The Top Five Craziest Things We’ve Ever Done

Muse bassist Chris Wolstenholme has come out in the NME today confessing to his recent battle with alcoholism.

He was smashed all day every day, apparently, his habit soon taking its toll on his health, his family and on the band. He’s now fixed the problem – and even penned some tunes about it that appear on Muse’s next album – but this got me thinking about just, you know, just how damn crazy it can be when you’re living the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle.

I know, I know – you look at me and you go ‘there’s a guy who has done some crazy-ass, rock ‘n’ roll shit in his time’, and you’d be right. I’m out of control. I once went on tour WITHOUT A CLIPBOARD. Seriously. I mean, it was a mistake… a gross lapse of concentration… but once the weeping had subsided, I found a way round it (small notebook).

Anyway, in honour of Wolstenholme’s triumphant victory over alcoholism, I thought I’d present to you…

THE TOP 5 FIVE CRAZIEST THINGS THE LIGHTYEARS HAVE EVER DONE

(Watch out, ‘cos they’re ruddy crazy.)

5. TONY GOES MENTAL ON A MUSHROOM
On tour in South Korea in 2011, LYs drummer Tony partied for twelve hours straight on a giant mushroom. No, not a magic mushroom – a polystyrene one he’d nicked from the gig we’d just played (don’t ask). He held onto it all night, dragging it through two clubs and three bars, eventually admitting defeat when a misguided attempt to lob it onto the roof of a brothel went horribly wrong. Naughty boy.

4. LIMOBIKING OUT OF WEMBLEY STADIUM
Presented with the problem of how to get from a gig at Wembley Stadium to a booking in Bagshot in less than forty minutes, extensive research led from helicopter (no landing pad at the stadium – lame) via teleportation (technology yet to be developed) to the wonder of Virgin Limobikes. This was literally the coolest thing I have EVER done. Mind you, my driver told me that the last artist he’d had on the back of his bike was Cheryl Cole and, bearing that in mind, I suspected he may have been slightly disappointed with that day’s cargo (it didn’t help that I was whimpering with fear, obviously).

3. MIDNIGHT TRIP TO GLASTONBURY FESTIVAL
In 2007, we were lucky enough to work with legendary, multi-million selling producer Hugh Padgham, responsible for massive hits such as ‘In The Air Tonight’ and ‘Every Breath You Take’. He’s used to working with Sting, McCartney and Elton John, is Hugh, so he was a bit taken aback when, at 3am in the morning after a hefty mixing session on our track ‘Sleepless’, we downed tools, jumped into our battered Mitsubishi Spacewagon (that’s right – Spacewagon) and drove all the way to Somerset for a string of gigs at Glastonbury Festival. On the way we hit some debris and buggered the car, arrived at 6.30am, slept in the boot for two hours, got up, walked our gear onsite, cracked open the whisky and hit the stage at about 11 in the morning. Fairly tipsy. Hoorah!

2. TWO GIGS, TWO CONTINENTS, ONE DAY
For our fourth American tour, some dim-witted buffoon* on The Lightyears’ management team thought it would be a good idea to book us a gig in Portsmouth on Saturday night (ending at 2.30am) and then another in Union Square, New York – on the other side of the Atlantic – at lunchtime the following day. You don’t need me to point out that this isn’t a good idea, but hey. After 45 minutes of restless kip on Tony’s sofa I was bundled into the car at some ungodly hour by the rest of the band and we set off for Heathrow, utterly knackered. Some hours later, praying against unexpected delays, we went straight from the plane to customs to a cab to the streets of Manhattan to the stage and BOOM, we were off. I still can’t really remember the gig, to be honest. I think I was hallucinating at the time.

*It’s possible that the dim-witted buffoon was, in fact, me.

1. BABY DON’T LEAVE ME
It’s obvious what goes at Number One – that gig we did by mistake in a crèche. Yeah, you might scoff at this – might question just how crazy it really was – but if you think there are many things scarier than trying to convince a roomful of screaming, shitting toddlers to purchase your new charity football single, you’d be very wrong indeed.

[No photo was available for this incident. Seriously, that’s for the best.]

Titanium unlocked at Project LYs

No, not the lustrous white metal (we’re not building a corrosion-resistant battleship, honest) but rather our live acoustic version of the David Guetta hit from his recent album ‘Nothing But The Beat’.

The track was unlocked when we hit 25,000 views at www.ProjectLightyears.com. Massive thanks to everyone who has been sharing our videos on social networking sites and so on… you’re a huge bunch of legends. Click here to claim your delicious free prize.

We’re still (ahem) a short distance from our eventual target of 10 million, but these things take time! The more hits we get, the more content we unlock – so do keep spreading the good word.

And if you haven’t had a chance to check the site out yet, give it a gander (as in slang for ‘look’, not an adult male goose. I’m not doing well today, am I?) for recent LYs music videos and a trilogy of readings from my upcoming Lightyears novel, Mockstars.

Paul McCartney disses the establishment…

I love Paul McCartney because, for a man who is theoretically one of the coolest human beings who has ever lived, he’s also kind of… uncool?

You’ll see what I mean if you check out this video of Paul and his band rehearsing for the opening ceremony of the Olympics (at the risk of spoiling it, after a verse and a chorus, somebody ‘pulls the plug’ in an ironic reenactment of the recent incident at Springsteen’s Hyde Park concert). Don’t get me wrong – I LOVE the fact that he’s done it (I was ranting about the whole affair myself only the other day), and the moment when the band act surprised at the power disappearing is really quite endearing, if strangely awkward. But it does strike me as a strangely adolescent sort of response when you consider McCartney’s stature. It’s the kind of thing a teenager might do to piss off their parents, you know? Yeah. You wanna ground me? Take away my pocket money? Fine. But I’m SO going to publish an ironic video about it on YouTube, and there’s nothing you can do about it and I wish I’d never been born (etc).

The Beatles are and always will be legends, but these days Paul McCartney has morphed wonderfully into a sort of cuddly, uncool mirror-image of his younger trend-setting self, a bit like your grandad wearing Nike Airs. And I personally think that’s quite nice.

I know there are certain Beatles ‘fans’ out there – the crazy Lennonists – who despise everything that Macca represents, calling him a sell-out and insisting that just because he doesn’t sit in bed all day protesting about world peace he’s somehow not a proper musician. But I think that’s poppycock. Macca is a national treasure and, as long as keeps on doing funny little quirky things like this, he will remain so for a long time.

[Resisting the pun ‘folking genius’]

Some years back, after our second performance at Glastonbury 2008, two of my brothers insisted I come and join them at the Park Stage to watch a set by a then relatively unknown band called Mumford & Sons.

It was a great gig (although for some reason one that I neglected to mention in my frankly riveting 2008 Glastonbury Tour Diary). My bros had been following Mumford & Sons pretty much since they started, roughly a year previously, touring around small pubs and clubs in London watching the band patiently build their fanbase. Four years later, they’ve sold 2.3 million records. You do the math (there isn’t really any math to do here; that just seemed like the appropriate thing to say).

Anyhow, news today is that the Mumfords’ second album Babel is due for release on September 25 on Glassnote. Pretty excited about this myself, as I was a huge fan of Sigh No More. The NME have released a video of them previewing a track from the next record called ‘Ghosts That We Knew’ on Philadelphia’s 104.5FM. Click here to check it out.

Best of luck to them, I say. A quintessentially English band playing quintessentially English music. And they made folk cool, which nobody saw coming.

ps. if this puts you in the mood for listening to British acoustic acts performing live on American radio, click here to listen to The Lightyears’ interview on WXPN Philadelphia.

Life as a musician – we’ve never had it better…

There was a time when it was basically impossible to launch a band without a record label. Then there was a time when everybody knew the labels were buggered, and we all felt we should probably leave them twitching in the gutter, but it wasn’t yet clear how on earth you could get anywhere without one. Then came the time when the power to kickstart and sustain a successful music career was – genuinely – handed back to the musician.

There was a time when it was basically impossible to launch a band without a record label. Then there was a time when everybody knew the labels were buggered, and we all felt we should probably leave them twitching in the gutter, but it wasn’t yet clear how on earth you could get anywhere without one. Then came the time when the power to kickstart and sustain a successful music career was – genuinely – handed back to the musician.

And that time is now.

Which also makes this just about the most exciting time in history to be a musician…

A band who exemplify what it’s possible to achieve in this new era is Boyce Avenue. There’s a very good chance you haven’t heard of this Script-esque Florida-based three-piece, but they’re a global phenomenon, and a shining example of how you can use the internet to home-grow a brand that people across the world will love.

In a nutshell, a few years back brothers Alejandro, Daniel and Fabian starting posting cover versions of hit songs on YouTube. This was at a stage when not many bands were doing it, and getting in there early gave them a major advantage over their competitors. They kept the awesome content coming, gradually expanded their fanbase over time and by 2011 had built up a big enough profile to sustain a sold-out world tour that took them across five continents. Only six years in did they sign a record deal (with Universal Republic), which they recently left in order to start their own label.

It’s an inspiring story because, at the end of the day, while The Lightyears may have been lucky enough in our careers to perform all over the world at all kinds of amazing venues, festivals and stadiums (and it’s been an awesome journey so far), when it comes to growing our fanbase we, just like anyone else, need to do it from the ground up (this is what Project LYs is all about – check it out here if you haven’t had a chance yet. There’s free stuff).

I think there are probably quite a few similarities between us and the Boyce boys. They’ve got nice hair, we’ve got nice hair. They’re from Florida, we’re from Berkshire (the Florida of the Home Counties).

Also, we’ve covered some of the same songs. Take the Rihanna track We Found Love, for example – here’s the Boyce version, and here’s the LYs version. Almost a Mexican stand-off. In fact, I propose we use this opportunity to open up the field for a kind of balladic equivalent of Eminem’s 8 Mile rap battles. We wouldn’t be rapping, for obvious reasons, but we could instead battle it out through the medium of heart-trembling acoustic balladry. So, I dunno, George would have to sing a melancholy-but-at-the-same-time-uplifting line at Alejandro, and then Alejandro would have to sing back something equally if not more poignant to stay in the game. Then, if you lose, you’re forced to sit in a padded cell for two weeks listening to Tinchy Stryder interviews. Or something.

Anyway, I guess my point is – check them out. Who knows, maybe one day we’ll be sharing a stage.

LYs win Telegraph Arts Award for Olympic Project

We recently collaborated with the Voyager Academy on a community project to celebrate the arrival of the Olympic Torch in Peterborough, and we found out last week that the project had been nominated in the city’s 2012 Evening Telegraph Education Awards. The news from last night’s ceremony at Peterborough’s Key Theatre is… we won!

George and I wrote “There With You” at the tail-end of 2011, having been commissioned by the Voyager Academy to write an anthemic song for Peterborough that could be used to welcome the Olympic Torch this summer. The song was then learned and eventually performed by a massive collective of six-hundred singers and drummers on the Embankment at the official Olympic Torch celebration concert, as well as in front of the cathedral for the BBC cameras while the torch passed and, finally, in the Town Square the following morning.

Click here to watch a video of the Cathedral performance.

On behalf of The Lightyears, many thanks to Moira Green (Vice-Principal at the Voyager and project coordinator), Simon Allen (arranger and orchestrator) and the huge number of adults and children from across the city who put months of work into making the song sound amazing.

My Top Ten Lyrics from Graceland

In The Lightyears, as I’m sure is the case with many bands, we’re all a bit obsessed with Paul Simon. I can honestly say that the number of times I’ve listened to Graceland absurdly outweighs any other album in my collection.

And in honour of Paul’s Graceland reunion performance in Hyde Park last Sunday (marred only, according to the reviews, by a suspiciously quiet sound system possibly resulting from Saturday night’s Springsteen-gate – read my rant about this here), I thought I’d publish my Top Ten Lyrics From Graceland.

Because, to be frank, even though he’s kinda short and these days looks a bit like a potato, I’d probably still bloody marry Paul Simon.

Here we go then. In a sort of approximate, backwards order.

10. “The Mississippi delta was shining like a national guitar”
from Graceland
– This simple line sums up everything that’s awesome about Paul Simon. He has this ability to write lyrics that mean absolutely nothing, and absolutely everything, at the same time.

9. “Cattle in the marketplace, scatterlings and orphanages”
from You Can Call Me Al
–  Paul evokes details and scenes like a novelist. The words themselves are musical – not just the chords and melodies behind them.

8. “He sees angels in the architecture, spinning in infinity”
from You Can Call Me Al
– How to make buildings sound like poetry.

7. “She was physically forgotten but then she slipped into my pocket with my car keys”
from Diamonds On The Soles Of Her Shoes
– First of all, not many people could sing ‘physically forgotten’ with panache, and secondly – that car keys image is just magic.

6. “Hey, don’t I know you from the cinematographer’s party?”
from I Know What I Know
– This shouldn’t work as a lyric. It just shouldn’t. But somehow, it does. And that’s the man’s genius – conversational off-the-cuffs turned into classic lines.

5. “He’s a poor boy, empty as a pocket”
from Diamonds On The Soles Of Her Shoes
– I love this, because for eight small words this line does so much work. In the empty pocket is the possibility of a full pocket – and so you learn that, although he’s poor, this boy has dreams, aspirations and ambition.

4. “There is a girl in New York City who calls herself the human trampoline”
from Graceland
– You think ‘oh yeah, I get that, she’s a slapper, that’s clever and funny’. And it is. But then he twists the meaning in the lyrics that follow – look it up and you’ll see what I mean.

3. “I am following the river down the highway through the cradle of the civil war”
from Graceland
– Evoking centuries of history, casually, in just a few words. Amazing.

2. “She makes the sign of the teaspoon, he makes the sign of the wave”
from Diamonds On The Soles Of Her Shoes
– Reminds me of my good friends Emily & Skinny (from our song, Emily), and how sometimes people just fit together. Always makes me smile.

And the inevitable winner…

1. “He ducked down the alley with some roly-poly little bat-faced girl”
from You Can Call Me Al
– Nobody else writes lyrics like this, and even if they tried to they’d never get away with it.

Have I missed any out…?!

“Nothing really matters…”

Today we awake to the news that Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody has been voted the nation’s favourite Number 1 single as part of an ITV series called, um… well, called The Nation’s Favourite Number 1 Single.

First off, let’s spare a thought for all those fans of The Ketchup Song, Shaddap You Face and most importantly Blazin’ Squad’s early Noughties smash-hit Crossroads who were let down by the decision. I’m sorry Flava, Frenzie, Tommy-B, Freek & the gang – you may rap like Reebok-clad angels but I’m afraid your falsetto skills fall woefully short of Freddie’s.

Secondly, this constant opinion polling is pretty bizarre. We all know how it’ll pan out – Del Boy falling through the bar is the funniest thing that’s ever happened, Star Wars is the greatest film of all time etc. So quite what the point is of yet another vote to decide that Clearly The Greatest Song Of All Time is indeed officially still The Greatest Song Of All Time does seem to have been lost somewhere in the haze. Still… people love countdowns, don’t they?

Anyhow, all that nonsense aside, Queen – we salute you. There will never be another band like Freddie, Brian, Roger and John.

Also, here in The Lightyears, we’re proud to be able to say that (along with Queen, obviously) we’re one of the few acts ever to have performed Bohemian Rhapsody at Wembley Stadium.

Mind you, we also once performed La Bamba at a jumble sale, so it’s swing and roundabouts.

Beware… incoming music rant.

I’m hacked off.

I’m hacked off.

That’s right, hacked off. (AKA: a hair’s breadth away from writing a snitty e-mail to the Guardian.)

On Saturday night, at the climax of an epic concert, two of rock ‘n’ roll’s best-loved performers – Springsteen & McCartney – joined forces onstage at Hyde Park. This has never happened before. And just to ensure nobody was tempted to forget this momentous collaboration, an unnamed jobsworth operating on behalf of the concert organisers carved himself a dubious spot in music history by pulling the plug on the PA system actually during the pair’s raucous rendition of Twist & Shout at the end of the night.

The sound apparently dampened, went a bit weird, then suddenly silent. The 65,000-strong crowd were as confused as Bruce, who at first continued addressing them through the microphone before realising it wasn’t turned on. Basically, here you have a man – the Boss, no less – who has dedicated his life to giving mind-blowing live performances and is just in the process of wrapping up what was by many accounts an absolute belter when some berk in combat trousers and a Black & Decker utility belt shut the whole gig down because the band had apparently ‘broken their curfew’.

As Springsteen’s guitarist Stevie Van Zandt rightly pointed out, this wouldn’t happen anywhere in the world apart from England. And I personally believe this is because we are gradually falling foul to a culture of litigation, where stuck-up local residents complain about concert noise and, after threatening legal action, effectively harangue local councils into imposing laughable sound limitations on venues, on pain of losing their licenses. So in truth it would be unfair to blame the concert organisers who pulled the plug on this particular occasion, because they’re really just trying to keep their jobs. No, instead we should all be blaming the residents of Mayfair and Knightsbridge who, upon purchasing their absurdly palatial London penthouse pads SLAP-BANG NEXT TO THE CONCERT VENUE HYDE PARK waste little time in complaining to anyone who’ll listen that, hang on a minute, there I was just a-going about my business when one day I woke up to discover I was living next-door to a concert venue. That’s right, Residents Of Central London, I blame you for this ridiculous circus of health and safety regulations, and I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that you are BRINGING ABOUT THE DECLINE OF CIVILISATION.

We’ve inherited this culture of blame from the States, and we need to be a bit bloody careful. Accidentally hacked your leg off with a saw while pointlessly wandering drunk through a building site with a bag on your head? Yeah? Don’t worry, our team of spineless failed lawyers who when not otherwise tied up poisoning kittens for money will happily fill their time shooting endless disingenuous TV ads destined to clog up the dead air between parts one and two of Jeremy Kyle’s ‘Young Mums On Crack’ midweek special and carefully designed to lure witless people into suing their own grandmothers for fat wadges of cold, hard unearned cash.

In The Lightyears we’ve been on the sharp edge of this sort of thing ourselves. Countless venues we’ve played at have been forced to hardwire so-called ‘sound limiters’ into their electrical circuitry, maliciously designed by (I can only imagine) Lucifer himself to instantly cut all the power in the venue should it dare to creep over the laughably cautious pre-set maximum. The thing is, though, it would be okay if this pre-set maximum sound level allowed you to, I don’t know, PLAY A GIG, but it’s more like ‘Hey, yeah sure, come along with your guitars and your drums and just totally do your thing, right, but you’d better hope one of the earwigs living in the skirting board doesn’t inadvertently belch because that could very well max out our limiter’. We played a gig in a tudor barn once, a barn lumbered with particularly severe limiting technology, and while we’d managed to just about shoehorn the level of our instruments down underneath the red line, every time the crowd applauded at the end of a song the whole place was plunged into silent darkness. Ridiculous. And all because some wrinkled miser in a neighbouring cottage – who was probably half-deaf anyway – didn’t like the idea of anybody having fun within a ten-mile radius of their bleak little existence.

I’m a big fan of the principles put forward by Utilitarianism – a man should act in such a way that increases happiness for the maximum number of people. Simple idea, simple philosophy. So I don’t have a lot of time for the decision taken on Saturday night that made the lives of sixty-five thousand fully paid-up music fans considerably more rubbish in favour of pandering to the fatuous whim of some cantankerous, over-privileged, probably-only-lives-in-Hyde-Park-because-her-ancestors-oppressed-lots-of-poor-people, Daily Mail-reading coiffed moose in a blouse who’s decided she can’t hear the closing credits of Morse over the sweet sound of one of the world’s greatest living musicians.

There. I told you I was hacked off.

Never judge a book by its cover

It’s emerged in the press that Katy Perry‘s insurance agents are concerned that, one of these days, she’s going to come a cropper on one of her bizarre stage outfits.

The Pezmeister has upset her insurance company by insisting on wearing a mechanical rotating bra during live gigs, and now they’re worried her hair might get stuck in the mechanism and cause a serious neck injury (I should imagine Katy’s publicists, on the other hand, are rubbing their palms together at the PR jamboree that would follow the headline ‘Popstar decapitated live onstage by malfunctioning brassiere’).

Perry’s insurers are probably justified in their anxieties, although of course her wardrobe antics do somewhat pale in comparison to Gaga’s – a woman who, when she’s not dressing up in pork underpants, is more than likely to be seen accepting a Grammy in nothing but a few strips of rather cleverly positioned duck tape.

But the thing is, insurance issues aside, all of this just exposes the superficial farce that is pop music these days. What are we doing endlessly discussing the outrageous garb of this popstar or that when really we should be debating the quality of their music…? Isn’t that judging proverbial books by their covers? I just think it’s really sad when musicians feel like they have to dress up, like they have to play court jester in ridiculous costumes, when really they should just let their music speak for itself.

I just think it’s really sad.

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