Mike Rimmer met up with Tre Sheppard, the American-born, Northern Ireland-based frontman of rockers ONEHUNDREDHOURS.

He continues, "We'd been living in a community for 14 years as part of Youth With A Mission, which were 14 incredible years, but in a way it's been great to move out and live in a normal town. We're involved with Causeway Coast Vineyard, which has been really bizarre because the last thing I guess in the world I thought I'd ever do was help lead a church in some way! But it's just been this wonderful ride of doing some things that have always been on my heart. I'm designing guitars for Avalon Guitars, I'm heading up engagehivaids.com, and obviously still doing the band. So in a way some things have slowed down and some things have sped up. But I tell you this man: I put my kids to bed at night a lot more than I ever have. And I tell you, nothing in the world. . .nothing in the world. . .is worth not getting to do that."

What about the difference between living in a community and living just as a family unit? I wonder whether that must have been a bit strange? Did he not feel a bit lonely at first? He responds honestly, "I think in a way we had this terrifying fear that we might move there and be 'all on our own', you know? And I'll tell you the other thing is that, one of the reasons we knew it was time for us to move out of a community is because we'd come home and we'd been on tour. . .sort of public eye thing. . .come home and then immediately the door would go and the phone would go. And we got to where we didn't want to see people at all! We didn't want to have people round. We didn't want to open the door. We were just exhausted. And now the exact opposite has happened." He laughs, "It's like; we love it! We love having friends round. It's been a wonderful shift in communities because the community at YWAM was so wonderful to us but moving into Portstewart and being a part of this new community in Northern Ireland, it's been wonderful because it's a very different kind of community. But man, we've been so embraced by Northern Ireland. I mean, it's been ridiculous! We really felt like we came home. It's very similar to where I grew up, which is a little bizarre!"

It is very bizarre when you consider that Tre grew up in Georgia and that's hardly near the seaside! You can take the boy out of Georgia but you can't take Georgia out of the boy! Listening to the album, there's plenty of southern soulfuness which pushes through the rock'n'roll. It's often captured in Sheppard's vocal performances. He must be slightly nervous though when he's presenting a new set of songs to the band's fans. "I might be regretting these words later, but I think this is the best stuff we've ever done. I really do! I don't mean that in a prideful way, I just mean that it's so much better than just me showing up with my guitar and going, 'Hey boys! I wrote another country rock song!'"

This time around the process has been much more organic for the band and Tre feels the strength of that. "It's a band. It's a band record," he insists. "We wrote this record together, and the boys and Tori are extraordinary writers. I think that process of writing those songs has just been wonderful. There is this little bit of fear in a way I guess. I guess every songwriter and performer feels it. When it comes out you go: will people connect? Will they 'get it' or are people going to go, 'What happened to "River Wide"?!' You know, that kind of thing?"

But if he's written these songs with his band mates, shouldn't he be LESS vulnerable about it? Because it's been collected together by the band, shouldn't that give him a bit of cover? It's not just Tre in the spotlight. "I think you're right man!" he agrees, "it's not like I'm going, 'Here are my precious little creations!' The bottom line was us as a band writing together. Although I wrote the lyrics for the record we were like, 'This song is going to be about this.' And so they'd be like, 'Alright boy, go off and write the lyrics!' But in a way, I don't feel this is personal in that way. Even though these are very personal songs it's the sound of a group of people trying to follow Jesus together in the midst of trying to change the world really, and play in a rock'n'roll band, and get a little sleep, somewhere! We are best friends. In a way that's one of the greatest things about being Onehundredhours; it's being in a band with your very best friends and going, 'What do we believe and what do we want to say? Well let's turn it up and say it!'"

When it comes to creating a title for the album, 'As Sure As the Stars' wasn't there from the beginning but was discovered as part of the band's creative process. Tre remembers, "We started writing songs and halfway through it we realised, 'Goodness gracious, there's hope everywhere in this record! It's everywhere! It refuses to be put down. It must come out!' One of the songs, a song called "Hold On", has a line in it that says, 'As sure as the stars around are falling one by one. . .', and that line just hit me: 'As sure as the stars'. It's ironic in a way because in the line in "Hold On", I'm actually talking about the broken promises of the world's governments over people with HIV and AIDS. But that line about 'As sure as the stars', I realised that there is something sure about the stars. There is this thing that every night, the stars come out. When you can't see them, the stars are there. And during the day when the sun is up the stars haven't moved, they're still there, there's just too much light for you to see them. And I love the way that when it gets really, really dark, the stars seem incredibly bright, but actually they haven't changed at all."

He continues, "And for me there is this certainty to that. Though they fall sometimes, and that's quite glorious to watch, there's a certainty to the stars, you know? As long as there have been people singing there have been stars above them. And for me that's a lot of the heart of the record; hope is as sure as the stars and thank God, THANK GOD, hope found me! And when he found me he liked me, that's what's amazing I guess!"

Tre has been friends with Daniel Bedingfield for a long time. Now that he's living in Ireland, does he get a chance to see him? "Well Dan's living in America a lot now as well," Tre responds, "but he and I, we chat, we email back and forth, and we're still really close. I think that Dan's certainly in the place of going, 'Dude, if I go back out on the road are you up for it?' And I think for us and a lot of my friends, if you get into this business and I don't mean just the rock'n'roll business but I mean the world-changing business, it's hard to stay in the same town as your friends all the time. We've been like, 'Well, I like Northern Ireland, you like LA. I'll come visit, you come visit', and it all works out fine, you know? So it's cool."

So Tre is in the world-changing business! Is that how he sees it? I point out it sounds a bit grand! In response Tre laughs and then goes thoughtful, "I think everybody who follows Jesus is hopefully in the world-changing business. It's funny in a way; we've spoken so much about me and about my life during this interview. There's so much of a focus in Christianity of fixing YOUR life; that it's about YOU and fixing YOUR life, and I guess the thing that I feel is that no matter how much we think it's about us it's always about others. And the stuff that God does in us is always in a way that it blesses us immensely so that we can be a blessing to others. And I guess to be honest with you, it was in the middle of my darkest period that God really spoke to me about HIV and AIDS, and we launched engagehivaids. When I look back I just see that something that was literally all about me never really was all about me, it was all about how we actually have the power to do something. And anyone who's a follower of Jesus, you have the power to do something! You have a voice and you have the kingdom of God in you and you've got a chance to actually change things."

He continues, "And for those of us who, I mean we live really comfortable lives, you know? I mean all of us, we've got bills to pay and you never have enough money, all of that stuff; but all that notwithstanding, most of us who are reading this, we sleep in a bed, we have enough food, we have friends, we have love. We have so many of our needs provided, you know? I'm back and forth to Africa two or three times a year now and every time I'm there I just spend so much time with people that have really grown to be more than just people that I'm serving, but are my friends. And when we sit down and chat and I find out the struggle on a daily basis of something as simple as making sure your child doesn't die. . . I'm humbled again at the power that we have to do something about it."

Africa has been a big part of Tre's heart for a while now, and the whole HIV/AIDS issues there. Politicians make decisions and they make statements and sometimes there is a reality gap between the sound bites you hear in the media and what actually happens on the ground. Does Tre get disappointed by all of this? "Yeah I do," he says simply, "you've caught me at a funny time. I mean, we finished the record at 6:00am yesterday and we were meant to be at a TV interview at 2:00pm, fortunately it got cancelled. Hallelujah, it got cancelled! So Tori and I just basically checked into a hotel to try to get some sleep. Inevitably we turn on the television and Sky is doing wall-to-wall coverage of Paris Hilton on her way to jail. And after almost an hour of solid coverage just watching outside of Paris Hilton's house; they broke in to tell us the G8 agreements for the world's poor. I struggled so hard! I struggled with the result of the G8 meetings: the fact that they haven't kept their promises. They're eight billion dollars behind and basically their promise of, 'We're going to give 30 billion,' actually it's only about one and a half billion dollars a year extra in aid. It is a shocking result to be honest with you! It's terrifying! As I was sitting on the hotel bed there looking at the screen I was just pulling at my hair going, 'BUT YOU PROMISED! The world was watching you a few years ago and you all promised! And with straight faces you're breaking those promises! And yet you're giving out sound bites as if you've done more!' And then bam! We're back to the Paris Hilton coverage! I don't want to get on my high horse here but it's all the wrong way round isn't it?"

He continues, "The reason that they covered Paris Hilton for four hours yesterday is because we want to watch that. We don't want to know sometimes. But I believe man, I believe in a better thing in humans. I believe that actually, people want to do something about HIV and AIDS, and a lot of times they just don't know what to do. So when that stuff comes on you've got to change channel because you don't know what to do about it. And that's why we started engagehivaids.com; it's because we CAN do something about it. I mean, the most important thing I'll ever do in my life is what I'm doing in engagehivaids. I don't think anything in the world, other than being with my kids and my wife, is as important as this. We're living in a time where world governments are actually listening to the people, and right now they have basically made a promise to the poorest, most needy people in the world, and then they have basically, with big grins, taken that promise right back off the table. And we are the people who have a voice to do something about it."

Tre is on a roll now, talking about the issues that are really important to him. "I look to people that are real heroes to me, people like Nelson Mandela, people like Martin Luther King, and just see the power of quiet dissent; of us actually saying, 'Look, we're not gonna tear up things and yell and march in the streets and scream at you, but we are NOT going to stand for you cutting the world's poorest and most needy and most broken people out of the picture and acting like it's okay. Because it's not okay!' And I think that as followers of Jesus we need to be on the frontline of that.

"I won't tell you the real name but I have a very good friend in Kenya. She's a woman who has been HIV positive for quite a few years. She's gone all the way through being HIV positive. She's now become an AIDS counsellor and she does HIV testing, and she is one of the lead counsellors and testers at a VCT Centre, which is a Voluntary Counselling and Testing Centre that's run by a church in the middle of a market place, which is wonderful. We've really become good friends and every time I'm with her I go through this terrible thing when we say 'goodbye' going: how long do we have? She's young; she's around my age but everything within me, it tears me up inside because I think that there's so much that could be done. There are so many promises that CAN be kept. And she deserves a chance, she deserves a chance, and we have the power to actually see that happen. We don't know a cure yet but we CAN provide basic community-based healthcare. We CAN provide anti-retroviral drugs, we CAN work to see justice on the front of this terrible imbalance of the trade regulations between the West and Africa. And we can actually, rather than feeling, 'Oh I'll just throw a few pounds at it,' we can actually work to see economic, social and cultural change that enables our sisters and brothers to join us here on this playing field of the world's economy, so that we can see a real transformation in what's happening with the HIV and AIDS crisis. It's about so much more than just money or even just activism, it's really about real, fundamental, cultural change. Man, cultural change is what the followers of Jesus were born for, so I reckon this is our business, this is our time to do it!"

"That's why we've just launched the www.myspace.com/engagehivaids site so I'd love for people to come and visit there, find out about the text service and about the badges you can buy, little bits and pieces. And also signing up for the email list for Engage is a wonderful way of getting involved. We're launching a wonderful thing called Every Copper Counts over the summer. It's actually invented by a young girl from Northern Ireland who basically thought this title up: Every Copper Counts, and went around collecting pennies - 1p's and 2p's, because some people just throw them away! She collected over £200 in pennies and basically delivered them to me one day!" Tre laughs at the memory, "She told me about this idea and I just thought it was the most genius thing I'd ever heard, and this is a 14-year-old girl in Northern Ireland who decided; she made a promise and she was going to keep it. She didn't know how she'd do it, she didn't have any money, so she went around collecting coppers and invented Every Copper Counts. And there are a billion 14-year-old girls out there!"

So it seems Tre Sheppard needs to add the phrase "world changer" to his CV. Rock star, speaker, guitar designer, church leader and world changer may make it a busy life but Sheppard continues to be an inspiration because he refuses to let life's limitations hold him back from making an impact.

Our chat ends with Tori taking him away to eat and the band heading out onto the stage in the sunshine to play their brand of faith, hope and rock'n'roll to an appreciative crowd. I wander out to watch them and stand at the back basking in the sunshine swaying and singing along to the chorus of "Love Rescue Me" and reflecting that the world is already a better place because of Tre, Tori and the rest of Onehundredhours.