Chaplin’s – Spring City, PA – 31/07/09

Union Square Park – New York, NYC – 30/07/09

Lightyears on tour in USA

We’re leaving for the United States today for a run of dates in the New York and Philadelphia area. See details below…

THURSDAY 30 JULY: Union Square, Manhattan NY (with Jukebox The Ghost)
– Free Entry. LYs onstage 6pm.

FRIDAY 31 JULY: Chaplin’s, Spring City PA (with Brooke Shive & The 45s)
– Doors 7pm. LYs onstage 8pm. BYOB. Buy tickets here.

SATURDAY 1 AUGUST: Milkboy, Ardmore PA (with Vantine/Amadio)
– Doors 8pm. Buy tickets here.

SUNDAY 2 AUGUST: Burlington Amphitheatre, Westampton NJ (with Jon Clifton)
– Free entry. LYs onstage 3pm.

See you guys there!

The Piano-led Power-Pop Revolution!

Top-dollar Philadelphia act Jukebox The Ghost have just been added to the bill for our Union Square gig this Thursday 30 July. This is awesome news, for this jaunty piano-led power-pop 3-piece (sound familiar anyone?!) are one of the finest acts we’ve ever played with.

Jukebox supported us at the Clapham Grand back in 2007 whilst gigging in the UK and since then have toured with Ben Folds and gone from strength to strength. Check them out here.

If you’re in Manhattan, make sure you get down to Union Square at 5pm this Thursday for a rare opportunity to catch Jukebox and The Lightyears on the same stage…

The Troubadour – London – 24/07/09

Lightyears to play Wembley Stadium

We’re very excited to announce that we’ve just been booked to perform at Wembley Stadium on Saturday 12 September. 

The Lightyears will be appearing on the centre circle of the Wembley pitch immediately before kick-off at the Guinness Premiership match between Saracens and Northampton Saints. Also performing that day are Diversity, winners of Britain’s Got Talent, and Goldfish, one of South Africa’s hottest acts.

We aim to get as many Lightyears fans down on the day as possible – and at a tenner a ticket, you’d be craaaaaaazy not to join us.

That’s right – for just £10 (or £5 if you’re under 16) you get The Lightyears, Diversity, Goldfish, a premiership rugby match and the legendary Wembley atmosphere. All in all, an amazing family day out.

Click here to buy your tickets now from Ticketmaster.  

Saracens RFC have massive plans for this season and hiring Wembley is just the beginning. With an ’09/’10 squad featuring Springboks, Italians, Fijians, an All Black scrum-half, the current English captain and several home-grown emerging internationals, the Sarries plan to appeal to as wide an audience as possible in the coming season. In fact, on 12 September the club intend to fill the 91,000-seater stadium to capacity and smash all previous attendance records for a rugby union match.

Imagine it now – a summer’s day, an iconic stadium, top class rugby and top class entertainment. What could be better! We look forward to seeing you all there…

Woodcote Rally – Oxfordshire – 11/07/09

VIP concert tickets released for US fans

Lightyears fans in Philadelphia can now purchase VIP tickets for our show at Milkboy Coffee on Saturday 1 August, securing guaranteed front-row seats.

The VIP tickets have just been released for sale on the Milkboy website. They cost $25. Click here to buy yours.

Regular tickets cost $12. Click here to buy yours.

Our Milkboy shows have a habit of selling out so get in there quick!

Milkboy Coffee, situated in Ardmore PA, is one of our favourite venues on the East Coast. Click here to visit the Tour Diary page and read about our previous gigs there…

The Great AEG Hologram Debacle

Does anybody else think that AEG Live, the company responsible for booking Michael Jackson’s gargantuan run of shows at the O2 in May, got what was coming to them?

Against the star’s wishes, AEG extended MJ’s initial run of 10 shows to 50, virtually overnight. Michael himself wasn’t happy about this but it seemed he had no choice in the matter. It was obvious to everybody that he was going to really struggle to make it through 50 concerts – the people knew it, the media knew it and the insurance companies knew it. As a result, AEG were only able to secure insurance against a small proportion of the concerts they’d booked and now they are in the hole for something like £300 million. 

It has recently emerged that the company are offering fans a “souvenir ticket”, featuring a hologram of the great man, as an alternative to a refund. I’m sorry, but what?! A hologram? You used to get tat like that free in cereal packets in the 1980s. That is clearly the result of a group of executives sitting around a boardroom trying to figure out how they can exploit the memory of Michael Jackson just to save themselves a few quid.

Now, I don’t want to come across as naive – businessmen exploit musical talent for financial gain all the time (that’s why we have a music industry and it’s also the reason bands are able to get their music out to millions rather than just hundreds, which is clearly a good thing) –  but I think in this case it’s a little crass. The problem, however, is this. I wish I could say that the fans will see through AEG’s hokey offer. I wish I could say that devoted Jackson-ites will boycott the scheme on principle. But they won’t. And AEG know that. 

Personally, I wouldn’t accept a shiny ticket for a concert that never happened created by a desperate corporation as a suitable memento for the loss of the world’s greatest entertainer. Mind you, maybe that’s just sour grapes from one of the schmucks who failed to get a ticket in the first place. 😉 

What I will say is this – if you can’t decide between a refund and a souvenir ticket, why not join me on my soapbox and take the cash? Then, later on today, in place of framing AEG’s ground-breaking hologram technology and hanging it on your wall, why not bust out a huge ghetto blaster and strut the streets of your hometown playing “Speed Demon” on full blast and grabbing your crotch? That’s a better tribute to the King Of Pop than anything that could have been dreamed up by the suits at AEG…

“We’ll always have Cape Town, boys…”

SATURDAY 7 MARCH, 9.30am (Table Bay Hotel, Cape Town, South Africa):
It’s the morning of the gig. The moment this whole week has been building up to. Last night we spent a few nerve-wracking hours getting to know the rugby players who will constitute a large proportion of our audience tonight and, whilst we escaped without any broken bones, we all remain a little nervous about whether or not we’ll win them over at the gig.

On the way to breakfast in the hotel I spot several copies of the Cape Argus, one of the city’s foremost broadsheets, resting on a side-table. Our interview ought to be published today. As I rifle through the pages, I discover that indeed it has been. I read the article over a breakfast of roasted duck pancakes with hoisin sauce, sushi, avocado salad, quail’s eggs, freshly-brewed black coffee and a few slices of exquisitely rare prime beef-steak (click here to find out where the Table Bay breakfast placed in my International Five Star Hotel Breakfast Richter Scale). The article’s great – the journalist has really done his homework and has some nice comments to make about the band and our recent track “Johannesburg”. Click here to read it.

After a few hours spent relaxing by the pool, we jump in our wicked tour-bus and head for Hamilton Rugby Club. It’s a scorcher of a day and, when we arrive, it becomes very evident that those not involved in the tournament have been hitting the drink pretty hard since early in the day. Saying that, the players themselves (aside from those taking it very seriously) have clearly been doing much the same thing and so the stage is set for an epic night in the beer tent.

We kick off around 8pm. Our plan is to mix up some of our original tunes with a bunch of crowd-pleasing covers, saving “Johannesburg” until the beginning of the second set. We start at a fairly chilled pace but, within about 20 minutes, the tent is full to bursting and the people are demonstrably ready to let loose. As we begin chucking in upbeat songs of our own such as “Emily”, and pot-boiling covers like “Bohemian Like You” and “A Little Respect”, the atmosphere is really starting to cook.

Our nerves fade away as the crowd surges towards the stage and the energy we’re giving out is matched easily by the energy coming back off the audience. It’s smiles all round. I can tell that we’re winning them over. After a short break we return with Set Two, which is where we properly seal the deal. We kick off with “Johannesburg”, explaining the story behind the song and, I’m happy to say, inspiring a mass sing-along from people who have never heard the tune before. As Alex James writes in his autobiography “Bit Of A Blur”, you know you’ve got a good song on your hands when the crowd are singing along by the end of the first chorus. And they were.

As the evening draws on and we get louder, the people get rowdier and the sun drops lower, I’m riding on a wave of adrenaline. People are hugging and kissing and dancing with each other. The police are hovering outside. Fully-naked men are throwing themselves across beer-flooded picnic tables. It’s magnificent, rip-roaring rock ‘n’ roll chaos.

Suddenly, I realise what I have to do next.

My first ever stage-dive.

The circumstances are primed. Two thousand party animals are writhing as one in front of me. I’ve drunk just the right amount of beer to blunt the hard edge of caution whilst remaining capable enough to avoid grievous injury. I am poised. I am ready to fly.

Then, out of the blue, I am beaten to it. By an FHM supermodel.

And not everybody can say that.

Roxy Louw, South Africa’s foremost supermodel and a regular in lad-mag FHM, has mounted the stage during my period of prevarication and launched herself spectacularly into the crowd. I watch her surf about on the turbulent sea of excited hands, amused by the huge mob of pissed-up blokes virtually goggle-eyed at the opportunity to legitimately grope one of the world’s hottest women.

Whilst in some ways I can’t help but feel like a bit of a disappointment after the delivery of a supermodel, I resolve nevertheless to join the throng. After a run-up that would make Evel Knievel jealous, I bounce in a high, smooth arc from the stage onto the moving platform of heads and hands. What a glorious moment. Everybody is singing around me. I have come home. This, as they say, is it.

It’s a hot and sweaty night that sees many more stage-dives and a slew of encores. The organisers manage to keep the police at bay (just) and ask us to come back and play again tomorrow night. Sporting legend Bobby Skinstad calls us “the best band in the world”. He’s never seen Toploader play live, of course, but we’ll forgive him that.

“The real stars of Day One are The Lightyears, who blow the marquee apart with a roaring display that sees four encores and has the police sent to check noise levels dancing in the crowd…”
RUGBY 365.COM (read full article here)

SUNDAY 8 MARCH, 10am (My hotel room, Cape Town):
When I wake up, I have the fear. That distant, indefinable fear you sometimes get the morning after the night before, when the heady cloud of a hangover keeps you from pinpointing exactly what it is you did last night that you’re about to begin regretting.

At breakfast, I’m halfway through my smoked salmon, toasted muffins, hollandaise sauce, tuna steak and home-made guacamole when it slowly but surely dawns on me. After we left the stage yesterday following our fourth encore, I was approached by a promoter interested in booking us for a show in Johannesburg later in the year. I gave him my business card but he didn’t have one himself so he wrote his landline and mobile phone numbers down on the nearest available piece of paper – which happened to be a flyer for a local strip-joint. I didn’t think a great deal of it at the time, popping it down on the desk in my hotel room before crashing into a deep and happy sleep.

Something important, however, has just occurred to me.

Housekeeping.

The time I’ve spent in this hotel thus far has confirmed to me that the housekeeping staff are ruthlessly efficient when it comes to clearing up after messy British rock bands. Anything that appears to be rubbish is likely to be binned pretty sharpish. And there’s a good chance that the crumpled flyer in question, decorated with its illegible scribblings and tacky, pornographic imagery, would be immediately deemed as fit only for the bin. And this could lose us a potential gig in Johannesburg. I have to do something.

Making my excuses I dash out of the breakfast room and pelt across the lobby to the lift. I don’t know if you’ve ever spotted this but lifts rarely respond quickly enough when you’re in a hurry. When I finally make it back to my room, it immediately becomes clear that I’m too late. The beds are expertly made and the room is spotless. They’ve been. And they’ve taken the flyer.

The odds are stacked against me but I’m hoping against hope that I’ll be able to trace the flyer by working out which member of staff cleared out my room. It’s a long shot but I’m left with little choice. The concierge ought to be my best bet, I figure, so I head back down to the lobby, take a seat at the front desk and ring the bell. Presently the concierge appears wearing a neat uniform and a funny little hat.

“Can I help sir?” he asks, sitting down opposite me.

“Ah, yes, that would be great thanks. You see, the thing is, I left a really rather important piece of paper in my room this morning and I think the housekeepers have thrown it away.”

“Oh,” he replies, his expression dropping.

“… Yes, I know. Bit of a stretch, I realise that, but I was wondering if the housekeeping department would be able to keep an eye out for it in case it turns up?”

Duty-bound to humour my doomed mission, the concierge produces a small notepad from his top pocket and clicks the end of a shiny silver pen.

“Could you describe it for me?”

At no point in this little crusade had it occurred to me that, in order for the hotel staff to “keep an eye out” for my lost flyer, they’d need to know what it looked like. And what it looked like was, to be brutally honest, an oiled-up pole-dancer with her baps out.

“OK, erm, so…. this is what it looks like…” I stammer, stalling for time, searching for a polite way of describing a photo of a nude sex-worker. “So, it’s black, and sort of gold round the edges. Rectangular, probably a little crumpled. There are some important phone numbers written on it. It’s maybe eight inches long, three wide….? And, erm… I guess that’s about it.”

A short pause.

“And there’s a fully naked chick on the front.”

The concierge raises his eyebrow. “And you say this leaflet has very important phone numbers on it?”

“It does,” I reply.

He allows himself a wry smile. “Yes, I wouldn’t want to lose phone numbers of that nature either”.

Oh god. They think I’m a pimp. But it’s too late to back-pedal now. “No,” I offer with a nervous laugh, “I guess not.”

Note to self: mistakenly introducing oneself as a pimp to the concierge at a five-star hotel – even if it is Snoop Dog’s hotel – may reasonably be considered an unwise move.

SUNDAY 8 MARCH, 6.30pm (Hamilton Rugby Club, Cape Town):
Today we swagger into the Cape Town Tens exhuding an easy confidence, satisfied that last night’s high-octane performance has permanently ingratiated us with the locals. As we stroll through the front gates of the club, suited and booted and carrying guitar cases, the MC momentarily ceases in his commentary of the current rugby match to announce “Ladies and Gentlemen, The Lightyears have arrived!”. To my childish delight this prompts spontaneous applause from all round the ground. This is definitely the closest we have ever come to “Elvis has left the building”…

Today’s gig starts with the laid-back swing of a Sunday evening, but before long it has erupted into a party to rival last night’s performance. There’s more stage-diving, plenty of sing-alongs, police hovering outside and a lot of sweating. Afterwards we hit the clubs for our final taste of the Cape Town lifestyle, and are able to beat the queues at Cafe Caprice, the city’s trendiest night-spot, on account of arriving with Bob, who is pretty much regarded here as the country’s answer to David Beckham.

Standing outside the club several hour’s later, watching the waves lap at the beach and feeling the warm night air on our faces, we reflect on the tour.

“We’ll always have Cape Town, boys,” muses John, prophetic as ever.

Bob’s brother Dan, A.K.A. The Commander (and something of a legend about the town), throws his arms round us and nods his head in agreement.

“It can only get better boys,” he says, “it can only get better. Which, when you think about it, is actually quite scary.”

Which, I reflect, is exactly how I like it.

Chris Lightyear