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

Island Records is proud to announce that their One Love Covid-19 Relief Auction in support of NHS Charities Together & Feeding America, has raised the fantastic sum of £179,755. Hosted by the inimitable Emmy®, Tony® and Grammy® Award-winning actor, singer, director, composer and playwright Billy Porter, the auction comprised incredible lots and one-of-a-kind donations from Island artists old and new as well as friends of the label. The U2 lot, featuring Bono’s signed and hand-written lyrics for ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For’, sold for a staggering £76,000, believed to be a world record for U2 lyrics. There was also a last-minute addition to the auction with a truly unique one-off lot from Brian Eno. Eno offered up a personal one-of-a-kind ringtone composed by him. The response from media and the public alike has been unbelievable with almost 800 people registered to bid and over 3,250 bids during the hour-long live broadcast. Speaking about the auction Island Re...

Alt-pop duo Moby Rich enlists multiplatinum-selling star Bishop Briggs for their new single, ‘friends*’. The pair—Maxwell Joseph and Connor Pledger—relocated to LA from Indianapolis and Atlanta in search of, well, anything. In a moment of synergy, Connor began attending open mic nights around the town in which Maxwell was living. The pair serendipitously met, began writing together, and realised an identifiable sound between the two them. Writing the majority of their tracks on acoustic guitar, they sing every song in unison, a sort of whole-is-greater-than-the-sum-of-parts attitude, which speaks volumes of their close, almost twin-like, friendship. Listen to ‘friends*: HERE Of the collaboration with Bishop Briggs, Moby Rich says, “When we wrote ‘friends*’ with Bishop, it was our first time meeting her. Sometimes sessions have a way of just giving you a song, and the second we started writing, the words and melodies just started to flow. It’s pretty wild when we get to work wit...

During a particularly raw period of time; lead singer of Flyte Will Taylor recorded a 20-minute voice-note about a painful breakup, as a warning to himself to “buckle up and get ready for a really shit time”. New single ‘Easy Tiger’ was born, a startlingly frank yet beautifully poignant song, recorded over a few days in LA with producer Justin Raisen (Angel Olsen, Ariel Pink) and Ali Chant (Aldous Harding) on mixing duties. ‘Easy Tiger’ immediately caught the attention of Mark Jenkin, the BAFTA-winning British director (Bait) of Bullion Productions. During quarantine, Will and Mark started work on a music video, Mark’s trademark use of hand-processed and physically edited film serving as the perfect solution to the current limitations of film making during COVID-19. ‘Easy Tiger’ is the first music video Mark has directed. “The challenge was to make something that felt amorphous – to create something that has a tactile feel to it, is a single artefact, something that feels like a f...

Island Records is proud to announce the One Love Covid-19 Relief Auction in support of NHS Charities Together & Feeding America. Artists old and new, as well as friends of the label, have donated one-of-a-kind lots to raise funds for relief efforts. The event will be hosted by Emmy®, Tony® and Grammy® Award-winning actor, singer, director, composer and playwright Billy Porter and will be broadcast live from 6pm BST on May 21st. To bid on the lots, you must register in advance with Island's partner Omega Auctions, further information can be found via Island Records' dedicated oneloveauction.com Website. All lots are available to view and place bids on via an online catalogue https://bid.omegaauctions.co.uk/m/view-auctions/info/id/83 which can be found on Omega's website www.omegaauctions.co.uk . Featured lots include: Amy Winehouse: A Pair of Amy Winehouse's stilettos worn by Amy & all Amy's album releases on vinyl Annie Lennox: Beautifully h...

Ahead of the release of their highly anticipated debut album Deep Down Happy on 19 June, Sports Team today share new single and video for ‘Going Soft’, reminding us about the euphoric highs of live music – albeit from a screen – filmed by friends and fans over the last year of the pandemonium of life on the road.   The six-piece have built a large, fiercely loyal and fervent fanbase; coming up on the back of word of mouth live hype, drawing round the block queues to early gigs at The Five Bells and Moth Club, and celebrating a Kentish Town Forum headline at the end of last year. ‘Going Soft’ captures the essence of a band waiting to get back out there doing what they love, and what they do best. Sports Team are a band of six singular characters, who have been described as one of the most raucous, electrifying and chaotic acts in the UK. Here’s The Thing, the first single lifted from their debut album was chosen as Greg James’ Track Of The Week, following an Annie Mac Hotte...

Kenyan-Norwegian singer, songwriter, producer, and visual artist Lil Halima releases her brand-new single titled ‘Glue’ via Island Records today.  At only 21-years old, Lil Halima has been nominated for two Norwegian Grammy’s and the coveted Nordic Music Prize. She caught the public’s attention with a stunning COLORS session last year (invited back for their A COLOURS live stream), and released the Brown Girl Diary mixtape, which documents her romantic relationships and search for identity, through the prism of a young woman of colour growing up in rural Norway, in a village of only 4000 people. Her first 2020 release, ‘Glue’ has dream team writing credits from Lil Halima, Nathaniel Warner (Mahalia, Sinead Harnett), Anders Kjaer (Dagny, Bendik, Ary) and George Moore (Nao, Snoh Alegra, Kwabs), who has also produced the track. “Commitment is hard, and it always get to the point where I’m scared the other person preferably would always want us to be glued together. You know,...