Best start to a tour… ever.

So, we landed in Cape Town yesterday and immediately jumped in a cab bound for the Table Bay Hotel. The Table Bay is generally regarded as being the city's best hotel (it's in the "Leading Hotels Of The World" group, don't you know) and is definitely one of the major perks of our annual South Africa trip. We were sat in the lobby waiting for our rooms to be prepared and decided to wander outside into the sunshine and have a closer look at the statue of a giant golden ...

A call to arms… help us hit the charts!

Today, Monday 11 January, marks the date of our first major label release - the song "Come With Me", which we wrote for the Josh's Band project. We're hoping that, with your help, we'll be able to reach the UK Top 40 Chart on Sunday. You guys have supported us loyally for years now and we truly appreciate it - a band without a fanbase is, after all, just four blokes sat in a room eating crisps and arguing about whether ...

Our Top 20 Moments Of 2009

Christmas Time is here again and there’s enormous excitement in the air. There’s an outside chance that Rage Against The Machine will beat the X Factor to Number One on Sunday and the weather-man says that snow’s a-coming. Things literally couldn’t be any better. We thought we’d add to the general feeling of goodwill and festivity by recounting our favourite and most memorable experiences from the past year. Most of them - whether in London, Cape Town or the USA - ...

Kate Nash & Her Famous Rabbit

Last night we went back into the studio to finish the lead vocal track for "Come With Me", the song we wrote for the new T-Mobile ad campaign. The record is being produced by Jonathan Quarmby, whose past work includes Finley Quaye's seminal album Maverick A Strike. George and I both lent our voices to the lead vocal track along with an awesome, honey-voiced female singer called Obenwa. The track is being ...

Setting the record straight

Yesterday afternoon we gathered at Rak Studios in St John's Wood to put the finishing touches to the track we wrote for Josh's Band, "Come With Me". Awesome turns were made by, amongst others, a rather talented tuba player, several trumpeters and the inimitable Russell Ward on the squeezebox. One perennial truth of being in the studio is that you spend 10% of your time making records and 90% of your time hanging about. It's vitally important that, during this 90% majority period, you ...

The Lightyears on your telly-box

So... the inaugural nationwide tour of Josh's Band is now over. We've been to Birmingham, Bristol, London, Edinburgh and Manchester and played to (and with!) over 1,100 people. It's been an incredible experience to be part of Josh's core band and the general consensus is that all of this is merely the beginning. Work on the track we wrote for the campaign - "Come With Me" - continues apace and it is due for release on a major record label in January. The final recording will feature hundreds of musicians and singers ...

Look out Manchester – Josh’s Band is a-coming…

Since I last blogged, Josh's Band has jammed in Bristol, London and Edinburgh. We've played with pipers, melodised with melodica players and harmonised with hurdy-gurdyists (don't be fooled by the elaborate alliteration - all of this is true). Plus our mates are starting to get in contact to say they've heard us on the radio tonight - so the word is spreading... It's been an awesome journey so far and ...

Thank you Wembley… and hello Bristol!

Last night we played to 46,000 people at Wembley Stadium and who should turn up to join the crowd but that bloke off the telly, Josh Ward! Seriously though, we had an awesome night and it was great to see so many LYs fans there. We took the opportunity to do a little onstage camera piece with Josh ahead of our trip to Bristol tonight - the next stop on Josh's Band's T-Mobile tour. I studied at Bristol University so I have a special affection for the place... ...

Josh’s Band hits the road…

Well... Birmingham was awesome. Nobody knew quite what to expect from the first date on Josh's Band's tour but what we got was a mass singalong in the Bullring, just enough decent weather to perform outside and about 200 screaming fans! Josh, it seems, has become a minor celebrity overnight and his mere presence now sparks mass hysteria amongst his devoted groupies. Our song, "Come With Me", went down really well ...

Come one, come all, to Birmingham…

All the great tours start in great cities. That's just a simple fact of rock and roll. It might be the Enormodome, Memphis, or the Shepherd's Bush Empire, or New York's Madison Square Gardens. This tour, on the other hand, begins in Birmingham. But you gotta start somewhere, eh?! Tomorrow morning at 11am, Josh's Band (featuring Chris and George Lightyear) will be premiering at the Birmingham Bullring in an attempt to get the good people of the UK singing the song ...

Tate Modern, here we come…

Over the past few weeks I've been spotting my face all over bus stops, underground stations and bins (no, really) as part of the new T-Mobile ad campaign. I know what you're thinking - if a man sees his face on too many shopping centre bins then, eventually, he's going to develop an intolerable ego. Well, true to form, the ego is burgeoning and well and truly on its way. But that's not all. Not only have ...

Our song in a national ad campaign…!

Here's the news - T-Mobile have selected our song "Come With Me" to be the signature song for their upcoming ad campaign. On top of this, George and Chris have now officially joined Josh Ward (the face of the ad campaign) and virtuoso drummer Mike Glozier to form the core band for the tour. This means that we'll be bombing up and down the country over the next month or so ...

Writing a song for T-Mobile…

Our involvement with the new T-Mobile ad campaign is now beginning to get exciting. Friends and family have been spotting us all over the UK on TV ads, billboards, bus-stops and train station big screens.... and today we were brought in to write the campaign's flagship song. We were invited to the famous Rak Studios in St John's Wood, which is where Radiohead recorded The Bends. Our brief was to write a song that would provide the ...

Jamming on an open-top bus!

OK, so it's Week Three and yet again I found myself gathering up an instrument and heading off to a slightly unconventional jamming session for the new T-Mobile ad campaign. I was on guitar rather than piano today because the session was taking place on a vintage open-top bus driving through the centre of London. I know. This was rock and roll in its purest form. George is out-of-town at the moment so I took my kid brother Shaun with me, who is a stunning musician ...

The Piano Orchestra

OK - latest developments in the T-Mobile Superband Bonanza... Today Josh asked us to come and join him and bunch of other musicians in the Half Moon pub in Oxford to jam a new song that had been written for the campaign called "I Wanna Feel You Move". It was a small pub and full to the brim with guitarists, singers, percussionists and pianists. I was rather delighted to find myself ...

The Lightyears join a superband

A couple of weeks ago, a curly-haired musician named Josh Ward (who we've played with a few times in the past and who has been known to wake up on our kitchen floor after Lightyears parties in a sticky puddle of champagne dressed like a sheep) was stopped in the street and asked by a camera crew what he would ...

The Myth Of The Great British Summertime

Today's blog doesn't really have anything to do with music. In fact, I'm slightly ashamed to admit that it's no more than a rant on what is effectively the lowest common denominator of talking points in this country - the weather. Whilst on tour in the USA last week (where we were subjected to some pretty varied weather conditions) I found myself explaining to a number of Americans that whilst for them rain is merely "a bit of a bummer", for us it is practically a way of life. That's accepted. And so I was somewhat taken ...

The Piano-led Power-Pop Revolution!

Top-dollar Philadelphia act Jukebox The Ghost have just been added to the bill for our Union Square gig this Thursday 30 July. This is awesome news, for this jaunty piano-led power-pop 3-piece (sound familiar anyone?!) are one of the finest acts we've ever played with. Jukebox supported us at the Clapham Grand back in 2007 whilst gigging in the UK and since then have toured with Ben Folds and gone from strength to strength. Check ...

The Great AEG Hologram Debacle

Does anybody else think that AEG Live, the company responsible for booking Michael Jackson's gargantuan run of shows at the O2 in May, got what was coming to them? Against the star's wishes, AEG extended MJ's initial run of 10 shows to 50, virtually overnight. Michael himself wasn't happy about this but it seemed he had no choice in the matter. It was obvious to everybody that he was going to really struggle to make it through 50 concerts - the people knew it, the media ...

The King is Dead… Long Live The King!

Michael Jackson was always destined to become a legend, and now he can properly begin that process. Traditionally, pop stars have struggled to grow old gracefully. Marilyn Monroe, Kurt Cobain, Buddy Holly et al all figured out that if you die young, leave a good-looking corpse and, most importantly, don't go a bit mental and start dangling babies out of first floor windows, you'll find it a lot easier to live an unblemished eternity in the hearts of millions when you die. Not so for poor old Michael who, to use a ...

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