Tour Diary

Dubai. Apparently not just one huge airport.

We are at Dubai airport, waiting for our connecting flight to Gatwick. I appear to have lost the rest of the band. There are rather a lot of people here, most of them sleeping. It is 4am. Technically speaking. Danny has gone to buy a shisha pipe. My eyebrows feel weird. 

I am experiencing that disarmingly euphoric jetlag hangover that you get when you fly long-haul and end up spending a string of lost hours in some distant airport waiting for a connecting flight. I have no idea whether I am still drunk or not. I have also watched too many poorly-executed rom-coms on the plane and I fear that this may have damaged my ability to interact with normal human beings. I know, I know, I only have myself to blame for that. It’s the airline food. The chemicals compromise my sense of taste. 

When we arrived in the Middle East about an hour ago, Tony informed us that he’d just received a text message from our Irish cohorts Fred The Band offering us a last-minute gig in Cork. This Friday. Could it be done? Would it in fact make more sense just to stay here and connect straight to Ireland instead of London? Perhaps not. Mustn’t submit to delirium.  

Incidentally, this is my 8th trip to Dubai and I have never once stepped outside the airport. Perhaps I am missing something. Allegedly there’s a whole city outside. Jury’s still out for me on that one.

The Korean Tour has been a resounding success, notwithstanding the fact that we once again failed to eat any dog whatsoever. Unless that funny-looking sausage on the plane wasn’t in fact veal as the menu claimed. You can never be too sure.

Chris Lightyear

I’m in Seoul but I’m not a soldier

I have just woken up. It is 4.30pm.

Last night was a good night. A very good night indeed. 

It began onstage at 8pm and ended in a jacuzzi at 8am. Just as all great nights out should. 

Let me talk you through it step-by-step……

8pm, Grand Hyatt Hotel
I am onstage, sat at a grand piano. The enormous stage has been immaculately set to emulate the opening scene from Phantom Of The Opera. The MC, dressed in trilby, half-mask, cloak and tails, stands behind me. Seunghee Park, one of Asia’s foremost opera singers, stands centre stage. I am playing the Korean national anthem, and Seunghee is singing. 500 people are singing back. One of them is the British Ambassador.

Is this a dream? No. This is my life. This is just the kind of wackiness I get up to all the time.

9.30pm, Grand Hyatt Hotel
…And, as if to prove a point, here I am again, sat at the grand piano – this time dressed as the Phantom myself – entertaining the guests with my trademark lounge renditions of popular tracks by Metallica and Rage Against The Machine. I don’t think anyone has noticed. It sounds just like jazz! That’s the clever thing! It’s the Trojan Horse of the music world. Metal dressed as jazz. 

That reminds me of a story Hugh Padgham told us about how he used to smuggle ham sandwiches into Paul McCartney’s house when they were working on McCartney’s Press To Play album. Paul and Linda, as you can imagine, were pretty strict on enforcing their no-meat rule but the carnivores got away with it by making cheese sandwiches, hollowing out the middle and filling them with ham! Genius. Paul, if you’re reading this, you’ve been hoodwinked mate. 

Anyhow, I digress. Metal-filled jazz sandwiches, Phantom Of The Opera, grand piano. So, this goes on for a while and then I slink off backstage to join the rest of the boys and make sure they haven’t caned all the booze whilst I’ve been working.

10.30pm, Grand Hyatt Hotel
We hit the stage about an hour ago and this place is cooking! Due to the music starting late on in the evening, all 500 guests were pretty sozzled by the time we started and were absolutely gagging to get on the dancefloor. We’ve chucked out a mix of Lightyears songs and covers and the dancefloor has been full all night.

Possibly my favourite moment of the evening, though, is when we drop the pace about half an hour from the end and play Miles Away. Everyone grabs a partner and we play the song slowly, with real patience. We don’t generally use this song as a “dance” number but it really works. Magic.  

We encore with Emily, which has been requested by five or six people on separate occasions, and can’t resist ending the evening on a slightly tailored version of The Killers’ All These Things That I’ve Done, featuring the immortal line “I’m in Seoul but I’m not a soldier”. Bit of political satire there. Brought the house down.

So. Job well done. Next stop – PartyVille.

2.30am, Spy Basement
We are in Spy Basement. How did this happen?

Yet again, for the third time in as many years, here we are. Seoul’s seediest club. A haven for prostitutes and sexually-frustrated American soldiers. John is being chatted up by a man. I am standing at the bar trying to work out how five beers could possibly come to £35. Danny and Tony are having it large on the dancefloor. George is looking nonchalant in his suit, sipping a beer and trying to divine whether the girl talking loudly at him is an escort or a legitimately interested groupie. 

Actually, Spy Basement turns out to be a lot of fun. Dressed in matching suits and surrounded by a sizeable entourage, we look at bit like the Reservoir Dogs and as a result are attracting quite a bit of attention from the revellers (although it’s possible that most people just think we’re pretentious bankers).

We stay in the Basement for an indeterminate amount of time. Beers are downed, dances are danced, merriment is made. Hours pass.

6am, Hooker Hill
It is 6am. We are, apparently, on “Hooker Hill”. I have no solid recollection of how we got here.

Hooker Hill does exactly what it says on the tin. No further explanation needed. It’s a pretty steep hill as well, which is a challenge in itself at 6 in the morning after a few sherbets. 

Tony is on absolutely blistering form. I have never seen him this up for it. We broach the idea of going home; he’s having none of it. In fact, before we’ve even had a chance to hit the taxi he’s already crossed our palms with another round of beers. What a legend. This keeps us going for another hour or so but eventually, at about 7am, John, Danny and I throw in the towel. Tony and George, however, have officially locked horns in a fight to the death and neither one wants to lose face – the first one to stop drinking and start sleeping loses. We leave them outside the still-pumping Debut Bar with the expectation that we might not see them again for several days and jump in a cab back to Insadong.

8am, Jacuzzi, Somerset Palace
In theory, the evening ended when we left Hooker Hill. In actuality, there were still over two hours of life left in us. When we got back home to Somerset Palace there was a massive anti-US beef protest going on outside our hotel (see the BBC News 24 pictures here). Hundreds of Koreans had turned out. Can you imagine Londoners rioting at 7am on a Sunday morning? Bizarre. Anyhow, we spent some time chilling with the rioters before heading up to breakfast, still dressed in our suits, chowing down on some seriously tasty pastries and then whipping on our trunks and hitting the jacuzzi. This is the only way to end an evening. I say “evening”; it was in fact most emphatically the morning and the sun was shining furiously.

We eventually crashed into bed at 9.30am. Tony and George followed half an hour later. The tour was nearly done and so were we.

Lightyears over and out. See you back in Blighty. 

Chris Lightyear

“Why aren’t we doing this in the jacuzzi?”

Here we are once again – back in Seoul, capital city of South Korea, invited out for the third year running to headline The Queen’s Birthday Ball at the Grand Hyatt Hotel. By now we know the city pretty well but it still has the ability to surprise us once in a while.

This week, for example, the whole place has been crawling with riot police. I mean, I say “crawling”; in fact they’ve been pretty much static the entire time. Hundreds of them, mostly boys, by-and-large looking too young to shave, clutching shields and truncheons and standing in neatly-aligned formation waiting for something to kick off. The Koreans are currently lobbying against their government for letting too much potentially CJD-ridden American beef into the country and, since the Asians are renowned for protesting in some particularly off-the-wall ways (setting fire to themselves, that sort of thing), the local authorities aren’t taking any chances. These guys are everywhere. Funnily enough, though, this doesn’t seem to disrupt the pervasive aura of calm that is peculiar to Seoul. If there were this many riot police on the streets of London, people would be starting ruckuses left right and centre.

If I’m honest though, I think they’re all a bit bored. I saw my first anti-beef protest the other day – eight or nine elaborately dressed Koreans wandering along with a severed bull’s head on a platter, peacefully protesting, singing songs, that sort of thing – and was amazed to see the riot police surround them like locusts and start chanting and shoving. They seemed to be starting a riot all by themselves. Mind you, you’d probably do the same if you’d be standing in the same place for three weeks without anything to do but count pavement tiles.

Anyhow, back to the tour. We played our first gig on Thursday night at a kind of “Meet The Lighyears” welcome party. It was supposed to be at a venue in Itaewon called The Bungalow, although due to unforeseen circumstances we ended up having to move (incidentally, when I say “unforeseen circumstances”, I’m referring to the fact that the British Ambassador was throwing a party the same night and had poached a big chunk of our audience. Not deliberate, I’m sure. Still, the ex-pat social scene can be pretty cut-throat. It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there). Thankfully, Ruth, one of our hosts, offered up her garden as a substitute and we set up on her patio. Rock and roll.

Copious amounts of food and drink were laid on and we played a set of mellow acoustic numbers – Fine, Girl On The Radio, Home For The Weekend, even I Could Be, which some of you might remember from three or four years back when we used to play it at the Kashmir Club in Baker Street. Fortunately the Ambassador doesn’t party as hard as us and, as his soiree had finished early, a bunch of people turned up later on to join in the festivities. This was our cue to up the pace a bit and we threw in Emily, Sleepless and so on. 

What happened next took us all by surprise – we got a request from a member of the audience to play Posh We Are, the Peterborough United charity single we released back in May! There we were, 5000 miles away from home, and the spirit of the Midlands reared its ugly head in the most unexpected way. Needless to say, we played the song and received tumultuous applause (from the Posh fans, at least). 

The following day was split between gawking at eels in street-corner tanks, guffawing at hilarious English translations on restaurant menus (I was seriously tempted to sample the indeterminate meaty mush with noodles described as “Hairy Triton”) and wandering open-mouthed around the world’s most enormous music shop. We do this every year. Danny is starting to find this a little wearying and I can kind of see his point. I mean, each year it’s the same – George bombs around trying to uncover some exotic new brand of effects pedal, Tony gets excited about vintage 12-track mixers and I scour the various keyboard stores for rare makes of keytar which I will unvariably not buy on account of the fact that, antique or otherwise, £450 is a lot of money to spend on a piece of plastic tat that I’m probably never going to use and that would make me look like a tool if I did. Danny, I’m sorry mate. It’s just a tradition, that’s all. And you don’t monkey with tradition.

We’d been advised against staying outside for too long in the Spring months in light of the ominous yellow mist squatting over the city, which Gail had informed us was a foul and toxic pollutant smog floating over from China. Which was nice. And so we took refuge in a little bar in Insadong and bought a round of Tsingtao beers and a weird little bowl of snacks that looked a bit like Hula Hoops but could have been dried squid rings. Who knows? Tasted good though. We ended up in a discussion about what set we should play at the ball which, as our set is due to be two hours long, turned out to be a pretty time-consuming process. We’d been discussing this for about 45 minutes when George interjected with “why aren’t we doing this in the jacuzzi?” (if only that was a phrase we used more often). And so we did.

Incidentally, it is now Saturday morning and I’m writing this whilst listening to Tony and Danny testing the reverb settings on the Korean PA system we’re using for the gig tonight. Suffice it to say I have been on more thrilling library tours. “Wild Canyon”, “Dank Cave” and “Iron Man” have been tested and rejected, just 478 settings still to go.

Kill me. Kill me now.

Mixing with the cognoscenti

My music career has taken me to many places I never quite expected to go – South Korea, Thailand, Chalgrove Village Hall. I have to say, though, I never expected it to take me to a Civic Reception hosted by the Mayor Of Peterborough in honour of a newly-promoted football team. I mean, I bet Jagger’s never done that. Nor Richards. Richards is probably too busy falling out of trees or snorting people’s cremated remains to attend Civic Receptions.

That said, the Stones could probably learn a thing or two from playing a gig of this sort. It was pretty unique. We were performing Posh We Are on the balcony as the triumphant Peterborough United squad (fresh from their open-top bus tour of the city) appeared through the doors of the town hall to frenzied journalistic activity and a cavalcade of local dignitaries. Of course, the infamous Barry Fry (Posh’s Director Of Football) was there, and he was absolutely LOVING it. He danced. I mean, he actually boogied. Everyone else maintained an aura of august calm, but Fry didn’t care! He was singing along and waving his scarf like there was no tomorrow. What a legend. We met him afterwards too and he was most complimentary, which was a thrill for Tony who somewhat idolises the man.

We were in the middle of doing our usual thing of maintaining the steely coolness that befits rock stars (not so straightforward when you’re eating finger food at a local council meeting) when we were approached by the Mayor herself. Let me tell you now, this lady is a diamond. She complimented us heartily on our performance and asked us if we were going to carry on with music when we left school. This is not the first time this has happened. Must remember to grow some stubble.

It makes us feel very cool that we’re now mates with some of Posh’s star players, including Golden Boot winner Aaron Maclean and new England reserve keeper Joe Lewis. I know very little about football but there’s no need to let on. Plus I have my own shirt now. I’ve been accepted.

Chris Lightyear

Peterborough is, quite literally, United

At 2pm yesterday we played a gig in a day care centre to a 6ft by 6ft room of very confused-looking toddlers. This was due to a slight mix-up during our Peterborough promotional schools tour and, I have to admit, it was a bit odd. I tried explaining to them after our performance that the new Peterborough United charity single Posh We Are was now available to download from iTunes for only 79p but the blank looks we received in response suggested to me that they hadn’t yet developed into discerning music consumers. Actually, I think most of them were just concentrating on not pooping their pants. 

By contrast, at 2pm this afternoon we played a gig in a football stadium in front of over 6,000 people. None of whom had soiled themselves (presumably). How things can change in 24 hours. 

It’s been quite a week. On Monday we released a charity football single in collaboration with Peterborough United (A.K.A “The Posh”) entitled Posh We Are. Posh We Are is Peterborough’s club anthem and has been around since the early 70s, when it was written and recorded by a couple of local chaps named Brian and Tony. We’ve collaborated with a bunch of fans, some of the star players and the Voyager School choir to re-record the song in celebration of the club’s promotion to League One. All profits are going to sports charity Free Kicks and, since the website we’ve set up to help people download the single has had nearly 4,000 hits since release day, it ought to raise a decent amount (plus it’s reached Number 45 in the iTunes Plus Top 100 Chart).

Since Monday we’ve been touring Peterborough’s schools playing the song. Kids are singing it in playgrounds across the city. Local radio stations are absolutely caning the record – playing it every hour, on the hour. The Peterborough Evening Telegraph has been running articles nearly every day, encouraging people to support their local club in aid of a good cause. Peterborough is, quite literally, united. Oh, and I’ve been given my own Posh football shirt with “Chris Lightyear” written on the back. This is now the coolest thing I own. And I own a keytar.

So, the whole project climaxed today with a performance at London Road Stadium, home of the Posh. The team faced Darlington for the last match of the season and by 3pm a sell-out crowd of 15,000 had passed through the gates. We lavished a high-energy set on our first ever stadium crowd, opening with She’s The One and steamrolling through This House Will Burn, Beat Alive, Banana Republic, Great Balls Of Fire, Sleepless and Emily. We even chucked in a cover of Chelsea Dagger for good measure. I had to improvise the bass-line which, in front of 6,000 people (whilst singing lead vocals), proved to be one of the bolder moves of my career. You know, I’ll be totally honest with you – a big part of me expected to be pelted with rotten pies at some point during the set or, at the very least, inspire some derogatory terrace chants, but we actually went down really well. As Tony says, football fans not coming at you with sawn-off lead piping is in reality a really good sign. If they applaud your performance with their hands above their head, as they were by the time we hit our last few songs, it virtually means they’re ready to commit to a lifetime of loving companionship with you and put down a deposit on a romantic holiday bungalow in Newton Abbott. 

Anyhow, the pièce de résistance came after we finished Emily. At this point, as we kicked into the opening bars of Posh We Are, over 100 students from the Voyager piled onto the pitch. Cue a feisty performance of the club anthem supported by a legion of excitable teenagers and the old faithful down at the London Road end (watch the video here). The opposition’s fan were quaking in their boots (shame Peterborough eventually lost 2-0).

Back in the bowels of the stadium, as we were putting our instruments away, we were approached by the Chief Executive of the club.

“Great job boys – how do you fancy coming back to play for the Manchester United pre-season friendly in August?”

I think we fancy that very much, thank you.

Chris Lightyear 

And the winner is…

Last night we hit the INDY Awards Gala Ceremony at the Forum in Kentish Town. A couple of months ago we found out we’d been nominated for a second year in a row and a few weeks after that were informed we’d made it to the final short-list of four in the BEST POP ACT category.

As you’re probably aware, we won an INDY Award last year. We were on tour in the USA at the time and received the news sitting in Starbucks on 5th Avenue in New York. This makes for a great story but it did mean we missed out on a lot of free champagne and the chance to do the whole “Well, we’d never have got here without God, our mums, the Salvation Army” thing live onstage. Would the INDYs honour us two years in a row? We were all pretty convinced that was unlikely but no one wanted to pass up the opportunity to strut around the Forum eyeing up the other indie bands and feeling smug so we gathered together a bit of an entourage, tarted ourselves up and headed Camden-wards.

Incidentally, it’s also worth mentioning at this stage that Skinny – a mate of ours who picked up the award on our behalf last year – promised us a couple of days ago that he’d buy us a trophy cabinet if we won again. For, my friends, one award is a fluke – but two is a collection.   

We had VIP tickets. Which was pretty cool. At least, it was until we arrived. Thing is, any band who’d been nominated had been given VIP tickets – and with about 50 bands nominated, each with an average of four members, you’re looking at a truck-load of VIPs. Kinda dilutes the glamour when you have to queue up on the street with 200 other people. This would never happen to Angelina Jolie. 

It wasn’t until we’d been waiting for at least half an hour that the doors opened and the doormen began letting a stream of people in. Oddly, though, this particular stream of people hadn’t been in the original queue and seemed to be bypassing the system. Predictably, Tony took exception. He stopped one of them as they passed.

“Sorry,” he said with a shrug of the shoulders, “there’s a queue. Are you VIPs?”

“No mate. We haven’t got tickets yet.”

And with that he disappeared inside the Forum! A quick confab with the bouncers confirmed that, yes – they were letting the punters in BEFORE the VIPs. Finally, after years of hard graft, we manage to climb the echelons of society to a level sufficient to be considered “Very Important” and the plebs were getting in first. Maybe they were making them scrub the carpets in preparation for our arrival.

Anyhow, once we finally got inside the pace quickened somewhat. We had our photo taken in front of the “INDY Music Awards – Highlighting the very best in emerging live music” display and were immediately whisked away by a collection of immaculately-coiffeured girls in short skirts. Turns out the girls were chaperoning bands for the evening, guiding them through the confusing maze that is the Forum and attempting to make sure everyone was in the right place at the right time. Kind of like Oompa Loompas. But sexier. 

When you watch the BRITs or the Oscars on TV, you probably just assume it’s all champagne fountains and cavorting celebrities – but there’s all kinds of complicated shenanigans going on backstage. We’d been cornered early because we’d been asked to present the first award – an honour in itself, given that the other presenters included Mike Rutherford (founder member of Genesis), Fergal Sharkey of The Undertones and Chas Smash from Madness. Everything had to run smoothly because the whole ceremony was going out on Sky TV. 

So, we were backstage, waiting for Starsailor to finish the opening set so we could get on and kick the proceedings off. We’d planned our attack pretty meticulously. I would say “And the nominations for Best Female Solo Act are…” and Tony would say “And the winner is…”. This left George with the job of kissing the girl, flashing his winning smile and posing for the TV cameras. Which he was pretty happy with. 

Starsailor finished, the MC (Radio 2’s Andy Davies) appeared and gave a little speech and our chaperone led us onstage to present the first award. We delivered our lines with aplomb; cue tumultuous applause from the winner’s assembled fans. It was just a little unfortunate that the winner herself – Dawn Kinnard – seemed to be AWAL.

A minute passed. And a minute, take it from me, is a long time when you’re standing on stage at the Forum in front of a few thousand people and nothing’s really happening. There was only so much ad-libbing the MC could do and in fact we did consider busting out an a capella number to keep everyone amused. Perhaps it’s best that we decided against that. Still, a good three or four minutes had passed by the time Dawn finally appeared,  which kinda took the edge off her big moment. She looked like she wasn’t really entirely sure why she was there. You could have handed her a courgette and she probably would have been none the wiser.  

And so, with our big moment over, we hit the free bar (which, might I add, had been significantly depleted during our absence – Tony did try pulling the “We’ve been onstage! We should be entitled to extra free booze!” card but it was met with vacant stares from the barstaff). About an hour later, proceedings reached the BEST POP ACT category. We weren’t expecting to be given the same award two years in a row but, I have to admit, I still felt a little flutter when they announced our name and Emily came on over the massive speaker system. Miss Pink Shoes, who we’d played with a few weeks previously at the Clapham Grand, won the award, and gave perhaps the best speech of the whole night. I can’t really remember what they said but I specifically recall being very impressed at the time. Apart from anything else, it was short – which, if you ask me, is a feature that ought to be common to all acceptance speeches (I hope you’re taking notes, Halle Berry). Anyway, they’re great guys and they really deserved it. Shame we never got that trophy cabinet though. Heck, there’s always the Ivor Novellos.

It was a great night all in all. The Buzzcocks headlined although, by the time they hit the stage, we were out on the streets of Kentish Town being entertained by a couple of INDY-nominated human beatboxers who had come all the way from Newcastle for the ceremony, which I thought was pretty impressive. Wish I could remember their name because they were dropping some well tight beats. That’s right. Well tight beats. I know the lingo. I’m urban.

Later peeps.

Chris Lightyear

“Good evening Leighton Buzzard!”

Tuesday 25 March, 10.15am (Voyager Recording Studio, Peterborough):
Here’s the news – we’re recording an album. We’re doing it in a state-of-the-art recording studio in a brand-new specialist arts school in Peterborough called The Voyager. It’s looking like it’ll feature 12 or 13 tracks and we have a challengingly short amount of time to record them in. George and I have set up and are ready to go, but Tony is looking a little concerned, as if there’s maybe something missing that could delay the beginning of the session. I think he must be trying to work out where some important lead or microphone is.

“Right,” he says, “I’m gonna go and investigate what Moira’s packed us for lunch.”

It is, let me reiterate, 10.15 in the morning.

******

By the end of the day we have successfully mic-ed up and sound-checked the drums, bass and guitar and have completed a take of one song – In Black Eyes. Not a bad start. The bass amp we have hired is an Ampeg 4×10 which, in case the technical term means nothing to you, is ruddy loud. Unfortunately the ceilings in this place are like the ceilings in most schools – made of plasterboard tiles – and the amp is making the entire room shake. Luckily, Tony, who has a rich history of dealing with specialized acoustic conundrums of this sort, has fixed the problem via the auspicious employment of a hard-wearing, custom-built noise-guard.

In other words, he’s stuck a cardboard box on top of it.

Sometimes it’s extraordinary what you can do with an old box and some sticky-back plastic. Just ask any Blue Peter presenter.

Saturday 29 March, 9.30am (Voyager Recording Studio, Peterborough):
It’s Day Five in the studio. For all 13 songs we have completed the drum track, bass track and a guide guitar track. Quite handsome for less than a week’s work. Just as well, really, since we now have to pack up all the gear and get to a headline show at The Wheatsheaf in Leighton Buzzard.

For those of you who haven’t been to Leighton Buzzard, well… it’s in Leighton Buzzard. It’s a funny little place but, to our surprise, it boasts an absolutely kicking live music venue. The Wheatsheaf is actually pretty well-known on the gig circuit and attracts some big names – Southside Jonny headlined here last week, for example (Tony points out that the last time he saw Southside Jonny was at Wembley Stadium, which is a little larger than The Wheatie but pretty much on a par reputation-wise, I’d say. Plus it’s much quicker getting a pint here).

We play a rocking show to a very appreciative audience, and it’s a great opportunity for us to air some of the material from the new album that we don’t often play live, such as I’m Not. After our encore we get chatting to some of the regulars and there seems to be a general consensus that they’d like us back, which is pretty cool.

Most importantly, I can tick off another lifelong rock and roll ambition from my list; namely, uttering those immortal words “Good EVENING Leighton Buzzard!”. Bruce Springsteen eat your heart out.

Chris Lightyear

My eyes are trying to escape backwards into my cranial cavity

Tuesday 4 March, 5.30pm (Old Jameson Whiskey Distillery, Dublin):
We are in Dublin to play a gig at the launch party for State Magazine, Ireland’s new music publication. The party’s being held at the Old Jameson Whiskey Distillery, which at some point in the recent past has been converted into a rather swanky functions venue.

We arrive at the place at around 5.30 and, as I step inside, the full extent of tonight’s potential carnage properly dawns on me. This is a music industry party. In a whiskey distillery. In Ireland. And the booze is free all night. These are circumstances in which a Mormon would struggle to remain sober.

We nip across the courtyard to the local restaurant to grab some nosh and a few beers before the gig starts. The owner comes over to our table to serve us and, I have to say, she’s behaving a bit oddly. She keeps dropping her pen and mixing up her words and even spills a beer at one point. We think nothing more of it until, after we’ve finished the meal and are about to leave, she scuttles over to our table clutching a menu and says, flustered, “I’m really really sorry, but… well… I know you’re famous and I’ve seen you on the TV and I was wondering if I could have your autograph?”.

I’m trying to work out what she’s referring to. I mean, I was on Match Of The Day when I was 6 in the crowd for the Marlow Vs Plymouth FA Cup Draw, but I get the feeling that’s not what she’s talking about. Anyhow, we sign the menu for her and she promises to frame it and hang it in the restaurant.

Back at the venue, we settle down at our instruments and get ready to start the gig. Our brief tonight from Phil (the Editor of State Magazine) is to play a set of witty yet non-obtrusive “Easy Listening Heavy Metal” that will amuse the journos without being too overbearing. Oh, and he has used the phrase NO JAZZ more than once. He hates jazz. And so, in response, we have prepared an instrumental medley of tongue-in-cheek rock covers played in a lounge style. Here’s a taster – a chirpy Love Will Tear Us Apart blends effortlessly into Rage Against The Machine’s Killing In The Name Of via a cheekily nonchalant rendition of Enter Sandman by Metallica.

Predictably, things are running a bit late and as a result our one-hour set turns into two hours. We’re not bothered though because the fantastic bar-staff have been enthusiastically plying us with whiskey and vol-au-vents all night and by this point we’re really starting to hit our stride. An extended jam uniting a piano interpretation of Sweet Child O’ Mine with Daft Punk’s One More Time blends gradually into our closing number, which sees The Real Slim Shady rubbing shoulders with Led Zeppelin’s Black Dog played half-time in a swing rhythm. Sweet.

By the time I come offstage I have, to borrow a phrase off Tony, overdone it a little on the sherbets. The problem is, of course, that when things are free there’s really very little choice other than to wretchedly abuse said complimentary items and we all know what that leads to. In the back of my mind somewhere I’m aware that we’re flying back to London early tomorrow morning for another gig but that seems like such a ludicrous idea that, when the launch party wraps up, the only sensible course of action seems to be to keep the good times going and stave off the arrival of the new dawn with a round of Guinnesses back in our hotel bar. Will I regret this at 7.30 tomorrow morning? Nah. It’ll be dandy.  

********

Oh Lord. Oh, sweet Lord and the heavens. It’s 7.30 in the morning and, yep, that’s right, I do indeed regret that. My eyes are trying to escape backwards into my cranial cavity. No time for moping though. Must catch plane. 

Via some tremendous miracle, several hours later we’re striding across the tarmac at Gatwick, still alive and, I think, with most internal organs intact. The next episode in The Lightyears Saga is a mildly hellish rush-hour trip into central London to get to sound-check in time for our gig at the Rock Garden in Covent Garden.

The things we do for our band, eh? Just as well there are plenty of perks. I mean, when I’m kicking back on a gold-plated, caviar-filled lilo in the guitar-shaped swimming pool of my private jet-shaped mansion in the Phillippines with the cryogenically-resurrected Hendrix, Presley and Morrison a few years from now, I can very much imagine looking back on this time and thinking “I miss those days, back when I used to have carry my own keyboard around, dress myself and buy milk like a normal person. In fact, I was probably happier then than I am now”. And then Jim Morrison would give me a head massage and probably strum a lute.

Anyhow, I digress. Tonight’s set, we decide, needs to start slowly, on account of our fragile and hungover state. We kick off with Fine, which we haven’t played in a while, and by the end of that we’re ready to tackle something more energetic. She’s The One wakes us up and takes us through Beat Alive, Sleepless, In Black Eyes (another one we haven’t played in ages), Filmstar, This House Will Burn and finally Emily.

On finishing our set, we leave the stage to find the promoter Jeremy (who is, incidentally, Irish) approaching us with a congratulatory round of drinks – three neat whiskeys.

God bless the Irish sense of humour.

We keep Tony in a box.

Monday 7 January, 2.45pm (LYs Studio, Secret Location, Oxfordshire):
We’ve been hard at work recording demos of some new songs since late afternoon on 2nd January 2008. It occurs to me that our last studio session was with Hugh Padgham in his climate-controlled, state-of-the-art, sound-proofed, sensitively-lit, top-of-the-range recording suite in central London. Today, on the other hand, we are huddled together in an abandoned school music department, hugging Danny The Sound Guy for heat, trying to stave off the onset of frostbite for long enough to finish the guitar overdubs on new song England. For the record, this room is not heated during the school holidays. I am wearing two jumpers and three scarves. My breath is actually visible. This cannot be good.

Tony tells me that he’s currently reading a book about Earnest Shackleton’s historic expedition to the South Pole in 1915, during which the arctic explorer and his intrepid team were forced off their ship (which had been entirely crushed by rock-hard ice sheets) into a tiny lifeboat, upon which they sailed for two weeks across 1600km of the world’s most freezing ocean to reach dry land. Their beards had frozen solid in minutes. Shackleton and his boys, Tony assures me, had it easy. They wouldn’t have survived 10 minutes in here. I think this is what people mean when they say you have to suffer for your art.

Anyhow, over the last week we have laid down draft versions of four new songs – England, The Enemy, Sarah and an as yet unnamed 2-minute pop number with a kind of Kinks/Beatles feel. You might not hear Sarah played at many gigs – it’s a fairly intense ballad and would demand a double bass and a grand piano for maximum impact (our roadies only get thruppence an hour and they have refused to hump a Steinway around the club circuit until they get a pay rise). England ought to be making a regular appearance in the set though, and in fact you’ll hear it at the Water Rats on the 12^th. We’ve also recorded a new arrangement of the song Brother from our 2005 album Mission Creep.

Incidentally, the location of our studio hide-out shall remain secret because we don’t want to be mobbed by the NME. They can be relentless, you know, the paparazzi.

Saturday 12 January, 9.30pm (Water Rats, King’s Cross, London):
Tonight we are playing our debut show at the infamous Water Rats in King’s Cross. We turn up at the venue at around 9.30pm and there’s an enormous queue on the street outside. We find some LYs regulars waiting to be admitted and they tell us that no one’s being allowed in – the place is apparently rammed already. We wish them luck and take the only possible course of action, which is to barge through the assembled masses waving our wristbands around trying not to get into any fights.

Inside, the place is heaving. It’s a sell-out crowd. We work our way through to the performance room and sneak backstage. It’s hotter than hell in here. Plus the backstage area is the size of a small toilet (in fact, from the look of the place it probably once was a small toilet) and it’s packed with seven bands’ worth of gear. Just in case you were under the illusion that we spend our backstage time bathing in scented jacuzzis and nibbling caviar off the wings of talking swans, well, we don’t. This evening, for example, I’m spending it with my face in the stage manager’s armpit, trying to work out where I put my piano. I begin to wonder where Tony is – we’re on in 5 minutes…

The band before us finish their set and George and I take to the stage to set up our gear. Still no Tony. Another five minutes pass, our instruments are in place and we are due to start. Just on cue, our flustered-looking drummer bursts through the stage door, looking a bit freaked out. “It took me FIFTEEN MINUTES to get in here! There’s still about 50 people outside!”. One day, I find myself thinking, we will be choppered onstage like Shirley Bassey at Glastonbury Festival. Still, for the moment I guess this is part of the fun. Besides, it’s very much Tony’s style to turn up to gigs at the absolute last minute, to the extent that fans have recently begun asking us whether we keep him in a box all week long and don’t let him out until show-time. The answer is yes, yes we do. We keep Tony in a box. He lives in a box.

It’s turns out to be a really great gig – we open with Beat Alive and She’s The One, and at the point in the set at which we usually play Miles Away we debut new song England, which gets a good reception. The heat is stifling and the room is filled to capacity. Sweat drips from the walls. We move through our pop numbers, Banana Republic and Emily, into set-closer The Last Night. The sound-system in the venue is excellent and George’s swirling guitar loops at the end of the set are sounding pretty epic.

Next show – Wednesday night at the Rock Garden. We’re starting a mid-week residency there for all you city types who fancy a couple of drinks and a sweet dose of keyboard-led pop-rock after work. See you there! 

A Truly Legendary Breakfast

Saturday 13 October, 9.30pm (PAWS Party, Laguna Hotel, Thailand):
Tonight’s show is the biggest gig of the tour – a headline slot at the annual fundraiser for local charity PAWS (Phuket Animal Welfare Society). There are around 300 people in the crowd this evening and they’re all up for a big one. The dancefloor is heaving and, weaving in and out of the boogying revellers, there’s a chap with an enormous camera who turns out to be here from Channel 11 – which means clips from the gig will be going out on Thai national television later in the week.

We end the first encore with Emily and initially resist calls for a second. However, our hosts are having none of this and we are spirited back onto the stage for another couple of tunes. I am sweating like a mariner. It is hot up here in my suit. Eventually we hang up our guitars and the evening draws to a close. PAWS have managed to raise THB 1 Million tonight, which is fantastic. Good work all round, I’d say.

Next stop is a local bar which is modest in size and utterly rammed full of big English blokes. They have, like us, congregated here for the Rubgy World Cup semi-final between England and France. I won’t pretend to understand, appreciate or even like rugby that much but I have absolutely no qualms about jumping on the glory bandwagon whilst the national team is actually winning games.

So, we triumph at the rugby, the bar erupts, the smaller members of the assembled crowd get thrown around by the larger ones, and everyone piles out onto the street. It is 3am. We are left with seemingly only one option – to retire to our rooms with a couple of bottles of Sang Som (Thai rum), pump up the Guns ‘N’ Roses on the stereo, channel all our discipline into not raiding the mini-bar and see the night through until 6am when we can go to breakfast.

******

So. It is now 6am. In the spirit of true British stoicism we have seen the whole night through and our reward is a delicious 5-star breakfast in one of the world’s top hotels at an hour so youthful that we have the entire dining room to ourselves. We each don a pair of shades and our official Laguna Hotel bathrobes and take our seats for a truly legendary breakfast.

In our heads we look like a rather suave amalgam of James Dean and Noel Coward. In reality, of course, we look like tools. This, in many ways, is what being in a band is all about. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Chris Lightyear

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