LYs gig review published in London E-zine

London-based online music mag and promotion company It’s All Happening have posted a gig review covering our recent performance at Westminster Library in central London.

IAH review gigs from all across the capital, as well as running their own events and festivals and generally working their socks off to promote and foster London’s thriving indie music scene.

Head on over to their website to give the review a read.

Media from the gig

If you missed our show at Westminster – or if you enjoyed it so ravenously that you simply must relive it – then mosey on over to the gallery page to check out the official photos, or read my gig report on the Lightyears blog page.

Lightyears soundtrack new Body Gossip film

The Lightyears have provided the soundtrack for a new short film by Cosmo award-winning body image campaign Body Gossip.

The film, entitled ‘Ageing Gracefully‘, features a cast of celebrities that includes Natalie Cassidy, Mikyla Dodd and Nikki Grahame and is the latest in a series of films by BG seeking to promote healthier body image in society.

We’re proud to have been associated with Body Gossip from the very beginning of their campaign. Take a sneaky peek at the new video below:

The Lightyears – live at Westminster Library

For those of you who don’t know, I’ve written a novel inspired by the international adventures of The Lightyears, entitled Mockstars. The band are also working on an album of original songs to accompany the book, making Mockstars the first ever full-length novel by a band, about the band, with its own original soundtrack.

On Saturday 9 February we unleashed this concept for the first time on the general public. A library felt like an appropriate place to kick off a project that combines rock ‘n’ roll with fiction and so, on National Libraries Day 2013, we booked in a headline show at Westminster Reference Library, just off Leicester Square. Most people are slightly taken aback when you tell them you’re performing in a library, but WRF has a track record for these things and has previously hosted, among others, British Sea Power and Mr Hudson (not to mention our erstwhile piano-led chums Royworld) and so the idea wasn’t totally unprecedented. Plus we’ve played libraries before and we know it works – here we are entertaining the crowds at Burlington Library in New Jersey back in 2009.

The gig took a fair bit of organisation, and we were expecting a capacity crowd, so the pressure was very much on. When Tesco delivered all the alcohol to Berkshire instead of Westminster Library I can reveal that a few heart-rates began to race – but then some kindly Lightyears fans who were coming from that direction agreed to play booze courier for us, and we were back on track. By 8.30 the venue was full, we had sold out, drinks were flowing and I had begun to feel that maybe this zany idea just might work.

After spellbinding Nigerian author Chibundu Onuzo opened the show with a couple of songs and a reading from her book The Spider King’s Daughter, we took to the stage. It’s been a while since we played our own songs in the capital, and I could tell I wasn’t the only Lightyear who was relishing the novelty. We opened with Wait Forever, a slow-building ballad with (predictably) a rousing, vocal harmony-filled chorus, and from there segued straight into Blinded By Light, the song which probably best sums up the musical direction the band is now heading in. After a 2013 acoustic re-imagining of our old gig favourite This House Will Burn, I stepped up to the mic for my first reading.

Up until this point I honestly had no idea whether it would work. If you were there yourself then, well, I guess you can tell me – but the reaction I got from the crowd certainly seemed to suggest that people enjoyed it. The band perched on the edge of the drum-riser and I proceeded to tell the (gloriously embellished) story of our first meeting with LYs drummer Tony. Tony had deliberately not read this scene in advance so that he could enjoy it first-hand with everyone else, although it’s possible that he began to regret that decision once his character entered the fray and he realised his personality was entirely at the mercy of my metaphorical quill.

I was delighted with how well the reading went down, but I’d also planned to keep each extract to roughly the length of a song so as not to bore anyone! From there we slipped right back into the music, and as the evening went on we continued to reveal material from the new album alongside a few carefully-selected older songs – tracks like Brother (from our 2005 album Mission Creep) and Fine (from our 2002 release Flying Blind). You can catch live videos of some of the new tracks – Embrace Of Many, Wait Forever and One Way Or The Other – at www.ProjectLightyears.com, along with video readings from Mockstars. Before the set ended I read a scene recounting the band’s first rehearsal, set in Croydon’s Scream Studios, and another that describes one of my first ever encounters with, for want of a better phrase, ‘posh groupies’ in the French Alps (also available to view on the Project Lightyears micro-site).

LYs photographer Alex Cooke – who took this photo of us at Wembley Stadium, among many others – was on-hand to document the event through his trusty lens, and you can see the pics on our PHOTOS page. We were also very lucky to have Kaushik Bhattacharya of Milky Films shoot the gig for us, and again we’re hopeful of putting together some of that footage for our YouTube channel over the coming weeks.

Thank you once again to everyone who came. It was a special night for us, a true career highlight, and hopefully the beginning of an exciting new chapter for The Lightyears. The book and album are still in development, but this gig was the first step on the road to becoming, as far as we’re aware, the only band in history to have released what I often ill-advisedly refer to as a ‘novel-bum’.

Watch this space.

Chris Lightyear

ps. Sorry we ran out of beer.

Sell-out at Westminster Library

Thanks to everyone who came down to Westminster Library on Saturday night for our Book & Album Preview – we played one of our favourite ever gigs, to a capacity crowd, in a truly unusual and exciting venue.

I’ve written a piece on the event in my Lightyears blog, and we also covered the show with a photographer and cameraman. We’ll be releasing new media as and when it’s available, so watch this space.

It was pretty thrilling for us to unleash extracts from the book and songs from the new album for the first time, and we’d be interested to know what people thought. Connect with us via our Twitter and Facebook accounts or, if you’re from the old school, just post us your crayon / dried pasta interpretations of the gig, and we’ll be happy.