south africa

The Cape Argus (8 February 2009)

“Light years ahead of the pack”
8 February 2009
Evan Milton, The Cape Argus, South Africa

The Lightyears are a hardworking indie pop group with a special link to South Africa…

British indie-pop band The Lightyears are in Cape Town to play the Cape Town Tens afterparties, hang out with their South African flatmate Andy Skinstad – and launch Johannesburg, a song inspired by a tale of two Zimbabwean refugees.
The Lightyears’ pianist and songwriter Chris Russell saw a BBC documentary about two young Zimbabwean brothers who had fled the crippled country after their parents were killed, allegedly by government militia, and trekked on foot to Johannesburg. Leaving with nothing – mugged, beaten and with their shoes stolen along the way – the boys, younger than 15, sustained themselves on their trek with little more than the hope that South Africa’s City of Gold was rumoured to be a place where they could get food and shelter.

“Even though this story was obviously a million miles away from anything I’ve ever experienced, and told of hardship I couldn’t hope to understand, something about it struck a chord with me,” Russell wrote on the band’s online journal, noting that it reminded him of the story behind one of his favourite songs, The Hollies’ He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother.
The origin of the 1969 ballad lies in a tale associated with Father Edward J Flanagan, the founder of Boys’ Town: a street urchin staggering along carrying a younger child on his back is asked about his heavy load and replies, “Why Mister, he ain’t heavy, he’s my brother”.

Described as “Toto meets Graceland-era Paul Simon via classic Bob Marley, sung by Crowded House”, The Lightyears have crafted a moving indie-pop slow song in Johannesburg. When Russell played it to his London flatmate, a South African, he suggested that the band should get to South Africa and launch the song here. The flatmate just happens to be one Andy Skinstad, brother of local rugby hero Bobby Skinstad, and one thing led to another.

It’s not The Lightyears’ first music/sport pairing. Last year, the band re-recorded Posh We Are, the football anthem for their local club, Peterborough United.

“The original was written 30 or 40 years ago,” explains Russell. “A local charity wanted to re-record it and update it to raise money for kids and sport. We were thrilled to do it, and then we did a lot of press in the local area to launch it. We played the stadium, in one of the last season matches – thrilling again.”
Russell is speaking via cellphone from one of Cape Town’s beaches.

The Lightyears are Russell, brothers George Owens (lead vocals, guitar) and John Owens (bass player), and Tony Lyons (vocals, drums). Described as “Babyshambles without the drugs – and with better manners” by one Irish reviewer, the band found themselves winning a British Indy Award in 2007 for “Best Pop/Rock Act”.

“We were stunned to be nominated as we weren’t expecting it at all,” says Russell. “We really didn’t expect to win, which is what I think people generally do in these situations. We were on tour in New York and we were listening on the phone… Then we won, and our friend Andy picked up the award. It was great, because it meant we were recognised for what we were doing, and we’re an independent band with no record label, managing and repping ourselves.

“A couple of months after that we got to record a few tracks with Hugh Padgham. He’s produced for Sting and sold 50 million records with Paul McCartney and Genesis. Not a lot of bands get that opportunity when they’re up and coming.”
It’s not all sunshine and roses for the band, though. “In the UK it almost seems like there are more bands than fans. On the one hand it’s great because people are really hungry for live acts. But, because of the UK’s thriving music scene… it is very competitive.

“London has a massive concentration of bands… So it’s good to get your face shown elsewhere. We like to get to different parts of the world, and test out different markets.”

The band is starting to see success in America, especially the East Coast, and in Asia, especially in South Korea. “We go to America once a year and I think we have a certain appeal, partly because we are British. We have a loyal fanbase in Philadelphia where it’s as if we’re playing to people who know us really well and always pack out the venues.”
In South Korea, the band was invited to play an annual fundraiser hosted by the British ex-pat community to raise funds for charity.

With the beach wind picking up, and Russell and bandmates needing to prepare for their debut South African gig – at the city’s new Speedway 105 Cafe – the interview draws to a close. “I wish I could conduct all my interviews from the beach,” laughs Russell, and goes on to enthuse about the band’s few days so far in the Cape.

“In Hermanus we had a braai which was fantastic. It’s a bit of a shock coming from winter in England with the worst snow, and to be sat here on a beach in the blazing sun. You probably get used to it if you live here, but for a Londoner, let me tell you that i’s amazing.”

The Lightyears play the Cape Town Tens after-parties on Saturday 7 February and Sunday 8 February at Hamilton’s Rugby Club in Green Point (see CapeTownTens.com). Download the song “Johannesburg” from TheLightyears.com.

www.capeargus.co.za

Video shoot in southern France

Last weekend, whilst on tour in the Dordogne, we shot a live video in a vineyard near Bordeaux.

We filmed two songs as the sun went down over Pujols, and the first of them – Speedway 105 – is now online at The Lightyears YouTube channel (or you can watch it by scrolling down to the bottom of this page).

Speedway 105 is a song that came out of our first ever tour to South Africa in 2009. It tells the story of a live music venue just off Hope Street in Cape Town, where we played our first show in SA. Sadly the Speedway has since closed down, but it remains a legendary landmark in the history of the band. Click here to read my tour diary about our time at the 105.

nb. No grapes were harmed in the making of this video.

Archive of tour photos now online

We’ve just posted a comprehensive archive of our tour photos on The Lightyears’ Facebook page, stretching all the way back to 1996 and covering tours to the USA, South Korea, Thailand, South Africa, Istanbul and more…

Click here to visit the archive and venture into the mysterious and terrifying world of The Lightyears On Tour. Yes, that’s right – mysterious and terrifying. If you can call photos of me gawping with my thumbs up and Danny draping himself across parked cars mysterious and terrifying.

Which I think you can.

Feel free to leave disparaging comments, or perhaps the occasional ‘Like’ for the ones that take your fancy.

And if your day is still left wanting for entertainment, mosey on over to Project Lightyears and help us reach our next target – just 2,000 more views will unlock your free copy of our live acoustic cover of David Guetta’s Titanium.

Thank you Cape Town!

Thanks to the amazing crowd at this year’s Cape Town Tens gig… what a belter! Apparently it was a record attendance too. Check out this tiny video Tony shot from the back of the stage.

On the right you’ll see what it looked like from where we were standing. What a beautiful bunch. In fact, let’s face it – you okes in Cape Town are hogging all the decent genes.

Anyone who can write in and tell us where in the crowd George’s mum is standing gets a free CD*.

(*George’s mum, you can’t enter.)

info@thelightyears.com

Lightyears return to South Africa

Our fourth Cape Town tour kicks off at the end of the month.

We’ll be heading back to CT to headline at the Cape Town Tens on Saturday 4 February. This has always been one of our favourite international gigs and has repeatedly proved to be pretty much the greatest party on earth (apart from those parties you had as kids where one of your chums would hire out the top floor of McDonalds in Reading. Man, were those parties ACE.)

Click here to read my previous South Africa tour blogs.

To our South African friends – we’ll see you all out there!

Why LYs fans are the best fans in the world…

When we discovered that a five-star hotel in Cape Town had erected a plaque in our honour back in January (read about it here), I think we all expected this would be the last time something like that would happen to us. Au contraire, however! After our recent gig at the Burlington Amphitheatre in New Jersey, USA, we were invited back to the picturesque town of Riverton for an after-party. The bash was being held on the legendary porch of one Maureen Murray, known well to The Lightyears during our recent visits to the USA for her propensity to ply us with Bombay Sapphire and delicious all-American breakfasts.

Lo and behold, in honour of an impromptu unplugged show we played on her porch back in 2007, it turned out that Maureen had erected a Ye Olde Wooden Plaque on the outside of her home (see photo above). Long may it hang there.

The more I think about this, the more I wonder whether Maureen may have started something here. A movement, perhaps. A mission for us to inspire plaque-hanging in every country in the world. USA and South Africa down, only about two hundred countries left to go.

Please feel free to help our cause. Erect a Lightyears plaque today. If you do, I promise to write a blog about it. And I’m a man of my word.

Just as glorious as I remember…

Wednesday 3 February, 11.30am (Table Bay Hotel, Cape Town, South Africa):
We landed in South Africa this morning to embark on our 2010 Cape Town tour and the place is just as glorious as I remember. Ten minutes ago we checked into our hotel rooms at the Table Bay, Cape Town’s swishest hotel, and whilst the rooms are being prepared we stroll out onto the Waterfront, bathed in sunshine, to have a little shufty at the famous Golden Seal statue.

The Seal statue is the hotel’s emblem and sits atop a plinth adorned with a series of golden plaques, bearing the names of the many famous and illustrious figures in film, music, politics and sport who have stayed there over the years. I investigate more closely and am suitably impressed. Here are some of the highlights:

– Michael Jackson
– Snoop Dogg
– Maroon Five
– Wesley Snipes
– Vladimir Putin
– Manchester United
– The England football team
– Stevie Wonder
– Robert De Niro
– Quincy Jones
– Barack Obama
– …and, just above Obama and slightly to the left… us.

The Lightyears.

We have a plaque on the Table Bay’s Golden Seal. And in case you don’t believe me, I’ve posted a photo on the right.

I suspect that if Putin discovered that he featured on the side of a statue, he’d play things pretty cool. Not us. We proceed to take a variety of shameless photos of ourselves pointing and grinning at our name, flipping the thumbs-up and generally behaving like the worst kind of tourists. But we don’t care. We’ve got our name on a statue. With a little union jack under it.

Our mothers will be so proud.

Best start to a tour… ever.

(By the way, this got me thinking – how many other plaques have been forged in our honour without us knowing? If we were to return one day to the Knutsford M6 Travelodge, would one of the concrete parking bollards bear the legend “The Lightyears stayed here – and they saw that it was good”? There’s simply no way of knowing for sure.)

Thursday 4 February, 8pm (Green Point World Cup Stadium, Cape Town):
Being in a touring band has landed me in some pretty unusual places. I’ve performed the Korean national anthem with a world-famous opera singer for Her Majesty’s Ambassador. I’ve played my piano in the centre-circle of a football pitch whilst Rio Ferdinand and Carlos Tevez kicked a ball about above my head. And I’ve sung my heart out to a hundred and fifty Belgian farmers in a cow-shed in Kortrijk whilst a massive bull looked on, apparently completely nonplussed by the music (perhaps he wasn’t into indie). Tonight, I’m drinking free beer and eating tiny little miniature hamburgers at the brand-new 60,000-capacity World Cup Stadium in Cape Town whilst a rugby talk show is filmed on the pitch – the first time cameras have been allowed inside. And I know almost nothing about rugby. How did this happen?!

In case you were wondering, it happened because the organisers of the Cape Town Tens (the event we’re playing at this weekend) are big names in the rugby world and in some cases were being interviewed tonight live on camera. When the filming finishes, we make our way back into the players’ tunnel in order to be as close as possible to the bar. I stand, beer in hand, gazing out at the immaculate flood-lit pitch and an interesting thought occurs to me. In six months’ time, the greatest footballers in the world will emerge from this tunnel to an enormous stadium crowd and a global TV viewing audience of millions. There is something wrong, and yet at the same time so wonderfully right, about me – a man who throws like a girl, would struggle to explain the offside rule and consistently came last in the high jump at school – beating them to it. Bring on the 2010 World Cup…

Friday 5 February, 8pm (Cape Town Tens Rugby Tournament, Hamiltons RFC, Cape Town):
Here we are, back at Hamiltons RFC (South Africa’s oldest rugby club) in the shadow of Green Point Stadium, making the preparations for our gigs this weekend at the annual Cape Town Tens Rugby Tournament. Last year’s event was spectacular and it seems to have doubled in size for 2010. The stage looks fantastic, all kitted out with a fancy lighting rig and an epic sound system. It’s also quite strange for us to see the drums set up on a riser at the back of the stage, which has happened on account of the fact that, for the first time ever, Tony isn’t on tour with us. Tony, you see, is having a baby (or rather his wife is), and for our South African trip he has been replaced by the inimitable Andy Paine, who is a little more conventional than Tony and play the drums sitting down at the back of the stage. Soundcheck is a very straightforward affair – the in-house engineers are excellent, and in combination with Danny Lightyear they have the whole thing sounding absolutely cracking within about twenty minutes. We’re all very excited about tomorrow…

Saturday 6 February, 8pm (Cape Town Tens Rugby Tournament, Hamiltons RFC, Cape Town):
The marquee is packed for our show tonight at the Tens… and let’s just say that the crowd are “well-oiled” after a day’s solid drinking in the Capetonian sun. After a storming warm-up set from Me & Mr Brown, we take to the stage amid flashing lights and dry ice and bask in the sonic glory of the Tens’ epic sound system. It’s a real joy to play on such a quality rig. The crowd are in the mood for singalongs tonight and the best moments come when we chuck in the odd South African number (Prime Circle’s “She Always Gets What She Wants”, for example – unknown in the UK but, boy, did that kick off in Cape Town!), as these really seem to capture the imagination of the locals. True to form there’s quite a bit of male nudity and playful wrestling going on during our set, as well as a practise in which one unfortunate chap is unexpectedly leapt upon by ten or eleven others until he turns red, like a tomato. Plus, these are BIG guys. All part of the fun of course.

My only disappointment tonight is that the increased security this year – as well as the barriers that separate us from the crowd – have rendered stage-diving pretty much impossible. Another time perhaps…

Sunday 7 February, 6.30pm (Cape Town Tens Rugby Tournament, Hamiltons RFC, Cape Town):
We spent today lounging by the pool and sampling the hotel’s excellent range of cocktails. If you look to the right you’ll see a photo of me and my blue margarita, which is admittedly something of a girly drink but is admirably offset by the book I’m reading (I would heartily recommend Slash’s autobiography, incidentally – any book which contains the sentence “This is exactly the excuse we needed to fire Bob Clearmountain” is worth a look, if you ask me). By the time we return to Hamilton’s RFC for the second gig of the tour we are feeling mightily chilled out and this definitely feeds into our set which, in keeping with the Sunday night atmosphere amongst the crowd, has much more of a laidback vibe than yesterday. We’re really settling in to performing with Andy and, as the sun sets and the tournament draws to a close, it’s a genuine pleasure to simply play music together. The highlight of the evening is when we join Me & Mr Brown onstage for a collective performance of Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida” and everybody present absolutely sings their hearts out. Magic.

The rest of the tour is seen out in typical style with a celebratory last night out on the Waterfront, a frightening number of Jäegerbombers (for which we chiefly have Danny to blame) and a hotel-room party complete with the inevitable and merciless mini-bar raiding. John, Danny and I stayed on for a few extra days to climb the spectacular Lion’s Head, indulge in a little winetasting out in the countryside and marvel at the beautiful scenery of Cape Point, the southernmost tip of Africa – but that’s another story, for another time…

ps. Jacob David Lyons, the world’s first ever Micro-Lightyear, was born on Thursday 18 February at 10.33pm weighing 8lbs 10z. The race is on to turn him into a drummer/guitarist/keyboardist/bassist (depending on which member of the band you ask). The grown-up Lightyears are all excited at the prospect of little Jacob joining the LYs as soon as he’s ready, on account of the fact that he would bring our average age down really quite considerably.

Lightyears to return to Cape Town

Our 2010 Cape Town tour kicks off next week. We will be returning to South Africa to headline at the Cape Town Tens Rugby Tournament (sponsored by Castle Lager) at Hamiltons RFC on 6 and 7 February. Last year’s event was an absolute blast and the word on the street is that it’s only gonna get better this time round!

Click here to buy tickets to the CT Tens.

Click here to read press on our 2009 SA tour.

Click here to read my 2009 Cape Town Tour Diary.

And to those of you in Cape Town right now… looking forward to seeing lots of you there! Woop woop!

Our Top 20 Moments Of 2009

Christmas Time is here again and there’s enormous excitement in the air. There’s an outside chance that Rage Against The Machine will beat the X Factor to Number One on Sunday and the weather-man says that snow’s a-coming. Things literally couldn’t be any better.

We thought we’d add to the general feeling of goodwill and festivity by recounting our favourite and most memorable experiences from the past year. Most of them – whether in London, Cape Town or the USA – involved the support of our fans and we’d like to personally thank everyone who has helped us make 2009 one of our best years yet. You guys rule.

So here, in no particular order, are The Lightyears’ Top 20 Moments Of 2009:

1. Stepping out onstage at Wembley Stadium for the first time in front of 45,000 people

2. Winning over an audience of leather-clad Norwegian bikers at the Speedway Cafe in Cape Town

3. Performing a barbershop medley of British seaside tunes in front of the British Ambassador in Seoul

4. Writing a song for a national ad campaign (“Come With Me” is released on Universal Records in January)

5. Spotting our faces in train stations and on the side of buses

6. Performing for a full-house of fans, friends and family at The Lightyears’ Christmas Party

7. Playing to a crowd of thousands on a hot summer’s evening in Union Square, Manhattan

8. Working with top producers Bacon & Quarmby (David Bowie, Finley Quaye, Sugababes) on the studio release of “Come With Me”

9. Watching South Africa’s foremost FHM model Roxy Louw stage-dive into a crowd of boogying revelers at our Cape Town Tens gig

10. Being invited back to Wembley Stadium

11. Drinking Pina Coladas by the pool at the Table Bay Hotel, Cape Town

12. Seeing ourselves on TV (click here)

13. Touring the country with Josh’s Band

14. Finding out we’ve been immortalised on canvas!

15. Spotting The Lightyears in the New York Post

16. Dressing up as intergalactic space rockstars for a Forbidden Planet tribute gig

17. Selling out our latest album London, England on the US Tour

18. Celebrating the end of the Korean Tour with a Lightyears night on the tiles

19. Appearing on the same bill as Diversity, winners of Britain’s Got Talent

20. Partying with the LYs American Fan Club in Riverton, New Jersey!

Lightyears to play second gig at Wembley Stadium

We’re rather excited to announce that we’ve just been invited back to play Wembley Stadium again on Tuesday 17 November.

Following our performance in September in front of a crowd of nearly 45,000 people, we will be returning to the UK’s most iconic venue to play before the greatly anticipated match between Guinness Premiership leaders Saracens and world-champions South Africa.

As before, the tickets will be super-cheap – just £10 for adults and £5 for under-16s. Click here to buy yours.

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