VIEW PROFILE: Gavin Tyte

Preaching to a different beat

THIS week TOM GLOVER talks to THE REVEREND GAVIN TYTE who recently became the new vicar at Uplyme Parish Church. Here he reveals his passion for beat boxing and how a trip to Australia changed his life forever.

After spending his teenage years perfecting his skills as a human beat boxer, the last thing Gavin Tyte thought he would do was train as a Church of England Vicar.

But during a gap year trip hitchhiking through Australia Gavin put his faith in God and has never turned back.

Gavin was licensed at the parish church in Uplyme by the Bishop of Exeter Michael Langridge on December 21st this year, just in time for Christmas.

Despite joining the parish at a busy time Gavin wasn’t too worried about the festive period ahead.

He said: “I think I’ve timed it perfectly because it’s a bit too late to have to organise and lead everything but early enough to have some involvement.

“There is a kind of a misconception that for vicars Christmas is always a really busy time of year but it’s not actually true because if you know anything about being a vicar it’s just flat out all the time.

“Vicars work horrendous hours and in the summer you have all the weddings to do so actually at Christmas there might be a few more services but there is less other stuff going on.”

Gavin became a Christian at 19-years-old. One night on a solo hitchhiking trip around Australia he set a challenge to God.

Gavin said: “I sat there and thought, okay God, who wouldn’t want to believe in you, so I said ‘if you’re real then you’ve got to prove it. I’ll chose to believe in you from now on but you’ve got prove it’.

“I said to God at the time, ‘you’ve got two weeks and if you haven’t proved to me that you exist then I’ll forget it’ and it just blew my mind because I think God accepted the challenge and it was just gobsmacking some of the stuff that happened to me.”

The following two weeks changed Gavin’s life, so much so, that he later went on to write a book about his time in Australia.

“It was like every single person I met from that day on just happened to be a Christian,” he said.

“I was sat on the edge of the road one day and I wasn’t getting anywhere and I said ‘okay God, if your real then give me a lift’. About three cars went past and then the next car that came past skidded to a stop and reversed back up to me.

“It was a guy with his wife and kids and there wasn’t even room for me. I put my bag in the boot and climbed in the back with these kids and this guy said ‘look this may sound really weird but I’m a Christian and I’ve never picked up a hitchhiker before but as I drove up to you God spoke to me and said stop the car and pick him up’.

“It was just things like that happened over and over again in this two-week period and that was the start of my Christian journey.”

Gavin continued: “I think the realisation there was a God changed my life. I read the bible and it said Jesus will come and live in you by his holy spirit if you ask him to, and I thought maybe this is what happened. It just all kind of clicked into place and since then I’ve just had this relationship with God.”

Alongside his work in the church, Gavin still continues pursuing his other passion in life. Gavin started beat boxing at the age of eight and used to record his beat boxing on a reel-to-reel tape machine that belonged to his father.

It wasn’t until hip-hop took off in the 1980s that Gavin realised that other people liked what he did as well.

He honed his skills and went on to perform on the BBC’s Young Entertainer of the Year competition.

As beat boxing began to lose popularity Gavin stepped back but he continued pursuing his love for music.

After completing a degree in software engineering Gavin ran a recording studio for 18 months.

He then went on to teach music technology at Farnborough College.

Said Gavin: “In the late 1990s beat boxing had died and no one had heard of it for years, but then some of my students bought me an album by Rahzel, which had some beat boxing on it.

“I told them I was a beat boxer and they didn’t believe me but I showed them and I started lessons the next day.”

This began Gavin’s second wave of obsession for human beat boxing. He started a beat boxing website with a fellow enthusiast who had had the same idea and he later became one of the most recognisable faces in human beat boxing.

The site’s popularity grew and in 2003 Gavin hosted the world’s first beat boxing convention in London.

“We had guys from Australia, east and west coast USA, nearly every European country and it was kind of a landmark event because it was the first time that beatboxers from around the world had got together and we all had completely different styles it was incredible,” he said.

Gavin is now one of the biggest names in beat boxing having performed alongside acts such as The Roots and Killa Kella and at some of the biggest events including The German DJ championship finals, The Prince’s Trust Urban Music Festival in London and the BBC radio music festival.

Nowadays Gavin tends to gig less often but has been judging the Vauxhall UK Beat Boxing Championships for the past three years.

Being a vicar and a beat boxer does draw attention and interest to Gavin for both positive and negative reasons but he doesn’t see them as being too different.

He said: “I was on a BBC World Service show and the interviewer said that a beat boxing vicar is just about vicars trying to be trendy and I was like ‘no, you just don’t get it at all’.

“I’ve always been a beat boxer and a beat boxer is what I am but I happen also to be a vicar.

“The church probably find it a little more odd than the hip hop fraternity but there are a lot of very religious people in the world of hip hop as well.

“I think because hip hop came out of oppressed black culture, and it was a freedom of expression thing, there is quite a lot of openness.

“I’m passionate about both and for me. I don’t separate them because it’s who I am and they are both bundled up in this one product.”

Gavin has even managed to combine the two passions in his life.

“I’ve been beat boxing in worship for the last couple of years, which is wicked,” he said. “In a church service you sing songs and you might have a worship band who sing more contemporary songs and I beat box with them.

“I think you can connect with a younger audience through beat boxing but I also think it connects with everybody. I beat boxed at an event for over 60s, I’ve performed to pre-school kids and everything in between and it’s just one of those things that people love.”

With Christmas Day now passed Gavin is looking to the New Year and taking the reins at the parish church of Uplyme.

“I’m excited about taking Uplyme forward as a mission community and just turning the church outward looking again,” he said.

“Uplyme is quite an outward, very community focused church anyway but the church generally quite often can be quite inward looking.

“There are going to be aspects of traditional church that will need to adapt and change no doubt. I’m not going to kick all the traditional church goers out and say we are going to do it like this now, I want to take everybody with us as a community which is what it's about.”

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