LYs soundtrack award-winning campaign

As many of you may know, The Lightyears have previously soundtracked a number of short films for the positive body image campaign Body Gossip.

A new video has been released today featuring bespoke music from the LYs, and it’s called Poem For Women – a satirical take on weight loss, written by Lola Frears and performed by a cast of celebrities including Natalie Cassidy and Big Brother’s Nikki Grahame.

Body Gossip released the video today in celebration of the fact that, last night, co-founders Ruth & Natasha won ‘Ultimate Campaigners’ at the 2012 Cosmopolitan Women Of The Year Awards. This is incredible news – campaigns like this may appear to spring up out of nowhere, but here in The Lightyears we’ve watched The Dynamic Duo build Body Gossip up literally from nothing, and it’s been truly inspiring to watch.

Find out more on the Body Gossip website, and click below to watch ‘Poem For Women’:

New free download at Project LYs

Back in July we launched Project Lightyears, a multimedia micro-site designed to spread the word about the band far and wide across this good green earth.

Since then, with your help, we’ve racked up over 70,000 views. Thanks everyone! This also means that a new target has been unlocked, and we’ve decided to give away a preview recording of One Way Or The Other, which was one of the first tracks to come out of our writing sessions for the new album. We recorded the song live on the banks of Lake Grasmere in Cumbria back in September, using a basic set-up powered by a car battery (surprising a few ramblers in the process), and in fact some of you will already have seen the video on YouTube.

We wanted you to be able to take the song away and listen to it, so we’ve extracted the audio and made it available for free download at Project LYs. And if N-Dubz make urban pop, then we’re definitely spearheading a movement in hardcore rural music – because if you listen carefully to this track, you can actually hear the lake in the background. John Craven would fill his pants.

Our ultimate aim with Project Lightyears is to reach 10 million views, and while this is still some way off, word is spreading to far-flung corners of the earth and momentum is gathering (you may remember that our videos are particularly popular in Turkey, and in fact during the last thirty days we’ve had one lone viewer in Guadeloupe – if you’re that person and you’re reading this, make yourself known to me and I’ll write you a song… no joke). Thanks again for all your support!

Watch the video for One Way Or The Other below – or download the track for free by visiting Project Lightyears.

Sweden tour photos now online

Last week we jetted off to Gothenburg, Sweden, to perform with Roger Daltrey from The Who and Queen drummer Roger Taylor.

Aside from the catastrophic impact on our wallets of Gothenburg’s ‘nine quid for a pint of beer’ culture, the trip was a grand success. I’m in the process of documenting our adventures in a tour diary, but in the meantime, head to The Lightyears’ Facebook page where our Sweden tour photo album is now online.

“Where the hell are my lemon-scented towels…?!”

We supported the Mystery Jets a few years ago, and I remember being struck by their quirky backstage rider. As I documented in my tour diary of the experience, the Jets memorably demanded that a clutch of hot roast chickens be delivered to their dressing room before the performance, along with assorted crudités and of course the customary crate of Moet & Chandon.

This actually led me to imagine what our own fantasy rider would be when we eventually got to play Wembley Stadium, and it looked something like this:

– 2 eggcups of freshly distilled Peruvian mountain spring water faintly infused with the tears of a virgin
– A copy of 80s robot-comedy Short Circuit on VHS
– Clippings from Des Lynam’s beard
– A bag of eels
– 1 metric ton of paprika Snack-A-Jacks
– A 10-foot high decorative tapestry depicting the Norman invasion of Ireland in 1169 made from Faberge Eggs and snowflakes
– A box of damp otters
– Chesney Hawkes
– A speedboat

As turns out, we actually did play Wembley the following year – four times – but, true to form for The Lightyears, instead of acting like proper rockstars and demanding a wheelbarrow full of live squid (or similar), we were actually just really polite and said ‘a few sandwiches might be nice, but please don’t trouble yourselves’. Classic.

While we’re on this subject, NME recently published a list of the 40 strangest rockstar rider requests. Here are some of my favourites:

– Marilyn Manson: a bald, toothless hooker and a bag of gummi bears
– Eminem: a wooden pond for his koi carp
– J-Lo: demanded that her coffee was to be stirred anticlockwise
– Led Zeppelin: an iron and an ironing board
– Lily Allen: 12 packets of Monster Munch
– Motley Crue: a submachine gun and a 12-foot boa constrictor

What a bunch of mentalists.

ps. Here’s our behind-the-scenes video from the Mystery Jets gig:

The Beatles, The Lightyears & the legendary Cavern

Fifty years ago today, The Beatles released “Love Me Do”… and changed the world.

They changed Liverpool, they changed the music industry, they changed what it meant to be young – they changed everything. Somehow, fifty years doesn’t quite seem long enough ago for an event of that kind of cultural magnitude. The release of “Love Me Do” feels like it should be centuries in the past, an ancient relic, a barely lit memory, but it isn’t. It’s post-war. Post the NHS. My mum could probably tell you exactly where she was when she first heard it.

There’s a terrific documentary on BBC iPlayer at the moment which covers this whole event much better than I could: 1962 – Love Me Do. Well worth a look, if only because it features a minute or two of fantastic footage of The Beatles onstage at The Cavern – the only existing film of its kind. It’s spell-binding to watch. Paul wobbling his head, George lurking like a little boy at the back of the stage, at one point braving an awkward smile at a friend in the crowd, all four members of the band completely unaware that they are teetering on the brink of re-defining modern music. Absolutely amazing stuff.

We’ve been lucky enough to play at The Cavern a couple of times, and the first one in particular was memorable for a number of reasons. I remember arriving at the venue and suddenly feeling very… ahem… posh. We weren’t in Berkshire any more, and I quickly decided that this would be a gig where I would try and keep my increasingly unpredictable mouth shut. More singy singy, less talky talky. As long as I didn’t say anything that exposed us as southern pansies, I reasoned, we’d be OK.

But it didn’t occur to me that I also had to keep a fairly beady eye on Tony. He’s not a floppy-haired fop like me, of course (Tony’s from Croydon, guv’nor), but he does really really love trivia, and is occasionally known to bust out one of his many useless facts live onstage, in-between songs.

Normally this is fine. Normally this is just part of the act, casual banter for the crowd. But on this occasion things would be different. We’d finished our set and, to our surprise, had gone down really well. So well in fact that the crowd wouldn’t stop cheering after we left the stage. The compere reappeared and the audience were shouting for an encore, but we hadn’t prepared one because a) the festival organisers had made it pretty clear that time was too tight for encores, b) we didn’t expect to get one anyway and c) we literally didn’t have any more songs in our repertoire. Behind the curtain, we huddled for a quick conference and Tony pointed out that there was one song we could do. A song we had learned recently for a friend’s wedding.

A Beatles song.

But no. You can’t do that, not in the birthplace of The Beatles. In fact, it’s not just that you shouldn’t cover The Beatles at The Cavern – it’s that you DON’T cover The Beatles at The Cavern, for precisely the same reason that you don’t wear a cardboard Queen Elizabeth mask to Buckingham Palace. Because MI5 will kick your lily ass out of England, and rightly so. But this would be okay, Tony insisted, because the Beatles song we happened to know was ‘You Can’t Do That’ (originally the B-side to ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’), and the in-built irony of this would cover us in the event of a revolt.

Yeah right it would, I thought.

But before I knew it, there we were back onstage, standing in front of an expectant Beatle-mad crowd, about to do the one thing that you must NEVER EVER do at The Cavern Club… particularly if you’re a bunch of posh softies from the Home Counties.

‘I’ve got a fact about The Beatles,’ said Tony suddenly, into the microphone, before I could begin the piano introduction. What was he doing? I looked out at the shadowy sea of faces. You could hear a pin drop. Tony continued…

‘The Beatles’ first gig wasn’t in Liverpool at all.’

Please don’t kill us, northerners. Please don’t smash us in and mail our body parts to Tunbridge Wells.

‘Lennon and McCartney’s first ever gig wasn’t in Liverpool, it was in Reading. Where we live.’

This is it, I thought. This is, without a single shadow of a doubt, how I’m going to die. And while there are worse places to meet your demise than onstage at the Cavern Club, this wasn’t my time – I still had so much to give. ‘Why,’ resonated a voice inside my head, ‘I’d always hoped that one day I might release a charity single with a Midlands-based football team, or sell a truckload of mobile phones through the canny use of a pop song that sounds a bit like a ringtone, or at the very least see my face on the side of a bin in Wandsworth shopping centre – and how will I achieve any of those things if I die now?!’

However, far from finding myself swiftly decapitated by a flying re-mastered vinyl of The White Album, I opened my tightly scrunched eyes to a room full of people sagely nodding their heads in agreement – because it would appear that not only was Tony’s fact watertight (he’d probably claim all his facts are, but I’m not so sure – that one about humans being genetically pre-disposed to vegetarianism is very suspicious), but of course the kind of musos who hang out at the Cavern Club are so knowledgeable about The Beatles that they too knew this to be true. Indeed, far from causing a riot, Tony had in fact played an absolute blinder.

And the rest is history. We threw out a spirited rendition of ‘You Can’t Do That’, and it went down a storm.

At the bar afterwards, we were toasting our success over drinks when our good friend Steve Lally – a born and bred scouser – concluded with raised eyebrows: ‘That was stupid, lads. Really stupid.’

A smile spread across his face.

‘But you absolutely nailed it.’

So here’s to you, John, Paul, George & Ringo. Thanks for starting a band, and for changing the world.

Chris Lightyear

ps. This is just the kind of story that crops up in my Lightyears book ‘Mockstars’, so if you enjoyed this wee anecdote, visit www.ProjectLightyears.com for some novel readings (and maybe leave us some juicy comments on YouTube). Or, you’re feeling really lazy, just press play below:

Piano-led bands of the world… unite!

Those original geek-chic piano rockers Ben Folds Five have reformed and released a new album.

This is exciting news for me, and if you haven’t heard of Ben Folds Five but you’re a fan of The Lightyears then it’s probably rather exciting news for you too – because it means I’m introducing you to a band you’re really going to like (try this track to start you off – “Philosophy” from their eponymous debut album, live on Jools Holland).

I’d been playing piano for nearly ten years when I was introduced to Ben Folds Five by our school-days drummer Alan Oldfield (the first in our worryingly long line of herbivore drummers). At that point, everything changed. Suddenly playing the piano wasn’t about respectfully tinkling the ivories and staring wanly off into the distance anymore – it was about kicking the living shit out of it. I started bouncing around and smashing the keys with my fists and, at gigs, developed a habit of leaping onto my piano from a great height at moments of musical climax.

For a long time I basically just wanted The Lightyears to be Ben Folds Five. This is generally how being in a band works – kids get into music, learn an instrument and then assemble a group of their mates in an attempt to exactly replicate their favourite bands. In truth, Ben Folds Five were one of the few influences that we agreed on in the early days (Tony’s long-time love of Cream didn’t mix so well with mine and George’s Bon Jovi obsession), which is probably why we ended up sounding a bit like them.

Anyhow, I was kicking around the internet the other day and discovered this rare and untouched live recording from an early Lightyears gig at the 12 Bar Club, circa 2004. The 12 Bar Club features prominently in my Lightyears novel, Mockstars, and was a favourite haunt of ours for some years. This track, “Don’t Do It At The Hollywood”, particularly struck me because it’s clear I was very much caught in the clutches of my ‘wishing I was Ben Folds’ stage. It’s pretty scrappy but a lot of fun, and features former LYs member Tom Mansfield on the bass guitar.