Jam with the LYs on Whole World Band

The Lightyears have been selected to feature alongside Ronnie Wood from the Rolling Stones in a new and innovative music app called Whole World Band, which allows musicians to digitally ‘jam’ together over the internet.

The app, which launched this month, takes video ‘seed’ tracks by artists and invites users to layer their own recordings over the top. An e-Jam, if you will. And to get things moving, Whole World Band are giving €8 of credit to the first 5,000 users to download the app to their mobile device.

Pop over to www.WholeWorldBand.com now to take a look. Because come on – we know how many of you have “Jam With The Lightyears” on your bucket list (right next to swimming with dolphins, and licking Zac Efron).

Confused? Fear not – here’s an explanatory video from the WWB folks themselves:

Check out www.MockstarsTheNovel.com

For the past few years I’ve been working on a music novel inspired by my international tour diaries for The Lightyears. It’s called Mockstars, and I like to churlishly refer to it as ‘an uplifting tale of debts, mugs and rock ‘n’ roll’.

Mockstars has its very own website now at www.MockstarsTheNovel.com, which explains the background behind the book and hosts various news stories, blog postings, videos, photos and quotes from other authors. It’s probably the best website of all time, apart from obviously this one and AskJeeves, the rich man’s Google.

Incidentally, things took an exciting turn earlier this month when I was signed up by leading literary agent Ed Wilson at Johnson & Alcock, bringing the book (hopefully) one step closer to publication. Finding an agent has been a tough journey – less than 1% of writers who submit to agents get taken on – so I feel pretty lucky to have found someone who really gets the sense of humour behind the novel. We’ll be keeping you posted with any Mockstars-related news in the coming months.

In the meantime, enjoy the site, and perhaps think about asking for a Kindle for Christmas. Just in case.

Chris Lightyear

LYs music video breaks 100,000 views

Our piano-based acoustic cover of David Guetta’s smash hit song Titanium has now surpassed 100,000 views on YouTube. We’d like to thank our parents, our fans, and of course Jesus.

If you’ve been following us for a while, you may be aware that a fair old chunk of this traffic has come from Turkey, where the video has been on regular rotation on the country’s equivalent of MTV. Honestly, we now can’t walk down the street in Ankara without being showered in confetti. It’s a little disconcerting.

Powder Keg Sessions

The Lightyears’ Titanium cover came out of our Powder Keg Sessions, where we recorded similar versions of Coldplay’s Paradise and Rihanna’s We Found Love. If you like the look of the place in these videos, it’s actually a really excellent cocktail bar in Clapham called Powder Keg Diplomacy – you know, the kind of place where they serve gin slings in china teacups. Well worth a visit.

Now, as proud as we are of this frankly eye-watering level of success, we are nevertheless aware that there are still approximately 7,124,900,000 humans who haven’t seen our video, so we’ve posted it below. Quite what those people have been doing all this time, we have no idea.

Chris Lightyear signs to top literary agent

For the last few years, LYs pianist Chris has been working on a Lightyears novel called Mockstars. It’s been an interesting road so far, and things took an exciting turn this week when Chris was signed up by leading literary agent Ed Wilson at Johnson & Alcock.

Johnson & Alcock are a boutique literary agency based in Clerkenwell, representing a diverse range of prestigious writers of fiction and non-fiction. Ed and Chris will be working together on taking Mockstars to the next level, and hope to have news on publication soon. Watch this space! Chris said of the signing:

“I’m thrilled to be working with Ed on my Lightyears novel. The odds of finding a good literary agent these days, in a market saturated with writers, are pretty tiny… so I feel very lucky and excited to be in this position. One thing I will say, though, is this – it seems odd that you’d feel the need to quote me in this article, since everyone knows it’s me who writes these news stories in the first place.”

You’re right. That does seem strange.

Inspired by the band’s international tour diaries, and set against the backdrop of the French Alps, Mockstars is an uplifting tale of friendship, rock ‘n’ roll and following your dreams. Think Almost Famous meets High Fidelity. Find out more at the links below:

– Official website: www.MockstarsTheNovel.com
– Mockstars video excerpt: “The A&R Man”
– Mockstars live excerpt: “Posh Groupies”