paul mccartney

The Lightyears join Spotify

In case you were wondering when we were going to get off our bums and embrace the future of music, it’s finally happened – The Lightyears are now on Spotify.

This means you can stream our 2009 album London, England in full, for free, by clicking here (you can do that here too but it’s nice to have options). This is great because it means you don’t have to bother buying the record off iTunes, which saves you £7.90 and also stops us spending all the money – as we inevitably would – on crack, bitches, automatic weapons and hummus.

If you don’t know what Spotify is, what on earth are you doing on a computer? Sorry, I jest – Spotify is a digital music service you can set up on your computer, smartphone or tablet that gives you access to a truly enormous database of songs. Premium members (£9.99 a month) can enjoy music without the adverts, which I’d personally highly recommend – most of us are premium members in The Lightyears, and it’s absolutely tremendous. We can listen to our own music for near-enough free, which is excellent news because otherwise we’d only go spending all the cash on crack, bitches etc (see above).

London, England features two tracks from million-selling producer Hugh Padgham (Sting, Paul McCartney, Elton John), as well as LYs favourites This House Will Burn and England.

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:

The Top Five Craziest Things We’ve Ever Done

Muse bassist Chris Wolstenholme has come out in the NME today confessing to his recent battle with alcoholism.

He was smashed all day every day, apparently, his habit soon taking its toll on his health, his family and on the band. He’s now fixed the problem – and even penned some tunes about it that appear on Muse’s next album – but this got me thinking about just, you know, just how damn crazy it can be when you’re living the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle.

I know, I know – you look at me and you go ‘there’s a guy who has done some crazy-ass, rock ‘n’ roll shit in his time’, and you’d be right. I’m out of control. I once went on tour WITHOUT A CLIPBOARD. Seriously. I mean, it was a mistake… a gross lapse of concentration… but once the weeping had subsided, I found a way round it (small notebook).

Anyway, in honour of Wolstenholme’s triumphant victory over alcoholism, I thought I’d present to you…

THE TOP 5 FIVE CRAZIEST THINGS THE LIGHTYEARS HAVE EVER DONE

(Watch out, ‘cos they’re ruddy crazy.)

5. TONY GOES MENTAL ON A MUSHROOM
On tour in South Korea in 2011, LYs drummer Tony partied for twelve hours straight on a giant mushroom. No, not a magic mushroom – a polystyrene one he’d nicked from the gig we’d just played (don’t ask). He held onto it all night, dragging it through two clubs and three bars, eventually admitting defeat when a misguided attempt to lob it onto the roof of a brothel went horribly wrong. Naughty boy.

4. LIMOBIKING OUT OF WEMBLEY STADIUM
Presented with the problem of how to get from a gig at Wembley Stadium to a booking in Bagshot in less than forty minutes, extensive research led from helicopter (no landing pad at the stadium – lame) via teleportation (technology yet to be developed) to the wonder of Virgin Limobikes. This was literally the coolest thing I have EVER done. Mind you, my driver told me that the last artist he’d had on the back of his bike was Cheryl Cole and, bearing that in mind, I suspected he may have been slightly disappointed with that day’s cargo (it didn’t help that I was whimpering with fear, obviously).

3. MIDNIGHT TRIP TO GLASTONBURY FESTIVAL
In 2007, we were lucky enough to work with legendary, multi-million selling producer Hugh Padgham, responsible for massive hits such as ‘In The Air Tonight’ and ‘Every Breath You Take’. He’s used to working with Sting, McCartney and Elton John, is Hugh, so he was a bit taken aback when, at 3am in the morning after a hefty mixing session on our track ‘Sleepless’, we downed tools, jumped into our battered Mitsubishi Spacewagon (that’s right – Spacewagon) and drove all the way to Somerset for a string of gigs at Glastonbury Festival. On the way we hit some debris and buggered the car, arrived at 6.30am, slept in the boot for two hours, got up, walked our gear onsite, cracked open the whisky and hit the stage at about 11 in the morning. Fairly tipsy. Hoorah!

2. TWO GIGS, TWO CONTINENTS, ONE DAY
For our fourth American tour, some dim-witted buffoon* on The Lightyears’ management team thought it would be a good idea to book us a gig in Portsmouth on Saturday night (ending at 2.30am) and then another in Union Square, New York – on the other side of the Atlantic – at lunchtime the following day. You don’t need me to point out that this isn’t a good idea, but hey. After 45 minutes of restless kip on Tony’s sofa I was bundled into the car at some ungodly hour by the rest of the band and we set off for Heathrow, utterly knackered. Some hours later, praying against unexpected delays, we went straight from the plane to customs to a cab to the streets of Manhattan to the stage and BOOM, we were off. I still can’t really remember the gig, to be honest. I think I was hallucinating at the time.

*It’s possible that the dim-witted buffoon was, in fact, me.

1. BABY DON’T LEAVE ME
It’s obvious what goes at Number One – that gig we did by mistake in a crèche. Yeah, you might scoff at this – might question just how crazy it really was – but if you think there are many things scarier than trying to convince a roomful of screaming, shitting toddlers to purchase your new charity football single, you’d be very wrong indeed.

[No photo was available for this incident. Seriously, that’s for the best.]

Paul McCartney disses the establishment…

I love Paul McCartney because, for a man who is theoretically one of the coolest human beings who has ever lived, he’s also kind of… uncool?

You’ll see what I mean if you check out this video of Paul and his band rehearsing for the opening ceremony of the Olympics (at the risk of spoiling it, after a verse and a chorus, somebody ‘pulls the plug’ in an ironic reenactment of the recent incident at Springsteen’s Hyde Park concert). Don’t get me wrong – I LOVE the fact that he’s done it (I was ranting about the whole affair myself only the other day), and the moment when the band act surprised at the power disappearing is really quite endearing, if strangely awkward. But it does strike me as a strangely adolescent sort of response when you consider McCartney’s stature. It’s the kind of thing a teenager might do to piss off their parents, you know? Yeah. You wanna ground me? Take away my pocket money? Fine. But I’m SO going to publish an ironic video about it on YouTube, and there’s nothing you can do about it and I wish I’d never been born (etc).

The Beatles are and always will be legends, but these days Paul McCartney has morphed wonderfully into a sort of cuddly, uncool mirror-image of his younger trend-setting self, a bit like your grandad wearing Nike Airs. And I personally think that’s quite nice.

I know there are certain Beatles ‘fans’ out there – the crazy Lennonists – who despise everything that Macca represents, calling him a sell-out and insisting that just because he doesn’t sit in bed all day protesting about world peace he’s somehow not a proper musician. But I think that’s poppycock. Macca is a national treasure and, as long as keeps on doing funny little quirky things like this, he will remain so for a long time.

Beware… incoming music rant.

I’m hacked off.

I’m hacked off.

That’s right, hacked off. (AKA: a hair’s breadth away from writing a snitty e-mail to the Guardian.)

On Saturday night, at the climax of an epic concert, two of rock ‘n’ roll’s best-loved performers – Springsteen & McCartney – joined forces onstage at Hyde Park. This has never happened before. And just to ensure nobody was tempted to forget this momentous collaboration, an unnamed jobsworth operating on behalf of the concert organisers carved himself a dubious spot in music history by pulling the plug on the PA system actually during the pair’s raucous rendition of Twist & Shout at the end of the night.

The sound apparently dampened, went a bit weird, then suddenly silent. The 65,000-strong crowd were as confused as Bruce, who at first continued addressing them through the microphone before realising it wasn’t turned on. Basically, here you have a man – the Boss, no less – who has dedicated his life to giving mind-blowing live performances and is just in the process of wrapping up what was by many accounts an absolute belter when some berk in combat trousers and a Black & Decker utility belt shut the whole gig down because the band had apparently ‘broken their curfew’.

As Springsteen’s guitarist Stevie Van Zandt rightly pointed out, this wouldn’t happen anywhere in the world apart from England. And I personally believe this is because we are gradually falling foul to a culture of litigation, where stuck-up local residents complain about concert noise and, after threatening legal action, effectively harangue local councils into imposing laughable sound limitations on venues, on pain of losing their licenses. So in truth it would be unfair to blame the concert organisers who pulled the plug on this particular occasion, because they’re really just trying to keep their jobs. No, instead we should all be blaming the residents of Mayfair and Knightsbridge who, upon purchasing their absurdly palatial London penthouse pads SLAP-BANG NEXT TO THE CONCERT VENUE HYDE PARK waste little time in complaining to anyone who’ll listen that, hang on a minute, there I was just a-going about my business when one day I woke up to discover I was living next-door to a concert venue. That’s right, Residents Of Central London, I blame you for this ridiculous circus of health and safety regulations, and I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that you are BRINGING ABOUT THE DECLINE OF CIVILISATION.

We’ve inherited this culture of blame from the States, and we need to be a bit bloody careful. Accidentally hacked your leg off with a saw while pointlessly wandering drunk through a building site with a bag on your head? Yeah? Don’t worry, our team of spineless failed lawyers who when not otherwise tied up poisoning kittens for money will happily fill their time shooting endless disingenuous TV ads destined to clog up the dead air between parts one and two of Jeremy Kyle’s ‘Young Mums On Crack’ midweek special and carefully designed to lure witless people into suing their own grandmothers for fat wadges of cold, hard unearned cash.

In The Lightyears we’ve been on the sharp edge of this sort of thing ourselves. Countless venues we’ve played at have been forced to hardwire so-called ‘sound limiters’ into their electrical circuitry, maliciously designed by (I can only imagine) Lucifer himself to instantly cut all the power in the venue should it dare to creep over the laughably cautious pre-set maximum. The thing is, though, it would be okay if this pre-set maximum sound level allowed you to, I don’t know, PLAY A GIG, but it’s more like ‘Hey, yeah sure, come along with your guitars and your drums and just totally do your thing, right, but you’d better hope one of the earwigs living in the skirting board doesn’t inadvertently belch because that could very well max out our limiter’. We played a gig in a tudor barn once, a barn lumbered with particularly severe limiting technology, and while we’d managed to just about shoehorn the level of our instruments down underneath the red line, every time the crowd applauded at the end of a song the whole place was plunged into silent darkness. Ridiculous. And all because some wrinkled miser in a neighbouring cottage – who was probably half-deaf anyway – didn’t like the idea of anybody having fun within a ten-mile radius of their bleak little existence.

I’m a big fan of the principles put forward by Utilitarianism – a man should act in such a way that increases happiness for the maximum number of people. Simple idea, simple philosophy. So I don’t have a lot of time for the decision taken on Saturday night that made the lives of sixty-five thousand fully paid-up music fans considerably more rubbish in favour of pandering to the fatuous whim of some cantankerous, over-privileged, probably-only-lives-in-Hyde-Park-because-her-ancestors-oppressed-lots-of-poor-people, Daily Mail-reading coiffed moose in a blouse who’s decided she can’t hear the closing credits of Morse over the sweet sound of one of the world’s greatest living musicians.

There. I told you I was hacked off.

“London, England” sells out on US tour

We had such an overwhelming response from American fans during our recent Stateside tour that hard copies of our latest album, London, England, have now completely sold out.

The album is still available on iTunes priced £7.90. Click here to buy your copy.

Watch this space for a re-pressing of the album for those of you who prefer the old school format!

We released London, England in January 2009. It features many of our most popular tracks including “This House Will Burn”, “Emily” and “Sleepless”. The latter two tracks were produced by Hugh Padgham, the four time Grammy-winning producer responsible for selling over 50 million records with Sting, Paul McCartney, Elton John and many more.

Ireland’s State Magazine gave the record 4/5 and described the band as “Babyshambles with better manners”. Read the review by clicking here.

Further reviews of the album can be read here, here and here.

Read my blog on the experience of recording London, England by clicking here.

Lightyears complete new album “London, England”

It’s been nine months since we first set foot in the Voyager Studio to begin work on our second full-length album – and as 2008 draws to a close, we can now announce that the record is finished!  

The ten-track album is called London, England and features familiar tracks “This House Will Burn”, “Filmstar” and “She’s The One” along with lesser-heard material such as “England”, “I’m Not” and “Firefly”. We’re also very excited to reveal that it will include the tracks we recorded last year with Hugh Padgham, “Sleepless” and “Emily”. Hugh has worked with countless great artists such as Sting & The Police, Genesis, Paul McCartney and David Bowie, won four Grammys and sold over 50 million records – so we’re incredibly honoured to have his work on our album.

We’re really proud of the record and can’t wait for you guys to hear it. London, England will be released in the New Year – watch this space for updates!

Lightyears to appear on National TV

It has just been announced that The Lightyears will be appearing on ITV1’s new chat show The Alan Titchmarsh Show on Thursday 18 October.



Alan will interview the band, along with new Lightyears producer Hugh Padgham (Sting & The Police, Genesis, Paul McCartney, David Bowie etc), and following this the LYs will play a song live in the studio. Other artists currently scheduled to appear in the series include Kaiser Chiefs, Jools Holland, Sugababes and Lionel Ritchie.



The show is aired at 3pm daily and is expected to go out to around 3 million viewers.



…In the meantime, don’t forget that The Lightyears are headlining the Clapham Grand this Wednesday 5 September for Feedme Music’s INDY AWARDS CELEBRATION PARTY.



Doors 7.30pm, first band 8pm. LYs onstage 9.30pm. See you there!

LYs record with legendary producer Hugh Padgham



If you’re wondering why The Lightyears have been a little quiet for the last few weeks, here’s why – the band have been busy in the studio, recording new tracks with legendary producer Hugh Padgham.



Hugh Padgham is generally regarded as one of the most important producers in the history of popular music. He has worked with Paul McCartney, David Bowie, Kate Bush and Elton John but is perhaps most famous for his work with Sting, The Police, Genesis and Phil Collins. Hugh’s production skills were behind such classic hits as Sting’s Fields Of Gold, Every Breath You Take by The Police and Phil Collins’ In The Air Tonight. Over his prestigious career he has won 4 Grammys and sold over 250 million records.



Over recent weeks, The Lightyears have recorded three songs with Hugh. Watch this space for further updates over the coming months!