Barry McGuire - Cosmic Cowboy (Reissue) (1978/1990)

Born in Oklahoma, Barry McGuire was a former member of the New Christy Minstrels edging 30 when, in September 1965, he scored his one and only No 1 single with the folk-rock protest classic Eve of Destruction. Attacked at the time by both the left and the right, McGuire's career never recovered and by the early 70s he was a washed-up drug casualty. Happily, that year he also moved to Hollywood and - finally! - gave himself to The Lord. Working with a group called Agape Force, an evangelistic ministry founded in California that released children's albums of praise and worship, McGuire fell in with a Christian engineer called Buck Herring and soon found himself with a new record deal at the mighty Myrrh Records (then also home to Elvis' ex-squeeze, Wanda Jackson) who were focussed on a particularly Top 40 friendly version of Jesus Rock.

Working within a roster that included God-Pop titans like 2nd Chapter of Acts and Randy Matthews, artists who toured incessantly because they honestly believed that's what God wanted them to do, a clearly inspired McGuire he hit (relatively) big again in 1978 with the awesome Cosmic Cowboy, a blend of richly melodic pop, easy-strolling FM rock, noodle-doodle jazz-funk immensity and lashings (and LASHINGS) of gospel-themed lyrics. On the cover McGuire appears to reimagine himself as some sort of extra-terrestrial Christ character (complete with halogen heart, rippling six-pack and incipient baldness issues), but inside it's stone-cold banger after stone-cold banger. My King is a super-lachrymose ballad with a country-soul bent that bigs Him up, The Presence is a funk-rock strut that bigs Him up, Good New Shoes is an appallingly up-front musical-theatre growl-a-long that, oh yes, bigs Him up, while the title track is an all-out classic, a heavyweight production masterpiece dotted with cosmic analogue synth whistles and a walloping great orchestra and, oh yes, it really, really bigs Him up. These days Barry, now 78, spends his time between California and New Zealand, but the big man upstairs is still there for him. "We have never known such peace, such assurance, such hope, such knowing, that Christ IS living WITHIN every heart," he wrote on his blog a few years ago. Perhaps we're not quite as close to that destruction as we were 49 years ago?