Well we've had an amazing few months. We've been busy on the road with our Media Rules Tour which took us through from January until the end of March. That was an amazing time of being able to communicate with young people, challenging values and advice so readily thrown at us by the Media. we've seen some awesome stuff happen and some lives significantly changed through that... and great to get out there to meet loads of new people. At the end of that we were thrown into a mad as ever week at Spring Harvest. We were resident in the Distinctive venue which is always amazing and such a good time of being to invest into and teach so many radical young people. Not only were we performing and leading the worship with Myspoon and teaching girls sessions daily we also got to nip out from time to time to perform in slots across the site so it was great to see what else was going on in venues like I Scape, the Encounter Cafe and the Skyline Live. Shattering and amazing... but the amazing just about outweighs the shattering part - making it an awesome week!
A couple of days after this we were over to Southport to Roots Conference. (The national Salvation Army conference) where we were headlining on their opening night. It was brilliant to be part of what looked like it promised to be a great conference... and a bit of a shame to have to head home that night and miss the rest!
Back to our little office - or 'Golddigger Land' where we are busy busy writing the rest of the album. This week we've been in the studio getting all the final drum parts recorded and I even managed to get a vocal laid down while we had a spare hour! Its so exciting to know its all coming together and we cant wait to hear and see the finished product!
A couple of days ago we also had the photo shoot which will give us the album artwork. We worked with our favorite photographer - Rosie Hardy - a day with her is always just bizarre and funny and we just love spending time with her. She is so inspiring! We had an awesome day.
Tonight we're supporting at Pete James' album launch - so right now we're getting our set together and looking forward to performing there and then having the rest of the night to hear his new stuff and enjoy his set!
Gosh, what a lot ot repert in one post... will tell you about Firm Foundations next time!
So last week Beth and I hit town... we spent a couple of hours amongst the busy shoppers and wandered around looking at lovely things and finally collapsed in Starbucks for a coffee with shopping bags too heavy to carry and in need of a break... we ended up taking it all back to the car and heading out to get more... crazy thing about it was we didn't spend a thing!
We're so thankful to some of the Sheffield stores who have heard about our girls course and have believed that the vision is important enough to invest into. All for the sake of giving the girls a great goodie bag at the end of the time they've spent with us Lush, Starbucks, Boots, No 7 makeup and Body Shop have all generously supported GoldDigger in giving some of their top products to us to literally pack out bages to give to our girls... and most of them want to continue to do that for us!
Its so great to work on something that needs as little as 5 minutes chatting with someone and they become excited to get involved and help and support it in any way they can... much better than your regular Christmas shopping trip!
Well its an issue in itself why there have been no recent posts. The GoldDigger laptop is porley and in the apple hospital so I've been stuck for what seems like ages with no way of blogging, facebooking, websiting, emailing and its been ike going back to the stone-age or something..haha not really and I've been able to use other people's and my home PC its just not as easy!
Well we're almost winding down for a break for Christmas and I suppose we've got to the end of our first season as a 2, doing GoldDigger full time, having a new work place of our fab office and it feels like its been a great few months. Beth and I are really excited about things that are coming up in 2010... we're just working out how we can get it all in... and some of the plans will be told soon!
This week we've been really blessed with finance. Thats a rare and amazing thing to say... we've just been given enough for music production to be able to record some new songs... which takes our songs from being just performable to being something people can listen to as well! Thats great and I must say that recording and being in the studio is one of my very favourite things! I love creating a piece... much like artwork... and even the process of doing the same thing over and over until its the best that it can be is exciting in a studio... so Friday thats going down and we're excited to hear how they'l sound in the new year!
We've also just recieved a grant for some equipment we've been desperately needing for some time. We're now able to buy some in ear monitors... which will be brilliant for our performance as we'll be able to hear ourselves better, hopefully will stop the occaional squeel of feedback from the monitors but as vocalists - knowing you can hear yourselves, sing properly witout straining your voice and without singing badly because you CANT hear - thats so important... much like a pair of good trainers to an athlete. This grant also means we're set up to do our roadshow in schools with media and everything we need to make that run smothly and look great!
Thank you God!
... most people are winding down for the weekend now and we're getting ready to be busy... and loving it! Tonight we had the privilege again of working with the girls on the girls course we're doing. It struck Beth and I as we arrived today that one for the reasons we love doing what we do so much is that we tend to be working with girls that are not already linked closely to a youth leader, ones that aren't churched with loads of support outside of school... and what we can help to do is link them in better but just to know that you might be the first adult this girl has opened up and chatted to honestly and openly about her choices about sex and relationships... its a huge privilege and quite a huge responsibility! Having done a gig with these girls before starting the course has been brilliant - it often works as a really good tool as we get to present ourselves obviously as people older than them but in an approachable and more exciting context... they chat to us completely as mates and I know we see them as they are and not as girls who are slightly reserved around us... which helps masses with talking about the stuff we're talking about. Tonight it both encouraged and scared me to hear one of the girls tell me that she'd thought maybe 50% of teenagers her age (13) would be having sex... thats what she gets from watching programmes like Skins... and being able to expose some statistics about actually 13% of 14-15 year olds have actually had sex... still a high percentage... but you can imagine the pressure on a 13 year old if she thinks half her year group might have already done it :(
Tomorrow night we're in Liverpool so we're just getting some bits and pieces ready for that... throwing a few new covers in that people will know so there's a bit of word learning to happen on the road trip over tomorrow afternoon!
We had a great night last night trekking off to Bradford with our 'not so trusty- dodgy sat nav'. We were booked to do an acoustic set as the after dinner entertainment at the first annual fundraising meal for the Joshua Project there. They work with young people and I could tell from the presentations and from conversations from people I met there that the work going on there is really amazing... it was nice to be able to endorse another charity and another vision...but still one committed to investing young people and changing lives.
So we took Sean with us. He's the guitarist in the Gentlemen but has spent a bit of time with us learning our stuff and our current resident guitarist for acoustic gigs... so its fun to have another person to chat to and laugh with at funny things that happen along the way as well as spending time with someone who is so much futher into lots of the areas we are trying to establish ourselves into in terms of trying to get distribution deals and all the management/agent bla sort of stuff!
So we took Sean with us. He's the guitarist in the Gentlemen but has spent a bit of time with us learning our stuff and our current resident guitarist for acoustic gigs... so its fun to have another person to chat to and laugh with at funny things that happen along the way as well as spending time with someone who is so much futher into lots of the areas we are trying to establish ourselves into in terms of trying to get distribution deals and all the management/agent bla sort of stuff!
We filmed the night...we are filming everywhere at the moment as we don't have much footage of us as a 2 since the relaunch!
Here's one of the numbers we did... a mixed up version of Bulletproof by La Roux...
... not that its an amazing recording but yesterday during a practice we decided to just record our run though of one of our newer songs 'Really Live' We love this... Beth and I wrote it together and I really love the way it expresses the way we really feel in a heartfelt way... we do a lot of trying to be clever and challenge social issues, life commentary and irony in our songwriting... this one is just bog standard, honest, simple- what its all about... would be great to do this in the studio at some time soon but until that luxury ... here's this...
We've finished for the day having had a 'cramming our things to do lists into a couple of hours', a practice with Sean for our gig on Saturday, a trip to buy more tuck for the lolly monsters we work with and off to spend time with those 'lolly monsters' in the girls course we're doing in the Greenhill area of Sheffield. As we were setting up today one of the volunteers, a guy from Cliffe College who comes over to help at the drop-in who came in to wonderfully present us with a cup of tea (ALWAYS a great idea) told us how he'd noticed a massive (and positive) difference in the girls we've been working with... we do find it really easy to build a good rapport with the girls we work with, even the most hostile... not because of us particularly but because we've designed the course in such a way that the environment totally diffuses a lot of the barriers young people have against structure, education and relating to adults. So its great to hear that what we're up to in our time with them on the girls course is having impact on the time they spend in the rest of the youth work available to them... :DSo todays session is all about sex... it always shocks me how little teenagers get taught about sex... considering the amount of sexual content thrown at them on TV, in music videos, films, magazines, computer games and on the internet... yet one of the girls told us the the only sex ed they get is getting taught how to put a condom on a banana... and that's not the first time I've heard that... so its ALL around them, talked about all the time but they're often not taught more than the condom on a banana... that makes no sense! This first session we lead on sex looks at just how much pressure there is on teenagers... like just how little females in the 'celebrity' industry wear, how 50% of some magazines are sexual content even with an average reader age of 14... we then get the opportunity to challenge the girls to think about what they want out of sex in their lives... to allow them to think ideals, let themselves aim for the best ...and make their choices based on what they'd really like for their lives... not let themselves go without thinking it through and then end up making a decision fueled by alcohol, a party, insecurity and the fear that they might not fit in unless this is something they are doing...
Its amazing just how much relationships effect us - as adults we wouldn't dream of making relationship choices without thinking it through for hours and hours and getting advice and processing it all with the people we know and trust... why is it that teenagers are not able to access that at school - other than in their peers, who are also trying to make sense of such an overwhelming issue with no education either. This makes me feel both incredibly excited and privilidged to be doing the job we are doing... and makes me happy that I know we've spent part of our day talking through stuff with these particular girls that they otherwise would maybe be able to talk through...but also makes me sad that that isn't the situation and experience of so many teenagers in this country :(
