It’s always been so damn hard to get hold of Christian AOR albums in the UK. In the 1980s, at the height of the genre’s overseas popularity, the hardened collector might be forced to travel to and trawl through specialist Christian bookstores, the kinds of places where 600 different versions of the Bible were available – and, if you were lucky, the latest album by Petra.
Sure, you could easily get hold of records by the more mainstream likes of Stryper, but if you wanted the hardcore, under-the-counter kinda stuff, you wouldn’t find it in a Christian reading emporium. No, for the AOR cognoscenti, one would have to undertake clandestine trips to the likes of Lotus Records in Hanley, Staffordshire or Dual Edge in London to get that fix. This gave the genre the feel of an underground, cult movement, albeit one with massive mainstream appeal, especially in the States.
