark
side of liturgy and religious process.
Come on. Across the border we go.
Loydell’s main way of writing poetry in recent years has been to assemble phrases into a poem; phrases which come from a range of sources to create poems ‘that offer more questions than answers’. As a result, we should not simply equate the narrator’s voice in his poems with the author’s voice and need to remember that those who were involved in NOS do not speak about the experience with one voice either, but from multiple perspectives. This collection is deliberately polyphonic as a result.
With this collection, as with all his work, Loydell wants to challenge his readers to think about what language is and how ‘it is used around and indeed against us’, as ‘language is how we think about and construct the world’. After all, that is how the leaders of NOS created a space in which abuse could occur:
You imaged God as a packet of razor blades,
useful for noble and honourable purposes
but using metaphors, parables and similes
to round us up and convince us.
Jonathan Evens 1st April 2025
