Video shoot in southern France

Last weekend, whilst on tour in the Dordogne, we shot a live video in a vineyard near Bordeaux.

We filmed two songs as the sun went down over Pujols, and the first of them – Speedway 105 – is now online at The Lightyears YouTube channel (or you can watch it by scrolling down to the bottom of this page).

Speedway 105 is a song that came out of our first ever tour to South Africa in 2009. It tells the story of a live music venue just off Hope Street in Cape Town, where we played our first show in SA. Sadly the Speedway has since closed down, but it remains a legendary landmark in the history of the band. Click here to read my tour diary about our time at the 105.

nb. No grapes were harmed in the making of this video.

Meeting the Buzzcocks and saluting the sun

We spent last weekend on tour in the South of France, and my-oh-my what larks we had. On Saturday night we were playing a private party at a chateau near Bordeaux, and in light of our recently devised al fresco gig tradition we resolved beforehand to shoot an on-the-hoof live video somewhere in the French countryside.

Doing this meant first assembling all Lightyears in the same part of the world, which isn’t always as straightforward as you might think. George and John were the last to arrive, flying in from Gatwick to Bordeaux via the wondrous medium of Easyjet, and had caused a flutter of excitement by revealing via Twitter that world-famous punk band the Buzzcocks were on their flight. Pip and I were due to meet the brothers at the airport, and George suggested flippantly that we come armed with a sign reading ‘Never Mind The Buzzcocks, I’m here for The Lightyears’.

He was joking, of course, but I did it anyway.

This would have remained a hilarious band in-joke were it not for the fact that the Buzzcocks emerged from baggage reclaim significantly before The Lightyears – and upon spotting their name on our sign, assumed (really quite reasonably) that we were there for them. Moments before, I had joked on Twitter that if this happened and the Buzzcocks didn’t see the funny side, I could end up on the wrong end of a – let’s face it – pretty one-sided inter-band punch-up. This is roughly how the scenario played out:

– One Of The Buzzcocks: “Oh, ‘ello mate. We’re just waiting for our bags, out in a sec.”
– Chris Lightyear: “Right. Yes… um, actually, we’re not -”
– One Of The Buzzcocks: “Any chance you could take us straight to a restaurant? We’re starving.”
– Chris Lightyear: “I… well, the thing is…”
[One Of The Buzzcocks disappears back inside baggage reclaim. Chris Lightyear poops his pants for a few minutes. One Of The Buzzcocks returns.]
– One Of The Buzzcocks: “Mate, they got any luggage trolleys out here?”
– Chris Lightyear: [Has a pretend look around, knowing full well there are no luggage trolleys.] “I don’t think so, but… er… well, you see, funny story but… uh… we’re not actually here to pick you up at all.”
[One Of The Buzzcocks looks understandably confused.]
– Chris Lightyear: “We’re here to meet a far less famous band.”
– One Of The Buzzcocks: “But… your sign?”
[Chris Lightyear prays to a god he doesn’t believe in that One Of The Buzzcocks isn’t preparing to hurt him in the face. Pip unfolds the sign again.]
– Chris Lightyear: “It was a… joke?”
[One Of The Buzzcocks looks confused, then suspicious, then re-reads the sign. Then smiles.]
– One Of The Buzzcocks: “Huh. That’s actually pretty f*cking funny. Mind if I take a photo?”
[Chris Lightyear thinks in his head that One Of The Buzzcocks can do absolutely whatever he wants, and nods enthusiastically. One Of The Buzzcocks takes a photo, shrugs, and disappears.]

Buoyed up by the unexpectedly successful conclusion of this little episode, we scooped up George and John and headed back out into the countryside.

Upon arriving back at the hotel, we hastily set up our by now well-practised outdoor set up (car battery, electrical inverter, four-way extension, mini keyboard, acoustic guitar, busking drum, Zoom recorder, Canon 550 camera) on the fringes of a vineyard and hurried to shoot a track before the sun went down. Given the idyllic setting, we decided to go with ‘Speedway 105’, a song we wrote on our first Cape Town tour back in 2009.

As always, it’s tricky to say how the recording will come out (that’s in George’s hands at the moment!) but we’ll keep you posted if and when it goes up online. In the meantime, here’s our most recent live acoustic video, filmed during the Lake Grasmere sessions:

Our Top Three Worst Gigs… named and shamed.

Killers frontman Brandon Flowers recently commented in an interview that his band had a ‘chip on their shoulder’ when they were starting out, adding that he didn’t miss their days of playing in small venues to tiny crowds.

While the news that a rockstar prefers stadium gigs in front of screaming fans over playing to no-one in the fetid back-room of a pub in Hatch End isn’t overly surprising, in a funny kind of way it’s always nice to hear a global super-power like The Killers admitting that, even for them, there was a period of grinding, thankless drudgery when, at least at first, nobody really appeared to like them very much.

If I was ever invited onto a reverse version of Desert Island Discs and asked to list The Lightyears’ Three Worst Gigs Of All Time, I think I could answer pretty quickly…

STARBUCKS COFFEE HOUSE, NEW YORK (2007)
3) I should start by saying that I actually quite enjoyed this gig, but Tony hated it SO much that there was enough resentment hanging around to seriously bump up the average. In the lead-up to a weekend of gigs in Philadelphia which would turn out to be some of our best ever, we were asked to perform a short acoustic set in a student-heavy branch of Starbucks somewhere in Manhattan (the precise location eludes me). When we got there there was one microphone between three of us and, crowded awkwardly around the single mic stand, we struggled for forty-five minutes to entertain the glued-to-their-laptops crowd of stand-offish coffee drinkers – but were steadfastly ignored. We won an INDY Award the next day (something which, ironically, we found out by telephone whilst in a Starbucks) and this softened the blow a little, but to this day Tony still twitches if you offer him a Chai Tea Latte.

PLAN B, BRIXTON (2005)
2) Plan B is cool. I mean really, really cool. Indeed it’s a hip-hop venue – not a sensitive-melodic-pop venue – so quite what we were doing there I really couldn’t say. There were three people in the audience and they were all our girlfriends, and to be honest I think even they were stretched by this one. We were supporting a really great band called Lucky Soul (still together apparently), but didn’t exactly ingratiate ourselves with them when, in an attempt to eject some much-needed energy into the room, I leapt enthusiastically from a speaker towards my keyboard, thwacked my head against a pipe on the ceiling and fell backwards into a stack of their very expensive guitars. This hurt on so many levels.

CLUB COWBOY, BRIXTON (2004)
1) The astute amongst you will have noticed a theme here – Brixton is not a friend to The Lightyears. Our first warning should have been the name, which looking back on it rather implies a masochistic underground club night. The worst thing about this gig was the crowd, who were small in number but big in hostility. When we kicked into a cover of Erasure’s ‘A Little Respect‘ about halfway through, a thicket of skin-headed neanderthals gulping lager and slowly ruining society in the corner started sporadically shouting the word ‘gay’ at us, at a steadily-increasing volume. As the gig unfolded it became clear that they really only had the one point to make (it was the one about us being gay), and they were dreadfully persistent about it. Now I’m a pretty tolerant guy, but by the close of our set I was so pissed off that, on the final note of the gig, I crashed down onto the end of my piano and inadvertently sent it cartwheeling off the stage. After smashing dramatically onto the dancefloor (thankfully not decapitating anyone in the process), it bore a crescent moon-shaped scar for the rest of its life, right up until it burned to a cinder in our house fire.

Now… in the interests of balance, I’m tempted to follow this with a list of the best gigs we’ve ever done – but on reflection I think that might feel a bit self-aggrandising, and in any case I’m not one for blowing my own trumpet.

Although I will say that the gigs where I’ve blown my own trumpet have all been BRILLIANT.

New live video published

We’ve just published the third and final video from our recent ‘Live At Lake Grasmere’ sessions. Click here to check it out on YouTube, or scroll down to the bottom of this news story.

The song, ‘Embrace Of Many’, is another brand-new track intended for inclusion on our new album. It’s a song about feeling isolated whilst also being surrounded by crowds of people.

The video was recorded, along with ‘I Won’t Wait Forever‘ and ‘One Way Or The Other‘, on the banks of Lake Grasmere in Cumbria (northern England) while we were waiting to go onstage on Saturday 1 September. We powered the camera with a car battery, and absolutely everything is performed live.

In the YouTube notes you’ll find the lyrics and chords, just in case there are any budding musicians out there who fancy giving it a go!

Brand-new videos now online

Last weekend, whilst kicking about in the Lake District, we shot a series of live and unplugged acoustic performances on the banks of Lake Grasmere in Cumbria.

On top of surprising a few ramblers, we also came out with some rather nice videos featuring songs we’ve been working on for the new album. We’ve now published the first two of these videos on The Lightyears’ YouTube Channel – I Won’t Wait Forever and One Way Or The Other.

Work on the new album is coming along well, with many of the songs in the running coming straight from my Lightyears novel, Mockstars.

A third video from The Lakeside Sessions will be published next week. Watch this space for updates!

Playing a gig. Next to a lake. With ducks.

Last week was an interesting one for The Lightyears. On Friday we met up to work on songs for the new album, and by the end of the day we had fairly workable versions of four tracks – two of mine (Blinded By Light and Embrace Of Many) and two of George’s (One Way Or The Other and I Won’t Wait Forever). Then, the following day whilst in the Lake District for a gig, we said ‘hang it all’ and went and set up by the side of a massive lake and filmed ourselves playing them.

It was a pretty basic set-up – unplugged, unfettered, just four guys, the countryside and a Canon 550. We had to abandon a couple of takes due to unexpected labrador-related mishaps, but in the end (in the space of about twenty-five minutes) we managed to record all four songs.

We’ve actually been planning to do something like this for a while. As we’re often on the road at the weekend playing private events we figured it would make sense to use the dead time after sound-check to create something for you guys, and the idea of heading out into the country and performing ‘ad hoc’ rather appealed to us. Kind of like guerilla gigging… only there wouldn’t be an audience – well, some goats and ducks ‘n’ stuff, but no people (this actually wouldn’t be the first time we’ve performed for livestock – there was that the gig we once played in a cow-shed in Belgium… but I digress).

I actually have no idea how the videos will come out – for all I know it might just be three minutes of us bopping away to a muffled soundtrack of wind and quacking. We’ll keep you posted. But hey, at the very least we gave two groups of Cumbrian ramblers something to talk about in the pub on Saturday night. I suspect stumbling across a piano-led indie-rock band from London while on a gentle stroll around Lake Grasmere is about as likely as bumping into a sheep in the Trocadero.