The story begins, bizarrely enough, in a prayer meeting in a tiny United Reformed Church in a seaside village in the north of Devon. There were about 5 of us there. One acoustic guitar and a tambourine. Nothing particularly out of the ordinary. But at one point in the evening an old lady said something that caught my attention. She prophesied ‘it’s time to put our dancing shoes on’.

Now that sent my little lyric writing radar spinning. I noted it and filed it away for future use.

You see, I’m passionate about joy. One of my mottos is that taking something seriously and having fun are not mutually exclusive concepts. It’s a frustration of mine that worship music is often not that fun. I wanted to write something that was full of joy - but also gave us reason to be joyful. I didn’t just want a cool beat and a lyric about dancing.

So I started writing verses to remind us of all the reasons we have to be joyful. Inspired by Psalm 103, which says ‘forget not all His benefits’. I wanted to fix our attention on Jesus and all that He has done for us - how He loves us, has mercy on us and sets us free. And all that He has given us - His peace, His presence and His power.

And then I wanted to wrap that in joy - one of my favourite verses in the Psalms is ‘in His presence there is fullness of joy’ and I felt that was the perfect line to lead us into the lyric that started the whole thing off.

From there, I took a couple of riff ideas that I had stored in my voice memos on my phone and visions of Bruno Mars meeting Rage Against the Machine starting whirring in my head. And it all, hopefully, comes together in an explosion of joy and fun.