Blog

Update on The Lightyears’ novel, “Mockstars”

In light of the new video we’ve just posted on YouTube, I thought I should update all you fine people on where I’m at with my Lightyears novel, Mockstars.

The new video features one of the extracts from Mockstars that I read during our recent headline show at Westminster Reference Library. “Posh Groupies” tells the story of my encounter with Araminta (names have been changed to protect identities), a well-heeled private school girl who has taken a shine to George after seeing him sing one of our sensitive acoustic ballads on the first date of our French Alps tour. Hilarity does, of course, ensue.

Those of you who were at the gig and/or have been following our endeavours to launch the novel/album project may be wondering where we’re at with it. A few weeks ago I attended London Book Fair, where I learned that nobody who works at Earls Court Exhibition Centre has any idea where the toilets are (let alone the conference rooms) and everyone in publishing is finally beginning to embrace the digital revolution.

This is good news for us, as our novel/album double-header has enormous digital transmedia storytelling potential (this is a bit of a wanky publishing term, but basically it means we’ve got songs and stories and videos etc and we have the ability to present them all across multiple media platforms. Which actually still sounds quite wanky). I met several literary agents at the conference, face-to-face, one of whom I had exactly five minutes to pitch my Lightyears novel to in a direct attempt to secure representation. I can’t tell you who it was, but I can tell you that he really loved the idea and asked me to submit more material afterwards. So I’ll let you know if that meeting bears any fruit!

In the meantime, here’s the new video in all its glory:

GIG REVIEW: Wilko Johnson @ Koko Camden

In 1965, when Roger Daltrey sang ‘I hope I die before I get old’, he defined a generation. Music belonged to the young, and this meant that getting old wasn’t just uncool, it was to be avoided at all costs.

The irony is that Daltrey and co – a generation who actively used rock ‘n’ roll to distance themselves from their parents – have now reached the stage in life they once demonised and decided that maybe it ain’t so bad after all. What the 21 year-old Daltrey didn’t know, you see, was that like wine, cheese and Stephen Fry, he was going to keep on getting better with age. Much like another legendary rockstar, similarly advanced in years, whom I had the pleasure of seeing recently at Koko in Camden – one Wilko Johnson, formerly of Dr Feelgood.

Who is Wilko Johnson, I hear (some of) you cry? Well, don’t worry if you haven’t heard of him. I didn’t know a great deal about Wilko myself until a good friend offered me a last-minute ticket to his gig, but I soon discovered I was being inducted into a very special circle. Wilko’s career has spanned five decades and been notable for chart hits, relentless touring and a legendary live act. In early 2013 he was diagnosed with untreatable pancreatic cancer and, refusing chemotherapy, has been given just months to live. This gig was due, in all likelihood, to be one of his last.

Stepping into Koko that night, if you forgot for a moment the rock venue setting you could quite easily have been at B&Q’s Summer Sale. The place was a sea, an actual sea, of bald heads belonging to beer-bellied men in their fifties and sixties, and I suddenly felt very young and self-consciously skinny. This was rather refreshing because these days I’m generally aware of being slightly above the average age at most gigs I go to. Prior to Wilko’s show, the most recent gig I had attended was at East London’s Queen Of Hoxton and was hosted by an edgy electro band of the sort that features more laptops than humans. Technically, I could have been approaching twice the age of some of the kids in that place, mere children who know almost nothing of Blur Vs Oasis and consider living with anything less than fibre-optic broadband to be an abuse of their human rights.

And so, standing there among a crowd of men twice my age, I was concerned about feeling like an outsider – but instead I was welcomed into the fold with open arms. Wilko fans are a wonderfully inclusive club, bursting with joie de vivre and hopelessly devoted to their idol. One guy had seen Wilko two-hundred times and received personal thank-you letters from the man himself; another was so overwhelmed at this being the last gig that he was dewy-eyed before the show even began.

The set itself was astonishing. Wilko was mesmerising, an extraordinarily accomplished musician and a guitarist unlike any I’ve seen before. He hardly said a world all night; he just played, and played gloriously, for near-on two unforgettable hours, not flagging for a single second. It was a masterclass in rock ‘n’ roll, made all the more extraordinary by his age and experience.

His style of guitar-playing is instantly recognisable. Having taught himself to play, Johnson was unrestrained by rules and so made them up as he went along, combining lead and rhythm in one bumper package. He’s basically the Buy One Get One Free of blues guitarists, easily doing the job of two players. Special mention should also go to the rest of the band – Dylan Howe on drums and Norman Watt-Roy on bass, an absolute machine of a rhythm section. Watt-Roy (in his seventies, and also of The Blockheads) plays the bass like a 21 year-old on speed, and together they were quite easily one of the tightest and shit-hottest three-pieces I have ever seen, or can ever imagine seeing. Seething, primal, unpretentious, it was a spectacle no amount of laptops and gadgets and chaos pads will ever come close to (in my humble, and probably outdated, opinion).

At the end of the evening, I left Camden with one prevailing thought in mind. Wilko, Roger and the rest of you golden oldies, thank god you failed in your quest and actually did manage to get old. Because the world will be a far, far poorer place when you’re gone.

Chris Lightyear

To retweet, or not to retweet…?

As a musician and writer, I follow a number of musicians, writers, artists and actors on Twitter, most of whom use the service at least partly as a tool for self-promotion. Recently there has been a flurry of social media debate on whether or not it’s ‘cool’ to retweet what others say about you, which in turn has led to a slew of ranty articles by ranty bloggers such as myself.

I’ll admit that, while I don’t mind the occasional glowing retweet, it can be a bit annoying when someone I follow fills up my newsfeed with huge long streams of their own praise. However, I generally keep quiet about it, and this is why:

1. First of all, you have opted in to Twitter. You have also opted in to following individual users. Nobody’s making you do it. Constantly bitching about the Twitter feed of someone you have chosen to follow is inherently cretinous. Or, to quote the great Ricky Gervais: “Following someone on Twitter and then complaining about what they tweet about is like calling them up to tell them you don’t want to talk to them”.

2. If, for the sake of argument, we ignore point 1, remember you can turn off people’s retweets whenever you want so you don’t have to read them (here’s how).

3. If, for the sake of argument, we ignore points 1 and 2, remember you can just UNFOLLOW SOMEONE if they piss you off.

4. I’ve heard a lot of people complaining on the basis that self-promotion ‘is not what Twitter is for’. Come off it. You didn’t invent Twitter, and even if you did, it wouldn’t be up to you. The only thing Twitter is ‘for’ is for some people to say shit, and other people to listen – everything else is up to the individual.

5. As an addendum to point 4, everyone uses Twitter for different reasons. Some to inform their six followers what they had for breakfast, some to let their half a million fans know when their next book/album/movie is out, some to make sure the world is constantly up-to-date on the latest pictures of hot sexy boobs. None of these people have monopoly over the ‘purpose’ of Twitter. It is a gloriously flexible tool of technology, and anyone trying to reduce it to one single ‘purpose’ is just being self-important.

6. When people have something to promote, the idea that they might want their followers (FOLLOWERS, remember) to know what other people think about that product is neither new nor the heinous crime that many are making it out to be. As the excellent published author Matt Haig points out in his recent blog, writers have been posting complimentary quotes on their book sleeves for decades.

7. Finally, there are plenty worse things happening in this world than irritating retweets. Twitter is free, and brilliant, and user-generated. Any site that depends on and is defined by user-generated content will, duh, be user-generated in content. Deal with it.

ps. I am on twitter as @sixfootpianist. If you have enjoyed this blog and want to tell me what a talented writer I am, please tweet at me and I’ll pass it on – I think I have some followers who’d be interested in hearing your thoughts.

Chris Lightyear

Welcome to a world of pure imagination…

Ladies & gentlemen, it’s here… the all-new Lightyears website.

While we’ve kept most of the features from our previous site, we’ve also uploaded plenty of juicy new material in shiny new packaging to tantalise and delight the senses. Here are some highlights to get you started:

THE BAND

Read the story of The Lightyears (in brief – don’t worry, there’s a novel coming out soon for those interested in the extended edition) and enjoy our individual band member pages, each with their very own photo gallery. The better-looking the band member, the fewer photos in their gallery. Go figure.

MUSIC

We’ve been in this band since we were knee-high to a grasshopper and, in honour of this, have uploaded all of our releases since 2001 (sparing you the albums we released when we were still in our teens, because… well… only our mums need to hear those). Check ’em out and get listening.

PHOTOS

We’ve been lucky enough during our time together to tour four continents, and along the way we’ve kept a series of photo albums. They’re all online here, along with two brand-new, hot-off-the-press galleries.

VIDEOS

Check out our latest live video, Blinded By Light live from Westminster Library, on the VIDEOS page – along with a series of old faves.

There’s a bunch of other stuff on here too, from the band BLOG to my international Lightyears TOUR DIARIES – so put your feet up, grab a biscuit and have a look around…

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.

Stop the press – it’s National Libraries Day…

Saturday 9 February is National Libraries Day.

But that’s not all.

It is also the date of our return to the London stage, and coincidentally your first chance to hear live readings from my new Lightyears novel as well as songs from the album that accompanies it.

So if you were looking for a way to celebrate National Libraries Day – which come on, I KNOW YOU ALL WERE – then by George I believe we have it. The Lightyears live at Westminster Reference Library, 9 February from 7.30pm. Music, words, wine and fine company, all wrapped up inside this exciting, offbeat venue right in the heart of London.

Act fast, though – tickets are selling terribly well and there’s only so much space in there (bloody Leo Tolstoy insists on filling up most of the first floor with his frankly enormous books).

Tickets on sale here at the frighteningly reasonable price of £4.50: www.wegottickets.com/thelightyears.

Click here for full gig details.

And for a wee taste of what’s to come, check out this video extract from my LYs novel Mockstars:

Our Favourite Moments Of 2012

That’s right, people… it’s 2013. Not quite sure how that happened – we appear to be edging ever closer to the date in Back To The Future II, which doesn’t seem at all right, but there you go.

The Lightyears are looking forward to an exciting couple of months. We’re returning to the London stage on Saturday 9 February to headline at Westminster Reference Library, and before then we’ll be hitting the recording studio to lay down preview versions of some of the tracks we’ve been working on for the new album.

We’ll keep you posted on all that but, until then, feel free to avail yourself heartily of The Lightyears Favourite Moments Of 2012…

Chilling backstage with multiple Rogers
In October we larked off to Sweden to perform with Roger Daltrey from The Who and Queen drummer Roger Taylor. We spent most of the time buggering about on bikes and learned that people named Roger are always spiffing. Click here to read my Gothenburg Tour Diary.

Surprising some Cumbrian ramblers
As part of a new band initiative to get back to nature, 2012 saw us popping up in a number of al fresco gig destinations and shooting funny little acoustic videos. Here’s one of us on the banks of Lake Grasmere, shortly after we confused the absolute heck out of some local hiking types:

Nearly starting a fight with The Buzzcocks
In September, while we were on tour in France, one of my legendarily BRILLIANT jokes predictably backfired and I narrowly escaped fisticuffs with a punk legend. Read the story here.

Making acoustic music really quite sexy
Our first move in 2012 was to film and release a series of acoustic videos shot at the awesome Powder Keg Diplomacy in Clapham. These proved almost suspiciously popular in Turkey. Have a gander…

Releasing The Ultimate Lightyears Photo Album
Tired of having to recreate our precious band memories by scribing them into slates like Victorian schoolchildren, this year we decided to compile an archive of our craaaaaaziest international tour photos. Click here to take a look.

Coming perilously close to outshining Bolt at the Games
Back in the heady sporting summer of 2012, we wrote and performed an Olympic Anthem for the city of Peterborough. Here we are performing it with quite literally lots of humans.

Creating lasting world peace with our new app
A couple of months ago we made ourselves tiny enough to fit inside your phone. Apparently professional people call these apps; I call them Mini-Moving-Picture-Boxes. Click here to download your copy.

Queening it up at The Goring Jubilee
Roger Taylor’s all very well, but the shocking truth is that his band nicked their entire identity from this old rocker ALSO CALLED QUEEN. On 3 June we celebrated how many hats she has by playing a big, wet gig in Goring. It was epic.

Eclipsing the internet with Project LYs
In the summer we launched our multimedia micro-site Project Lightyears. The site proved so popular that it immediately broke Google. Don’t worry, there’s a bloke coming round to fix it.

Finishing the book that is fast becoming known as The New New Testament
I’ve been writing a book inspired by the international shenanigans of The Lightyears for some years now, and in 2012 I finished it. The spelling in it is excellent. And if you come to our gig on Saturday 9 February, you can hear me read from it. Here’s an excerpt:

Mercilessly rocking Cape Town
Cape Town welcomed us yet again with open arms at the beginning of the year, and we responded by first eating loads and loads of their delicious meat (not Tony) and then rocking their cocking socks off. Here’s a teeny tiny clip.

Happy New Year folks! And thanks to everyone who supported us in 2012 – it means a lot.

Chris, George, Tony & John
THE LIGHTYEARS

Emily, Andy Baldwin & The City That Never Sleeps

We recently unearthed a version of Lightyears track “Emily” which hardly anybody outside the band has heard before, and we’re giving it away free as part of Project Lightyears – just as soon as we reach 100,000 views. In the meantime, I thought I’d take the opportunity to tell the story behind this unusual version of one of our most popular songs…

During our third American tour, we played a venue in the Lower East Side called Pianos. A producer called Andy Baldwin (who had previously worked with acts like Bjork and Morcheeba) was at the gig and we got chatting afterwards; he said we reminded him of Blur, which as you can imagine we thought was BRILLIANT, and the idea of working together whilst we were in New York was mooted.

Problem was, we didn’t have a lot of time. We were gigging every night – squeezing in meetings and parties inbetween – and were due to fly back to London just a few days later. Turns out the answer was to sacrifice sleep, which partly explains why the recording has an unusually gritty tone for a Lightyears record. We were all completely wired during the recording sessions.

In truth, of course, the grittiness was mainly down to Andy’s production skills – in the past we’ve often been produced to sound clean and poppy, but he was very deliberately going for a much dirtier, edgier sound. I recorded my backing vocal after an all-night bender in Brooklyn (I have no idea how – I had no voice – but somehow Andy got a performance out of me; the man’s a genius), and George’s lead vocals sound uncharacteristically husky, which is rather cool. As a result we have two different versions of the song – Hugh Padgham’s polished, super-charged pop version (online here at Soundcloud and available on our 2009 album London, England) and Andy’s chunky, punchy Britpop version (available at Project Lightyears once the counter hits 100K).

GIG REVIEW: Ben Folds Five @ Brixton Academy

I’ve always said that, in The Lightyears, one of the few bands we all agree on is Ben Folds Five. There are obvious influences like The Beatles and Queen that we have in common, of course, but no band has permeated our sound more convincingly than this quirky piano-led trio from North Carolina (you can hear this particularly strongly in our live version of Don’t Do It At The Hollywood from 2004).

When Ben Folds Five announced a reunion tour earlier this year, I was first in line. It’s been thirteen years since they last performed together, thirteen years since I stood open-mouthed in front of the stage watching Ben pound the living crap out of his piano and thought: ‘You are the truth, the way and the light. Mould me in your image’.

On Tuesday night, the Brixton Academy was predictably populated with a crowd of beardy, knowing, Guardian-reading, ironic t-shirt wearing thirty-somethings all secretly sizing each other up to determine who had the most penetrative knowledge of limited release Ben Folds Five Japanese vinyls. Excitement grew as we waited for the band to hit the stage, the collective patience of four thousand die-hard fans about to burst at the seams under the spinning stage lights. Everyone speculated over what their first track would be. To be honest, while I personally would have come out all guns blazing with something like sophomore album-opener One Angry Dwarf, I half-expected the famously obtuse geek-chic rockers to kick off with an album track from their relatively unknown 2012 release simply as a way of saying ‘screw you, we’re not just here to play the hits’.

What actually happened was that they kicked off with an album track from their relatively unknown 2012 release simply as a way of saying ‘screw you, we’re not just here to play the hits’. Didn’t really work for me to be honest, but hey – I, like everyone else, was still reeling from the heady impact of seeing Darren, Robert and Ben together again, and ultimately didn’t really give a rat’s ass. This also helped to distract from the disappointingly woolly sound in the Academy, which in my opinion is pretty inexcusable in such an important venue. A band like BF5 can’t just rely on being loud like their shouty guitar-led counterparts – if you can’t actually hear the piano, the whole thing’s pointless.

The band started slowly, almost cautiously, as if deliberately making us wait for The Really Good Stuff. The Songs We All Came To Hear. But by the half-hour mark, things were beginning to loosen up, the soundman had finally joined the party and the nostalgia fest was in full swing. Uncle Walter had everyone bopping like mad, Ben made a nod at his solo career with a rendition of Landed, and the band’s best-known song Brick inspired mass singalong. But it was the closing holy trinity of Song For The Dumped, Kate and Underground that really sealed the deal. We were all in late nineties heaven. Underground begins with the lyric ‘I was never cool in school, I’m sure you don’t remember me’, a line which prompted in return a giant chorus of ‘Who the fuck are you?!’ from the auditorium. This was a collective reference to the moment in the semi-obscure live version of Underground in which a single person shouts this precise line back at them from the crowd, and I think was our way of saying ‘not everyone knows who you are, and we like that, because it confirms we’re clever and sophisticated and the rest of the world, those idiots out there, are just big fat idiots’ (or words to that effect).

This was not a gig for the uninitiated. Ben Folds Five are an acquired taste; they’re very much the Dandelion & Burdock of the music world. If you weren’t there first time round, chances are you’re going to struggle. By the third song, a woman standing next to me was playing Sudoku on her smartphone. I judged her severely for this, obviously, but to be fair I think she was the kind of BF5 rookie who halfway through the gig was still trying to figure out why there’s only three of them.

As reunion gigs go, you couldn’t have asked for anything better. You only had to watch Ben ‘conducting’ the crowd as we sang the brass-parts in closing number Army (which, by the way, he didn’t have to ask us to do – WE JUST KNEW) to appreciate the massive amount of love in the room for this truly unique band. Most people haven’t heard of them, and never will, and BF5 fans like it that way. Even if it is another thirteen years before we get to see them again.

Comin’ atcha, like Margaret Thatcher.

As most of you will know by now, we’ve booked a headline show at Westminster Reference Library on Saturday 9 February to showcase the songs we’re working on for our new album, along with readings from my new Lightyears novel Mockstars.

My book is currently being edited by a London literary consultancy, which is rather exciting, and meanwhile the band are preparing a new batch of tracks ahead of making some preview recordings early on in the New Year. We’ll make sure you’re first to hear about those when they’re done; but until then, here’s a quick rundown of the some of the songs we’ve worked on so far:

Blinded By Light: This is the first song I wrote for the new album. It’s about growing up, dealing with change, union and division. Here’s a clip from my bedroom demo:

Embrace Of Many: Written around the same time as Blinded, this song comes straight out of a scene in the novel that deals with isolation while being surrounded by people. Here’s a video of us performing Embrace Of Many on the banks of Lake Grasmere:

I Won’t Wait Forever: This is one of George’s, undeniably in debt to Bends-era Radiohead. Here’s our lakeside performance of the song:

One Way Or The Other: Another of George’s; this time a simple number that tracks the make-or-break point in a relationship. Again, live from Lake Grasmere:

To hear these songs (and more) live, follow this link to buy tickets for our Westminster Library show.

« Previous Page — Next Page »