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God bless the internet (and Gangnam Style)

Korean internet sensation PSY has just reached 1 billion views on his YouTube channel.

This is pretty astonishing, especially when you consider that neither One Direction, Nicki Minaj nor Adele have yet reached this milestone. Here you have a man who, until last summer, was known only in his native South Korea – a country hardly renowned for its pop exports – and recorded his global smash hit Gangnam Style as a bit of a joke for inclusion on his sixth studio album.

Gangnam Style is now the second most viewed video IN HISTORY – behind (you guessed it) Justin Bieber’s Baby. In honour of this, Bieber and PSY have now confirmed they will be working together on a single sometime in the future.

How wonderfully, gloriously silly.

This, I believe, is what the internet was invented for. To make ridiculous things like this happen, things that could never have occurred without our new-found global connectivity (not to mention propensity for deifying pointless weirdness on the web).

The Lightyears have played in South Korea a number of times, and we’ve developed a strange fondness for the place. To be honest I can’t remember whether or not we’ve ever been to the Gangnam district upon which the song is based, but a quick Wikipedia search tells me it has both a Kimchi and a Handbag Museum. So there you go. We’ll have to go hang out there if we ever return.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go and perfect the horse-riding dance for our next gig.

Click here to see The Lightyears’ South Korean tour photos

ps. Type the letter ‘g’ into Google – you’ll find that the sixth most popular suggestion for any search beginning with this letter is ‘gangnam style’. WOW.

pps. If you’re not familiar with Gangnam Style yet, then I’d suggest you keep it that way, if only because it’ll give you something to talk about at parties when you become the last human alive who hasn’t seen it (probably sometime tomorrow).

All my life… watching America

We’ve toured to America numerous times, and having been based mainly on the East Coast have spent a great deal of time with Barack Obama’s supporters and campaigners (in fact, we were in the US just a few months before he was originally elected in 2008). And so, at the risking of confusing music with politics or being in any way partisan… WOO-HOO!! Congratulations America – you made the right decision.

It’s been a rough ol’ road for rockstar Obama. In a way I think one of the biggest challenges he faces is that his nation is experiencing something of an identity crisis at the moment. Traditionally the USA has always been about optimism, triumph, and prosperity, but with stories of evictions and bankruptcy dominating the news, suddenly the American Dream would appear to be showing substantial cracks. That said, as a nation Americans are hardy of spirit and indomitably patriotic, and however things pan out, I’d say that’s unlikely to change.

I’ve always had a problem with the prevalence in Britain of ‘America bashing’ – the assumption that because we speak the same language it’s somehow okay to make offensive, sweeping generalisations. Over here in Blighty we generally have a low tolerance for racism, but it is for some unfathomable reason still socially acceptable to say ‘all Yanks are fat and stupid’, which I think is completely appalling – especially given that my experience on The Lightyears’ US tours is that Americans are amongst the warmest, smartest and most welcoming people on earth.

Whatever happens in the next four years, I firmly believe the USA – and therefore the world – is in far, far safer hands under Obama than it would have been under Romney. It ain’t gonna be easy, but then I guess that must be why they call it the hardest job in the world…

– Click here to see The Lightyears’ American Tour Photo Album
– Click here to read my 2009 USA Tour Diary
– Click here to see The Lightyears playing live at Milkboy in Ardmore, Pennsylvania (or watch it below)

Keepin’ it real with Dry The River…

Last week, Johnny LY and I went to see Dry The River at Shepherd’s Bush Empire. We’ve been lucky enough to catch this band at the two high points of their career – last year at the Scala, and now this date at SBE (both of which represented at the time their biggest headline shows to date) – and they were nothing short of stunning.

As we were watching DTR start their set, my housemate Neil asked me ‘Who’s the best band you’ve ever seen live?’ and I honestly struggled to think of an act more accomplished than Dry The River. Their history is an interesting one, the members’ past musical ventures representing a discordant mix of troubadour folk and hardcore post-punk. The result is a band who understand dynamics perfectly, right through from exquisite quiet to devastating loud. And their voices…? Well, in The Lightyears we’re a band who work hard at – and pride ourselves on – quality vocal harmonies, but I have to say I felt my cage rattled by this lot. Their vocals are just out of this world.

Possibly the most striking point of the evening was DTR’s encore, when they left the stage, headed out into the centre of the floor and performed their heartbreaking track Shaker Hymns completely unplugged, embraced in a sea of people and lit by the lamps from camera phones. I’ve seen this kind of thing done a couple of times now (apparently Ed Sheeran‘s a big advocate) and, while it’s no longer especially original, the impact on the audience is always huge, and I think this tells us a lot about the direction the industry is heading in. Almost every performance we see is magnified and boosted and amplified by a million valves and speakers and diodes; mainstream recordings are polished and cajoled and manipulated until they are no longer representative of ‘real’ music – and in an environment such as this, the simple fact of a few talented musicians performing without the veneer of electricity can seem (in fact, is) quite magical.

Here’s a video shot by someone lucky enough to be right in the heart of the action:

“Where the hell are my lemon-scented towels…?!”

We supported the Mystery Jets a few years ago, and I remember being struck by their quirky backstage rider. As I documented in my tour diary of the experience, the Jets memorably demanded that a clutch of hot roast chickens be delivered to their dressing room before the performance, along with assorted crudités and of course the customary crate of Moet & Chandon.

This actually led me to imagine what our own fantasy rider would be when we eventually got to play Wembley Stadium, and it looked something like this:

– 2 eggcups of freshly distilled Peruvian mountain spring water faintly infused with the tears of a virgin
– A copy of 80s robot-comedy Short Circuit on VHS
– Clippings from Des Lynam’s beard
– A bag of eels
– 1 metric ton of paprika Snack-A-Jacks
– A 10-foot high decorative tapestry depicting the Norman invasion of Ireland in 1169 made from Faberge Eggs and snowflakes
– A box of damp otters
– Chesney Hawkes
– A speedboat

As turns out, we actually did play Wembley the following year – four times – but, true to form for The Lightyears, instead of acting like proper rockstars and demanding a wheelbarrow full of live squid (or similar), we were actually just really polite and said ‘a few sandwiches might be nice, but please don’t trouble yourselves’. Classic.

While we’re on this subject, NME recently published a list of the 40 strangest rockstar rider requests. Here are some of my favourites:

– Marilyn Manson: a bald, toothless hooker and a bag of gummi bears
– Eminem: a wooden pond for his koi carp
– J-Lo: demanded that her coffee was to be stirred anticlockwise
– Led Zeppelin: an iron and an ironing board
– Lily Allen: 12 packets of Monster Munch
– Motley Crue: a submachine gun and a 12-foot boa constrictor

What a bunch of mentalists.

ps. Here’s our behind-the-scenes video from the Mystery Jets gig:

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:

Piano-led bands of the world… unite!

Those original geek-chic piano rockers Ben Folds Five have reformed and released a new album.

This is exciting news for me, and if you haven’t heard of Ben Folds Five but you’re a fan of The Lightyears then it’s probably rather exciting news for you too – because it means I’m introducing you to a band you’re really going to like (try this track to start you off – “Philosophy” from their eponymous debut album, live on Jools Holland).

I’d been playing piano for nearly ten years when I was introduced to Ben Folds Five by our school-days drummer Alan Oldfield (the first in our worryingly long line of herbivore drummers). At that point, everything changed. Suddenly playing the piano wasn’t about respectfully tinkling the ivories and staring wanly off into the distance anymore – it was about kicking the living shit out of it. I started bouncing around and smashing the keys with my fists and, at gigs, developed a habit of leaping onto my piano from a great height at moments of musical climax.

For a long time I basically just wanted The Lightyears to be Ben Folds Five. This is generally how being in a band works – kids get into music, learn an instrument and then assemble a group of their mates in an attempt to exactly replicate their favourite bands. In truth, Ben Folds Five were one of the few influences that we agreed on in the early days (Tony’s long-time love of Cream didn’t mix so well with mine and George’s Bon Jovi obsession), which is probably why we ended up sounding a bit like them.

Anyhow, I was kicking around the internet the other day and discovered this rare and untouched live recording from an early Lightyears gig at the 12 Bar Club, circa 2004. The 12 Bar Club features prominently in my Lightyears novel, Mockstars, and was a favourite haunt of ours for some years. This track, “Don’t Do It At The Hollywood”, particularly struck me because it’s clear I was very much caught in the clutches of my ‘wishing I was Ben Folds’ stage. It’s pretty scrappy but a lot of fun, and features former LYs member Tom Mansfield on the bass guitar.

Meeting the Buzzcocks and saluting the sun

We spent last weekend on tour in the South of France, and my-oh-my what larks we had. On Saturday night we were playing a private party at a chateau near Bordeaux, and in light of our recently devised al fresco gig tradition we resolved beforehand to shoot an on-the-hoof live video somewhere in the French countryside.

Doing this meant first assembling all Lightyears in the same part of the world, which isn’t always as straightforward as you might think. George and John were the last to arrive, flying in from Gatwick to Bordeaux via the wondrous medium of Easyjet, and had caused a flutter of excitement by revealing via Twitter that world-famous punk band the Buzzcocks were on their flight. Pip and I were due to meet the brothers at the airport, and George suggested flippantly that we come armed with a sign reading ‘Never Mind The Buzzcocks, I’m here for The Lightyears’.

He was joking, of course, but I did it anyway.

This would have remained a hilarious band in-joke were it not for the fact that the Buzzcocks emerged from baggage reclaim significantly before The Lightyears – and upon spotting their name on our sign, assumed (really quite reasonably) that we were there for them. Moments before, I had joked on Twitter that if this happened and the Buzzcocks didn’t see the funny side, I could end up on the wrong end of a – let’s face it – pretty one-sided inter-band punch-up. This is roughly how the scenario played out:

– One Of The Buzzcocks: “Oh, ‘ello mate. We’re just waiting for our bags, out in a sec.”
– Chris Lightyear: “Right. Yes… um, actually, we’re not -”
– One Of The Buzzcocks: “Any chance you could take us straight to a restaurant? We’re starving.”
– Chris Lightyear: “I… well, the thing is…”
[One Of The Buzzcocks disappears back inside baggage reclaim. Chris Lightyear poops his pants for a few minutes. One Of The Buzzcocks returns.]
– One Of The Buzzcocks: “Mate, they got any luggage trolleys out here?”
– Chris Lightyear: [Has a pretend look around, knowing full well there are no luggage trolleys.] “I don’t think so, but… er… well, you see, funny story but… uh… we’re not actually here to pick you up at all.”
[One Of The Buzzcocks looks understandably confused.]
– Chris Lightyear: “We’re here to meet a far less famous band.”
– One Of The Buzzcocks: “But… your sign?”
[Chris Lightyear prays to a god he doesn’t believe in that One Of The Buzzcocks isn’t preparing to hurt him in the face. Pip unfolds the sign again.]
– Chris Lightyear: “It was a… joke?”
[One Of The Buzzcocks looks confused, then suspicious, then re-reads the sign. Then smiles.]
– One Of The Buzzcocks: “Huh. That’s actually pretty f*cking funny. Mind if I take a photo?”
[Chris Lightyear thinks in his head that One Of The Buzzcocks can do absolutely whatever he wants, and nods enthusiastically. One Of The Buzzcocks takes a photo, shrugs, and disappears.]

Buoyed up by the unexpectedly successful conclusion of this little episode, we scooped up George and John and headed back out into the countryside.

Upon arriving back at the hotel, we hastily set up our by now well-practised outdoor set up (car battery, electrical inverter, four-way extension, mini keyboard, acoustic guitar, busking drum, Zoom recorder, Canon 550 camera) on the fringes of a vineyard and hurried to shoot a track before the sun went down. Given the idyllic setting, we decided to go with ‘Speedway 105’, a song we wrote on our first Cape Town tour back in 2009.

As always, it’s tricky to say how the recording will come out (that’s in George’s hands at the moment!) but we’ll keep you posted if and when it goes up online. In the meantime, here’s our most recent live acoustic video, filmed during the Lake Grasmere sessions:

Our Top Three Worst Gigs… named and shamed.

Killers frontman Brandon Flowers recently commented in an interview that his band had a ‘chip on their shoulder’ when they were starting out, adding that he didn’t miss their days of playing in small venues to tiny crowds.

While the news that a rockstar prefers stadium gigs in front of screaming fans over playing to no-one in the fetid back-room of a pub in Hatch End isn’t overly surprising, in a funny kind of way it’s always nice to hear a global super-power like The Killers admitting that, even for them, there was a period of grinding, thankless drudgery when, at least at first, nobody really appeared to like them very much.

If I was ever invited onto a reverse version of Desert Island Discs and asked to list The Lightyears’ Three Worst Gigs Of All Time, I think I could answer pretty quickly…

STARBUCKS COFFEE HOUSE, NEW YORK (2007)
3) I should start by saying that I actually quite enjoyed this gig, but Tony hated it SO much that there was enough resentment hanging around to seriously bump up the average. In the lead-up to a weekend of gigs in Philadelphia which would turn out to be some of our best ever, we were asked to perform a short acoustic set in a student-heavy branch of Starbucks somewhere in Manhattan (the precise location eludes me). When we got there there was one microphone between three of us and, crowded awkwardly around the single mic stand, we struggled for forty-five minutes to entertain the glued-to-their-laptops crowd of stand-offish coffee drinkers – but were steadfastly ignored. We won an INDY Award the next day (something which, ironically, we found out by telephone whilst in a Starbucks) and this softened the blow a little, but to this day Tony still twitches if you offer him a Chai Tea Latte.

PLAN B, BRIXTON (2005)
2) Plan B is cool. I mean really, really cool. Indeed it’s a hip-hop venue – not a sensitive-melodic-pop venue – so quite what we were doing there I really couldn’t say. There were three people in the audience and they were all our girlfriends, and to be honest I think even they were stretched by this one. We were supporting a really great band called Lucky Soul (still together apparently), but didn’t exactly ingratiate ourselves with them when, in an attempt to eject some much-needed energy into the room, I leapt enthusiastically from a speaker towards my keyboard, thwacked my head against a pipe on the ceiling and fell backwards into a stack of their very expensive guitars. This hurt on so many levels.

CLUB COWBOY, BRIXTON (2004)
1) The astute amongst you will have noticed a theme here – Brixton is not a friend to The Lightyears. Our first warning should have been the name, which looking back on it rather implies a masochistic underground club night. The worst thing about this gig was the crowd, who were small in number but big in hostility. When we kicked into a cover of Erasure’s ‘A Little Respect‘ about halfway through, a thicket of skin-headed neanderthals gulping lager and slowly ruining society in the corner started sporadically shouting the word ‘gay’ at us, at a steadily-increasing volume. As the gig unfolded it became clear that they really only had the one point to make (it was the one about us being gay), and they were dreadfully persistent about it. Now I’m a pretty tolerant guy, but by the close of our set I was so pissed off that, on the final note of the gig, I crashed down onto the end of my piano and inadvertently sent it cartwheeling off the stage. After smashing dramatically onto the dancefloor (thankfully not decapitating anyone in the process), it bore a crescent moon-shaped scar for the rest of its life, right up until it burned to a cinder in our house fire.

Now… in the interests of balance, I’m tempted to follow this with a list of the best gigs we’ve ever done – but on reflection I think that might feel a bit self-aggrandising, and in any case I’m not one for blowing my own trumpet.

Although I will say that the gigs where I’ve blown my own trumpet have all been BRILLIANT.

Playing a gig. Next to a lake. With ducks.

Last week was an interesting one for The Lightyears. On Friday we met up to work on songs for the new album, and by the end of the day we had fairly workable versions of four tracks – two of mine (Blinded By Light and Embrace Of Many) and two of George’s (One Way Or The Other and I Won’t Wait Forever). Then, the following day whilst in the Lake District for a gig, we said ‘hang it all’ and went and set up by the side of a massive lake and filmed ourselves playing them.

It was a pretty basic set-up – unplugged, unfettered, just four guys, the countryside and a Canon 550. We had to abandon a couple of takes due to unexpected labrador-related mishaps, but in the end (in the space of about twenty-five minutes) we managed to record all four songs.

We’ve actually been planning to do something like this for a while. As we’re often on the road at the weekend playing private events we figured it would make sense to use the dead time after sound-check to create something for you guys, and the idea of heading out into the country and performing ‘ad hoc’ rather appealed to us. Kind of like guerilla gigging… only there wouldn’t be an audience – well, some goats and ducks ‘n’ stuff, but no people (this actually wouldn’t be the first time we’ve performed for livestock – there was that the gig we once played in a cow-shed in Belgium… but I digress).

I actually have no idea how the videos will come out – for all I know it might just be three minutes of us bopping away to a muffled soundtrack of wind and quacking. We’ll keep you posted. But hey, at the very least we gave two groups of Cumbrian ramblers something to talk about in the pub on Saturday night. I suspect stumbling across a piano-led indie-rock band from London while on a gentle stroll around Lake Grasmere is about as likely as bumping into a sheep in the Trocadero.

The truth is out there…

I’m in the wilderness, in search of inspiration.

This is a pretty common path for artists and writers – look at Bon Iver, for example, who recorded his debut album For Emma, Forever Ago in a shack in Wisconsin; or the poet Lord Byron, who once underwent an eight-year self-imposed exile in Europe (although in truth I think that was mainly a voyage of rapacious sexual deviance – stuff that he couldn’t get away with in England. I hasten to add that is not my aim here).

Anyhow, I’m currently in a very remote part of Scotland. I’ll spare you the precise geographical details but, in short, there are more sheep within a ten-mile radius of my cottage than there are franchised coffee outlets. And for a Londoner, that’s quite a shock.

I’m here on a trip somewhere between a mini-break and a creative sabbatical, and I’m about to finish a demo of a song which I’m hoping will end up on the new album. It’s a track called ‘Seventeen’, and it’s about that time in your life when you and your friends all start learning to drive… specifically the moment when somebody passes their test, inherits a crappy old car from their parents and turns up at your house with the engine running – and your tiny teenage minds are all overwhelmed by the strange combination of not knowing where to go, but simultaneously knowing you could go anywhere. A-ha, you see – a metaphor for life.

But enough of all that pretentious nonsense – I’d better get back to finishing my vocal track. There’s a chicken outside the window, and the look on his face says: “That last note was slightly sharp”. Typical bloody chickens. Always sticking their beaks in.

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