Whithaugh Camp, Newcastleton - Adam Carmichael

26th August, 2009

Hello Steels fans.

I’m in a log cabin at Whithaugh camp in the Scottish borders, lying on my bunk bed. It’s a pretty horrible day which has forced us indoors. Matt’s on the xbox playing fifa and Simon’s trying to work out how to unmute his bass amp. (Long story!) There’s not even any phone signal up here which is rather painful! The iphone’s no good now!

We have been leading worship in the evening meetings all week, which has been great fun. I’m really enjoying getting stuck into some really good worship times. Last nights talk was on worshipping God with your whole life, in the good and the bad times. And singing ‘Blessed be your name’ to end the night was really powerful.
Apart from working in schools we also had the joy of playing on a wii, which was great fun! We did the wii fit to start with and I didn’t quite understand and unfortunately ended up with a wii fit age of 34! Oh dear! However, my posture was quite exquisite!

Yesterday was a much nicer day so me and Matt headed to the footy pitch, naturally, and then tried our hand at some archery. Matt was surprisingly accurate in the beginning, but as soon as he got a little over confident his initial ‘luck’ seemed to disappear somewhat! Was great fun though! Rained off today… There’s loads of stuff to do here though, assault course, swimming, bmx, water fights… and the kids all seem to be having a good tim, which is all that matters.

Anyway, I best go and set up for this evenings meeting.

Ad.

New Wine and Creationfest, Somerset and Cornwall - Simon Napper

8th August, 2009

I am now sitting at the surf cafe watching the performance of Phillipa Hanna...after wishing I was good enough to ride the wooden wave (the skate half pipe)! We're at Creationfest in Cornwall, a surf / skate themed festival.

Yesterday we performed an after hours gig at New Wine south, Shepton Mallet....hello to everyone who saw us. We were put up in some cow sheds - sadly me & matt had no towels so the morning shower was a bit embarrassing!

We were joined this weekend by Adam's new wife, Nikki Carmichael; who provided a fantastic merchandise stall both evenings - thanks maaaan!


I'm off for a crepe now...with extra ice cream.

Peace - also check out colossians 2 v 6.

Si.

Adoration, Stoke - Adam Carmichael

3rd July, 2009

Hi everyone!

I’m just sitting backstage at the Queen’s Theatre in Stoke after playing at Adoration 09. What a gig it was! It’s cheered me up even though Andy Murray just went out of Wimbledon, haha!

We’ve been in Stoke all week, going into schools and taking RE, Songwriting and Rhythm workshops! We’ve had the support of a fantastic team, which makes everything so much easier.

Apart from working in schools we also had the joy of playing on a wii, which was great fun! We did the wii fit to start with and I didn’t quite understand and unfortunately ended up with a wii fit age of 34! Oh dear! However, my posture was quite exquisite!

Me and matt went to play football with people from the church on Wednesday night, but unfortunately ended up in the wrong place…got changed….and tried to join in a game with a load of random workmen. Pretty embarrassing.

It was great to see so many kids from the schools at the gig tonight. I have to rush to a radio interview now so…

God bless,

Ad.

The Maker, Cornwall - Simon Napper

13th June, 2009

Hello...

Cornwall was a different experience all together - I have a few minutes to reflect as i am now standing on the ferry coming back across the Plymouth sea-mouth.

Yesterday we had a mammoth drive down to deepest darkest Cornwall, getting lost in a tiny village, with no fuel - we ended up going to a random man's house - he was simply dressed in a dressing grown & metal chain at 4pm!

We finally arrived at about 5pm... did a sound check in, let's say a 'different' venue. We were on a farm, in the middle of nowhere in, i think it's fair to say a hippy club. We went on stage at 11pm to quite a few drunk & stoned people and performed a good gig, giving a strong message! The gig went well with everyone getting into the fun Steels spirit.... great meeting you all afterwards - lots of good chats. On leaving we even had to borrow someones funnel & tube they had been using to drink beer so that we could refill our van with diesel....... all good!

Sunday was a trip to the local church & youth group on the beach in sunny Cornwall..... then here we are now on the dreaded 9 hour trip home....................!

Until the next time.....

Shabbaaaa...

S

P.S. this is me below on the ferry - the only picture i could find.

Mansfield - Adam Carmichael

12th June, 2009

Hello friends!

We have reached the end of an exhausting but rewarding week at QE School in Mansfield.

Monday was the start of 5 days taking RE lessons, playing in assemblies and hanging out with the Year 9 massive! They are pretty massive!

On Tuesday it was Simon’s birthday! The kids even surprised him by bringing a cake into a lesson. Look at his happy little face below! We took him out for tea, and in typical Simon fashion he picked the most expensive restaurant in Nottingham. It was quite exquisite!

For regular diary readers, four words can sum up Wednesday. “Flip Flops and Joggers”.

The highlight of Thursday, (apart from 4 more exciting yet informative lesson experiences) was a highly competitive game of Pitch and Putt. Matt took the crown beating me by two shots! However, we only got through 14 holes, so technically I don’t think we can really call it a victory. All we can conclude is that for all Simon’s passion his pure lack of coordination will always shine through.

Today, Friday was the day of the big gig and hundreds of kids turned up to rock out for the night. We were supported by a fantastic group of female singers. After hearing what God has done in all our lives, many young people responded and prayed to God to see what he could do in there’s! So amazing to see God working and changing people’s lives for the better.

Off to Cornwall tomorrow so I need to get some serious sleep! Which is made slightly more difficult by Simon’s sleep talking! Line of the week…”LOOK OUT THE WINDOW, LOOK OUT THE WINDOW” (3am, Tuesday morning)

Speak to you soon guys!

Adam.

Firm Foundations - Adam Carmichael

23rd May, 2009

Hello Steels fans...

We have just come off stage at Firm Foundations Festival in Hemel Hempstead. Thought I'd quickly tell you a bit about my day.

This morning we drove down from Lichfield where we spent last week. Arriving at the Firm Foundations site the weather was amazing! We popped on the shades and Simon switched to his customary flip flops and rolled up jeans combo while stating "You never get weather like this up north!" A smooth soundcheck followed before a well earned meal. After tea we had been asked to appear in the evening meeting, I gave a short testimony and Matt raced around the tent on a space hopper disguised as a horse with a motorbike helmet on...just the usual.

It wasn't till 10.30pm when we played, but it was worth the wait! The crowd were great even though there was a large gap between us and the audience. We had a great time and we hope all those who were watching had a night to remember!

After some crisps, chocolate and fizzy drinks we are now going off to bed for a well earned rest in our cosy little room!

Until next time...

Adam

Lichfield - Matt Chambers

18th May, 2009

S’up!

A few weeks ago we had the privilege of running music workshops in Lichfield cathedral, with the occasional performance thrown in. The event was for thousands of school kids from the surrounding area with the aim being to give them a better understanding of what it means to be a Christian. The week itself went really well and hopefully everyone enjoyed our workshops. Personally i felt we did a good job of conveying a non-stereotypical image of Christianity, although at points, Simon was walking around wearing rolled up jeans and sandals. If anyone has ever witnessed the actual length of Simons toes, it is definitely a sight to be reckoned with!

As always there were some comical moments when we weren’t working. A pool tournament nearly saw the end of the band with long heated arguments over who the actual winner was lasting for days. Adam apparently won but I still maintain that he failed the drugs test! Another incident involved getting stuck in a car park with height restrictions that somehow we got into but couldn’t get out of! Below is a picture of our soundman Rich Lee (also known as Rich Tea.....hilarious) on a swing that we were kindly pushing for him, he was wailing like a little girl much to the enjoyment of everyone watching!

Just before i finish I’ve decided that each time i write a diary entry I’m going to share what music I’m listening to at the moment, because all the music i listen to is so amazing and I feel I should share it with all of you! No doubt my fellow Steels will copy me! This week I’m listening to my favourite album of all time:

Album – Mmhmm
Artist – Relient K

Take Care,

Matt

CRE, London - Simon Napper

23rd May, 2009

Here we are for the second time this year (and ever) at the Christian Resources Exhibition in Sandown Park Racecourse, Esher, London.

We have just finished a full day of meeting and greeting people at our exhibition stand and playing short acoustic sets to very small amounts of people - always a winner! Now we are at the side of the stage preparing for tonights HIGH PROFILE event - which brings me to ask - why are we here?! but hey all good.... The evening has been billed as an 'Artist & Authors evening with Diane-Louise Jordan'. So i am casually chatting to the other acts realising that perhapse we are a little out of place chatting with multi-millionaire authors such as Adrian Plass & G P Taylor.... all good.

Don't worry, the evening went well and we did a toned down Steels style acoustic set....

Throughout the week we got to meet lots of interesting people - the best one being Terry Warren - check him out at www.myspace.com/terrywarrencom - ex Dallas Cowboy turned musician.... good guy! Myself and Adam also managed to crash his gig by being backing vocals for the set - problem was he is a gosel artist - we are not!!!

After some expensive meals & a quick TV interview with Premier TV & Radio we were ready to leave.....

Until next time...

Si

Vigo, Spain - Adam Carmichael

26 April 2009

Hola everyone!

We are currently in the air flying back from Asturias aeroporto in Spain to London. How did it come to this i hear you ask? Read on dear friend...

Thursday night saw us playing a worship evening in Hartfordshire. It was a really cool night, where we saw some old friends and we had the privilege of praying with a woman who became a Christian! We stayed in an old manor house that night, which was apperently mentioned in the Doomsday books! On Friday morning we drove to Stansted airport and flew to Spain. Unfortunately, North Spain was not as hot as we'd expected...in fact colder than London. Matt who had only brought tshirts was left in a slight predicament, and Simone was not able to wear his favourite white linen trousers and flip flops! We were picked up by Reuben a lovely Spanish guy who spoke very little English but provided many laughs.

Uno Dos Tres...GO!!! Last night we played an awesome gig in Vigo (Northwest Spain). We have never played a gig with a translator before and I even learnt how to sing 'Forever' in Spanish..."Por Siempre dios es fuerte"! Hopefully someone will upload that to youtube! I also had to play a little acoustic song for 5 minutes while catholic mass was going on upstairs! (See pic below) Hello to everyone we met and we hope to see you again soon. I'm looking forward to getting home and sleeping now, but still got another 4 hour drive after we land!

God bless and speak again soon

Adam.

25 gigs in 2 weeks - Simon Napper

14th April, 2009

Hello Steels fans…. 25 gigs in 2 weeks – that’s a lot by anyone’s standards!

From a school gig & RE lessons in Alnwick, to an after hours gig at Spring Harvest, to a Stoke radio interview, an Ice Festival in Morpeth, and much much more…. We ended up doing a crazy amount of appearances in 2 weeks.

The mini tour started off in Alnwick doing some RE lessons and a gig, followed by Morpeth 2 nights open-air Ice festival, then onto Tring for a week of schools….

Tring School in Hertfordshire (where everyone wears Blazers – I fitted in well) saw the entrance of ‘The Steels’ for 4 days only, and what a good week it was. Hello to everyone we have met and done RE lessons with, a special hello to those who played football with Adam and Matt – I was the lazy one who went for a sleep :-p. It was a good 4 days – we performed in every assembly – 400 people per day, did about 25 RE lessons, a few workshops and the one big gig where quite a few people became Christians– fun had by all!

Next off to Manchester to stay with my family which involved a amusing posh Indian restaurant, some crazy parking and three 21 year olds chilling with my 80 year old Granddad…. All good.

Hello to the guys at Neon Creations in Bolton – we went to collect our Neon sign, and how beautiful it is looking… Next off to Crossrhythms Radio in Stoke-on-Trent for an interview pre that evenings gig. Gig went well with a solid tight show delivered by us – I dare say myself…

Next we were off to sunny Skegness for one of the largest Christian conferences: Spring Harvest. We led worship for the Distinctive crew – was a privilege to see God doing amazing things…. Keep going guys! Not so privlieged that eveyone seemed to want to see my hair getting gungged....... so pleased that didn't happen! A highlight was our After Hours show when we managed to get a good 600 people rocking out in Reds….. Highlight: a funny fundraising gospel performance in the Skyline………hmmmm!

Next was back to Newcastle for a great worship evening in a totally rammed black Gospel church – as you can imagine, it was fun!

And to end our travels we led worship at out home church, Morpeth Baptist on Easter Sunday to complete a hectic, tiring but God inspired 2 weeks!

Peace until the next time……..

Si

UK CMA - Adam Carmichael

8th March, 2009

Hello everyone,

We've just come off stage after our first appearance at the UK Christian Music Alliance near Bedford. It was an amazing night which started with us performing an acoustic set. I can honestly say we've never performed 'My Energy' with about 20 backing vocalists, it was Simon's fault! The evening ended in true Live Aid fashion with all the artists sharing the stage for a final song. Me and Matt were stood next to Yazz, who you might remember sang 'The only way is up' which was a big number one in the 80's. We didn't have a clue of the song so felt like a bunch of idiots. Thankfully Simon ended up on bass without a clue how the song went either, so looked slightly more stupid than us!

The big shock of the evening was when we were presented with our first ever award, it was a pretty good feeling to be acknowledged for all our hard work in the Christian Music Industry. We have an amazing picture of George Hamilton IVth presenting the award to us, check it out below. Simon was amazed by the coolness of his waistcoat.

It was a fantastic night and we are now off for a well deserved celebratory meal!

God bless
Adam

Wedding - Matt Chambers

21st February, 2009

Hi guys!

We’ve had quite a busy February so far with the launch of our charity ‘The Steels Trust’, and you will all be happy to know that we are currently writing some hot new material for a new album so stay tuned for info about that. I am also happy to tell you that my sister got married on Sat 21st February, and guess who was asked to play at the wedding reception?! Admittedly, when I agreed to the steels being the band at the reception, I didn’t quite realise how hard it was going to be learning 20 cover songs, as well as being an usher at the wedding! However, The Steels rose to the occasion (with the help of a 2nd guitarist Mr Mark Napper) and pulled off such hits as ‘Sweet Child of Mine’ and ‘living on a Prayer’ by the late great Bon Jovi.

The evening went without a hitch.........................that is until we came to our penultimate song ‘Every Breath you Take’ by the late great Sting. Having practiced all the songs for quite some length of time prior to the wedding you would think that we couldn’t possibly forget about an entire song. Well we (me and Adam) didn’t. Unfortunately, our bassist extraordinaire Mr Simon Napper aka Adam Clayton, completely forgot that we even practised that song adamant of this fact. Luckily, after a few minutes to think about it, Simon realised his stupidity and we nailed the song! This description doesn’t quite convey how funny this moment was, just imagine it.........

Anyway it was a good night, and this is probably my longest diary entry ever!!!!

Take care everyone and God bless
Matt

BBC Radio Newcastle - Adam Carmichael

8th February 2009

Good morning Newcastle!

It's a cold Winter's Sunday morning and me and Matt have just returned from our debut on BBC radio. We did an interview and played a quick acoustic version of our new song 'Better not Dance'. It seemed to go well considering it was so early in the morning...8.30am! I'm feeling a little tired now as I got up at 6.30am to warm my voice up! Off to church now though, there is no time for rest when you're in The Steels

You can listen to the interview again on the BBC Radio Newcastle website. Look for 'Sunday Breakfast with John Harle'.

Have a good day everyone!
Adam.

Charity Launch - Simon Napper

5th February 2009

I have just got back from ‘The Steels Trust’ Charity Launch, Costa Coffee, Morpeth. What a cool night – we managed to fully take over the coffee shop, scaring most of the punters when we loaded in big speakers - even sticking our neon Steels sign in the window! The evening included 2 acoustic songs played by us – a presentation about our work and a video clip followed by Martin Luff, our most talkative trustee giving a short speech. A fun and exciting night had by all….

I’m excited about the future….

Simon Napper

Leicester - Matt Chambers

31st January 2009

Hi guys!

As you know we had a busy time at the CRE exhibition down in Exeter where the crowd weren’t AS lively as we’re used to! Straight after the exhibition, without any time to rest, we headed straight to Leicester to play a gig in the lovely Wigston! We arrived at the venue only 8 minutes late with our sound engineer extraordinaire Garrett Anderson. The gig went really well with the only problem being that Adam played the entire gig with no monitors! Welcome back Garrett..........................

Anyway, we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves that night and had a really good time after the gig chatting to everyone who came to see us. A few of you may even see yourselves on a certain charity launch video appearing on the site soon.....

Take care everyone and God bless
Matt

Christian Resource Exhibition, Exeter - Adam Carmichael

29th & 30th January 2009

Hi everyone!

This is my first diary entry on this new part of the website, I hope you guys are enjoying finding out a bit more about what we get up to.

We’ve spent the last couple of days at the West Park showground in Exeter at an exhibition of all things Christian. We are here with NCM (New Christian Music) mainly promoting the work we do in our gigs, schools work and worship leading to potential event organisers. Each day we have been playing short acoustic sets in the music café area, often to a group of confused looking pensioners! It’s been a right laugh, sometimes you just can’t take yourselves too seriously!

We have met a lot of really interesting people and found out about some fantastic work elsewhere in the Christian world. Below is a picture of me and Matt in a Cessna airplane. A very nice man who was promoting M.A.F showed us around. Matt, who also likes to be referred to as Captain Chambers tried desperately to show off his aeronautical knowledge. To be honest it was quite impressive, but don’t tell him that!

Opposite our stand in the main hall was a stand about a political party called the Christian Party. And the person they are putting up as a candidate for election is the man off ‘make yourself a Christian’ on channel 4! Anyone watch it? He was there chatting to everyone.

The real low point has to have been the cost of doughnuts…£1.70, daylight robbery!
Anyway, I’ll be back with another entry very soon I’m sure.
God bless,
Ad.

Steelworks Studio - Matthew Chambers

5th January 2009

Hi guys.

I hope you all enjoyed your Christmas holidays and had a good new year! I very much enjoyed the two weeks off and had a nice relaxing Christmas, apart from being slightly ill! On the 5th of Jan The Steels went into the studio to record two demo tracks. But this was no ordinary studio! We had the privilege of recording at Steelworks studio in Sheffield that has seen the likes of The Spice Girls, Rachel Stevens, Brian Adams, Fightstar, Celine Dion and Delta Goodrem. It was a fantastic experience to record in such a high quality studio and we managed to fully complete two demoes in just eight hours! Andy Baker will be producing these tracks which include a remake of ‘Better not Dance’ and a new song entitled ‘Live for You’. We will be updating the website and myspace with photos and videos soon! The tracks will follow soon! Take care and i hope you all have an exciting 2009!

Matt

Algarve, Portugal - Simon Napper

2nd January 2009

Greetings to anyone who might be reading my writings... Happy New Year!

It is a new year & a new season for 'The Steels' website - I am proud to be the first to make a diary entry. We shall be keeping you up to date with our activities on here - so keep checking these out!

I am currently sat on a beach in the Algarve, South Portugal with 2 close friends of mine; soaking up some of Portugal’s winter sun and enjoying the beautiful beaches, restaurants and villages - all for a flight and hotel combo of £20! Now that's what i call a winter bargain!

My New Year's thoughts start with reflecting on the past year - wow what a year... I graduated from University, obtaining a 2.1 (i have no idea how) and took the step of faith to go 'full-time' with the band - how exciting it's been. I fulfilled my dream of travelling around America, visiting 12 countries and taking over 30 flights. I never think that the next year can top the last - but it always seems too.... who knows what the next year will bring - outer space?!

I wish all who read a successful and God filled 2009 - bring on more blue skies and hot sun I say!

Simon - the bassist.