A Message From the Wilderness

In Christian tradition, crucial tests of faith occur in the wilderness, the setting where Jesus stood steadfast while Satan tried to tempt him out of being God’s agent of redemption.

The wilderness is where Peter Furler momentarily gave in to a more commonplace temptation--the adolescent readiness to gripe at one’s parents--and learned an important lesson that helped shape his future path as founder and front man of Newsboys, the only arena-scale rock band in contemporary Christian music that doesn’t sing with an American accent.

Furler started the band in Australia’s coastal Queensland region when he was 18 and full of zeal for spreading the faith to a big backbeat. But a few years before that, he was feeling a good deal less inspired. His parents were missionaries who would trek through the outback to help the needy when floods, droughts or other hardships struck.

Nothing as dramatic as a visitation from Satan occurred when Furler accompanied his folks into Australia’s wilderness on one such mission. Just the boredom and frustration of being 15 and out in the middle of nowhere for weeks on end.

“It was definitely a time of anger for me,” Furler, 32, recalled this week from Nashville, which is now the base for a multinational Newsboys lineup that includes two Aussies, a New Zealander and two Americans. The band, which headlines Sunday at UC Irvine’s Bren Events Center, has sold some 2 million records over the past 10 years, earning gold records for two recent releases despite no major crossover into the mainstream market.

“We were out in the middle of Australia, giving refuge to Aboriginals,” he said. “We were tired, we’d been traveling for six weeks, just stopping on the side of the road, setting up a tent and sleeping there.

“I thought, ‘What’s this all about? What are we doing here? Why didn’t my dad take on a proper career? My mom’s a very intelligent, witty woman--why didn’t she do something with her life?’ I remember saying, ‘This is stupid.’

“My father said, ‘This is what my job on Earth is; this is what I feel. Making a difference in one person’s life is worth the whole trip.’ When you’re 15, you don’t understand that. This [feeling] fell on me, a conviction that wasn’t there before,” he said. “I never thought or said anything bad about them again. I saw it in a new light.”

Looking back, Furler says that seeing the light and taking on a mission of his own as a gospel-spreading rocker didn’t instantly produce music he can stand behind.

“Our first three records I wouldn’t recommend to anybody,” said the shaven-headed singer-songwriter-drummer, who considers them too artless and blatantly dogmatic. “Back then it was a new faith, and I think we were trying to save the world and trying to indoctrinate everybody with our beliefs. It was honest, it was done out of love, but that doesn’t always mean you do it right.”

Their Big Break

Even so, he said, Newsboys didn’t alienate the public in Australia, a country he says is much less religious than the United States.

“America was raised on Christian belief; Australia was raised on a keg of beer,” he said lightly. “In America, I can say I believe in God, and more people than not would believe in God also. In Australia, you have to be dead serious [about faith] or it’s not going to last as long. We don’t have ‘In God We Trust’ written on our dollar bill.”

But if the Christian audience was more limited than in the United States, Furler said, the band did benefit from no-nonsense Aussie attitudes about music-making.

“It wasn’t so much ‘Are you Christian or not?’ but ‘Are ya any good or not?’ We were a really good band. We were terrible on record but really into our musicianship. We were a band that other musicians liked, and playing in concert was always our strong point.”

The Newsboys got their big break without even seeking it when they opened some shows for an American Christian band, White Heart, whose members became interested in producing a record for them.

“Three weeks later, on Christmas Day, 1987, we were on a plane to New York City to cut our first record,” Furler said.

Gradually, the Newsboys’ lineup changed, and the songwriting became more sophisticated. About five years ago, the band became based mainly in America, where Furler spends most of his time.

The original lead singer, John James, tired of the rock ‘n’ roll touring grind and headed back to Australia before the recording of the band’s new album, “Step Up to the Microphone.”

The two previous Newsboys releases, “Going Public” (1994) and “Take Me to Your Leader” (1996), both had gone gold in the U.S., marking sales of more than 500,000. Furler stepped out from behind his drum kit and assumed the front-man’s role.

He says it hasn’t been a huge transition, because he sang a great deal on previous records and would front the band for part of its set when James was still on hand.

“The show feels a bit more personal now,” Furler said. “John was a great front man, but sometimes it lacked the personal touch. He’s the sort of guy who would go through the tour and say the same thing every night.

“Every show is different for me,” he said. “I usually walk around the city that day and meet people, and whatever happens at the time affects the show that night for me.”

One thing that happens each night on the current tour is that Furler and drummer Duncan Phillips, the band’s other Australian (bassist Phil Joel is a New Zealander, guitarist Jody Davis hails from Indiana, and keyboard player Jeff Frankenstein is from Detroit), strap themselves into two drum kits that levitate and spin while they do a percussion duet, giving the Newsboys at least one thing in common with Motley Crue.

“I’ve ridden it seven times now,” Furler said. “The first time, when we were testing it out, we were going round and round and round, and I did have motion sickness. But since then I haven’t had a bad time.”

Furler may be spinning around and around during the drum duet, but he speaks enthusiastically about Newsboys’ prospects of moving forward creatively as they hone their songwriting.

A Knack for Melody

The band is loaded with talent and has a keen melodic knack, with Furler’s raw, husky lead voice--akin to Peter Garrett of Midnight Oil, an Australian band he greatly admires--bolstered by the pure, soaring harmonies and occasional lead singing of Joel and Davis.

With “Step Up to the Microphone,” the band delved into programmed beats and hip-hop inflections, but Furler says the live approach remains strictly organic.

“The band bought a studio, filled it with a bunch of gear, and we were boys with toys and started messing around with bells and whistles. I don’t regret it, but if I was going to make that record again now, it would have the same songs but maybe change that [electronic] element.”

The Newsboys’ songs remain almost exclusively religious. The lyrics on “Step Up to the Microphone” celebrate how faith can bring joy and purpose, or depict moments when things are less clear and the believer has to strain for a glimpse of divine light.

The concluding ballad, “Always,” takes a step toward merging the worldly with the spiritual, as it examines common personal experience from a Christian point of view. The song portrays a son who can’t let go of bitterness toward the father who abandoned him.

“I think we’re entering into a bit more poetic [approach] as opposed to trying to save the world” by preaching dogma, Furler said. “I’m a slow learner. I’m writing songs now I probably should have been writing when I was 20.

“In the next few years we want to get into things that move even further,” he said. “It can only come by living them. Something we’ve been talking about as a band is environmental issues. As Christians, we believe we’ve been given charge over the Earth to look after it.”

With “Take Me to Your Leader,” Newsboys began a new career phase, with the major label, Virgin Records, trying to drum up sales beyond the traditional Christian market--something that acts like Jars of Clay and Amy Grant have proved is possible. Meanwhile, the band’s longtime Christian label, Star Song, continues to promote it to religious outlets.

The new album does have crossover possibilities in such lush, sweetly yearning songs as “Entertaining Angels,” with its Crowded House feel, and “The Tide,” which calls to mind Savage Garden.

Both are examples of a subtler songwriting approach in which the band, following the biblical example of “Song of Songs,” finds a poetic angle to talk about belief, rather than hammering home common religious catch phrases.

“I don’t know if the stuff will get played on mainstream radio,” Furler said. “The coolest thing about not having a [mainstream] hit single is that you’re not disposable.

“If we had a hit on MTV or American radio tomorrow,” he said, “‘we could be has-beens in people’s eyes by next year. But we just played North Carolina and played to 13,000 or 14,000 people, and the local [stage] crew were saying, ‘Who the heck are these guys?’ ”

‘Too Much to Say’

In keeping with his parents’ approach, Furler says he wants to prod Christians away from a cloistered, separatist concept that shuns nonbelievers and instead engage the world and its problems.

“We Christians should have been the first in helping out people with AIDS,” he said. “I want to encourage a church where people don’t see hypocrites, they see grace, where they don’t see unforgiveness, but forgiveness.”

Unlike his parents, who do their good works in obscurity, Furler isn’t about to abandon the glamorous pulpit of rock ‘n’ roll to minister to the needy in the outback.

“I don’t feel we’re ready to leave what we’re doing, because we have too much to say. If I walked away from it, I would walk away with too much bitterness,” he said.

Besides, his success enables him to contribute financially to the ongoing work of his parents, Bill and Rosalie Furler, and to help recruit others to take on similar missions involving unusual personal commitment.

“Two months ago, they were sleeping on a park bench in Albania, where they were building an orphanage,” Furler said of his parents. Meanwhile, he carries on a different branch of the family business. “They see me as a 120-dB missionary. They’re really proud of what we do. They’re more proud of me discovering faith more and more and building on that, than any gold records.”

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Newsboys, Third Day and the Waiting play Sunday at Bren Events Center, West Peltason Drive at Mesa Road, UC Irvine. 6:30 p.m. $17.50-$19.50. (949) 824-5000.