The Lightyears

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…

New York Daily News, 27 July 2010

“Lightyears ahead in Astoria – Energetic British band thrills young and old”
27 July 2010
Lisa L. Colangelo, New York Daily News, USA
CLICK HERE FOR ARTICLE SCAN

ASTORIA PARK was treated to a burst of British pop rock last week when The Lightyears took to the stage for a free concert…

The energetic trio charmed the crowd of 2,000 with a mix of old favourites and self-penned tunes.

“They really won over the hearts of Astoria,” said City Councilman Peter Vallone Jr. “I have been going to these concerts for a long time, and I have never seen so many people at the end of the show looking for autographs and buying CDs.”

Vallone, a guitarist, even joined the band for a cover of The Monkees’ classic, “I’m A Believer”.

“It seems like our music has a connection here,” said keyboardist Chris Russell. “Americans are really open to that kind of uplifting, good old-fashioned pop music.”

The band’s eclectic set ranged from “Bohemian Rhapsody” and “Hey Jude” to “Great Balls Of Fire” – a nod to the mixed crowd, which included 20- and 30-somethings along with seniors.

“They are really good at gauging what the crowd is looking for,” said Raima McDaniel, a fan who has seen the band several times in recent years. “They really know how to get a crowd going, plus they’re British, so that’s fun.”

The free Thursday night concert series features country, big band and even 1960s bubblegum pop.

But it’s rare for an up-and-coming young band to take the stage.

“It was the first time I had seen or heard of them, and I actually bought their CD,” said Astoria resident Teresa Ciattei, who has attended many of the Thursday performances.

Russell said he and his bandmates love visiting New York City for the people, the culture and the food. The steamy summer weather, however, is a different story.

“We really eat when we come here; the food is great,” said Russell. “We’re British though, so the heat is a bit much for us…”

www.nydailynews.com

The Lightyears in the New York Daily News (July 2010)

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.

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.

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:

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.

Download the new Lightyears app

Today we are launching our very own app, which means you can now enjoy Lightyears music, video, photos and news direct from your mobile device.

That’s right – after years of expensive research and experimentation, scientists have found a way to shrink down piano-led pop bands to such a diminutive size, they’ll fit in your pocket. Best of all, it’s completely free.

To add the app to your smartphone or iPad, follow this link from your mobile device (if you’re on a computer you’ll be prompted to scan the QR code. Do contact us if any of this baffles you).

There’s even a Fan Wall where you can let us know what you think of the app, good or bad. Although we prefer bad. Nasty if at all possible.

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