News

LYs to headline Westminster Reference Library

We’re very excited to announce that we’ll be returning to the London stage on Saturday 9 February next year to headline at Westminster Reference Library. We’ll be presenting extracts from my Lightyears novel ‘Mockstars’, as well as songs from our new album, for one night only in an intimate setting.

This is your chance to get a sneak preview of the material we’ve been writing this year, and experience the fusion of words and live music in this exciting, offbeat venue.

*TICKETS ARE NOW ON SALE* at the frighteningly reasonable price of £4.50 (plus 50p booking fee). Click here to buy yours – and we’ll look forward to seeing you there!

Full details on the GIGS page.

LYs soundtrack award-winning campaign

As many of you may know, The Lightyears have previously soundtracked a number of short films for the positive body image campaign Body Gossip.

A new video has been released today featuring bespoke music from the LYs, and it’s called Poem For Women – a satirical take on weight loss, written by Lola Frears and performed by a cast of celebrities including Natalie Cassidy and Big Brother’s Nikki Grahame.

Body Gossip released the video today in celebration of the fact that, last night, co-founders Ruth & Natasha won ‘Ultimate Campaigners’ at the 2012 Cosmopolitan Women Of The Year Awards. This is incredible news – campaigns like this may appear to spring up out of nowhere, but here in The Lightyears we’ve watched The Dynamic Duo build Body Gossip up literally from nothing, and it’s been truly inspiring to watch.

Find out more on the Body Gossip website, and click below to watch ‘Poem For Women’:

New free download at Project LYs

Back in July we launched Project Lightyears, a multimedia micro-site designed to spread the word about the band far and wide across this good green earth.

Since then, with your help, we’ve racked up over 70,000 views. Thanks everyone! This also means that a new target has been unlocked, and we’ve decided to give away a preview recording of One Way Or The Other, which was one of the first tracks to come out of our writing sessions for the new album. We recorded the song live on the banks of Lake Grasmere in Cumbria back in September, using a basic set-up powered by a car battery (surprising a few ramblers in the process), and in fact some of you will already have seen the video on YouTube.

We wanted you to be able to take the song away and listen to it, so we’ve extracted the audio and made it available for free download at Project LYs. And if N-Dubz make urban pop, then we’re definitely spearheading a movement in hardcore rural music – because if you listen carefully to this track, you can actually hear the lake in the background. John Craven would fill his pants.

Our ultimate aim with Project Lightyears is to reach 10 million views, and while this is still some way off, word is spreading to far-flung corners of the earth and momentum is gathering (you may remember that our videos are particularly popular in Turkey, and in fact during the last thirty days we’ve had one lone viewer in Guadeloupe – if you’re that person and you’re reading this, make yourself known to me and I’ll write you a song… no joke). Thanks again for all your support!

Watch the video for One Way Or The Other below – or download the track for free by visiting Project Lightyears.

Sweden tour photos now online

Last week we jetted off to Gothenburg, Sweden, to perform with Roger Daltrey from The Who and Queen drummer Roger Taylor.

Aside from the catastrophic impact on our wallets of Gothenburg’s ‘nine quid for a pint of beer’ culture, the trip was a grand success. I’m in the process of documenting our adventures in a tour diary, but in the meantime, head to The Lightyears’ Facebook page where our Sweden tour photo album is now online.

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.

New live video published

We’ve just published the third and final video from our recent ‘Live At Lake Grasmere’ sessions. Click here to check it out on YouTube, or scroll down to the bottom of this news story.

The song, ‘Embrace Of Many’, is another brand-new track intended for inclusion on our new album. It’s a song about feeling isolated whilst also being surrounded by crowds of people.

The video was recorded, along with ‘I Won’t Wait Forever‘ and ‘One Way Or The Other‘, on the banks of Lake Grasmere in Cumbria (northern England) while we were waiting to go onstage on Saturday 1 September. We powered the camera with a car battery, and absolutely everything is performed live.

In the YouTube notes you’ll find the lyrics and chords, just in case there are any budding musicians out there who fancy giving it a go!

Brand-new videos now online

Last weekend, whilst kicking about in the Lake District, we shot a series of live and unplugged acoustic performances on the banks of Lake Grasmere in Cumbria.

On top of surprising a few ramblers, we also came out with some rather nice videos featuring songs we’ve been working on for the new album. We’ve now published the first two of these videos on The Lightyears’ YouTube Channel – I Won’t Wait Forever and One Way Or The Other.

Work on the new album is coming along well, with many of the songs in the running coming straight from my Lightyears novel, Mockstars.

A third video from The Lakeside Sessions will be published next week. Watch this space for updates!

Rihanna unlocked at Project Lightyears

A few days ago we reached 35,000 views at www.ProjectLightyears.com and decided it wasn’t fair to keep Rihanna locked up anymore, so we released her. Click here to download your free copy of our acoustic cover of We Found Love.

Thanks to everyone who’s been sharing our content on Facebook and Twitter – it means a lot to us.

If you haven’t seen the video yet and are still trying to decide whether it’s worth taking the time to download the free stuff we’re basically lobbing at you, here’s what it sounds like:

Brand-new free track unlocked at Project LYs

That’s right – you thought only Our Lord God could unlock Paradise, but you could not be more wrong.

Thanks to your 30,000+ views at www.ProjectLightyears.com, we’ve now reached our third target and have unlocked our acoustic cover of Coldplay’s “Paradise” from the album Mylo Xyloto.

Click here to claim your free copy.

And once again, thanks so much for your part in helping to spread the word. As I mentioned in my recent blog, the band’s now getting lots of new traffic from places like Turkey, Albania and Mexico, which is rather exciting. And we’ve booked in a session later this month to knock out some early previews of songs for the new album… so watch this space!

Chris Lightyear published in Body Gossip book

In late 2010, The Lightyears wrote and recorded the soundtrack to two short films by Body Gossip, a campaign aiming to challenge society’s unrealistic and narrow beauty ideals. On September 6th, Body Gossip are releasing their first book, with a foreword by Gok Wan, and it features a story by none other than me, Chris Lightyear. And it’s about my bum (or lack thereof).

My article is called ‘Does My Bum Look Small In This?’ – but if you want to read it yourself then, by George, you’ll just have to pre-order a copy from Amazon. And in the unlikely event that you need convincing, there are naked people on the cover. Boobs, and arses, and all that. So there.

Body Gossip is run by the amazing Ruth Rogers and Natasha Devon. Find out more on the BG Facebook page.

As you probably know, I’ve been honing my writing skills over the last few years while working on my debut novel, a semi-fictionalised re-telling of the story of The Lightyears, entitled Mockstars. We recently released three readings from the book at Project Lightyears, and here’s the one where I try (and fail!) to impress an A&R Man from a major record label:

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