Focus Music Notes. "Out of the Blues". Popular music through the decades

In December 2016, a man and his rescue dog drove out to Joshua Tree in the Southern California Desert. Armed with a guitar and “a shitty 10-year-old laptop,” the genre-spanning maverick spent two weeks screaming into a microphone at two in the morning and bleeding over his guitar strings in between walking his dog under the cool, arid night sky and barely sleeping at the “weird house” he rented. That man was Mondo Cozmo (the dog just goes by Cozmo, you can hear his input on the raucous ‘Come With Me’). They left the desert with the artist’s 2017 full-length debut, ‘Plastic Soul’ in tow. ‘Plastic Soul’ is a genuinely unique, impassioned collection of ten songs. It has to be one of the most intriguing, exciting and impressive debuts to be released this year. Having already been tipped by Sunday Times Culture as a ‘Breaking Act’ and with every track released to date being named a ‘Best New Track’ in NME, as well as support from BBC Radio 1 and Radio X, this year looks set to belong