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

Mumford & Sons release their new single, ‘Roll Away Your Stone’ through Gentlemen Of The Road / Island Records on the 7th June 2010. It is taken from the band’s critically acclaimed, platinum selling Top 5 debut album, ‘ Sigh No More ’. It's turning out to be Mumford & Sons ' year. Spurred on by glowing word-of-mouth recommendations and a fearsome live reputation, their debut album, 'Sigh No More', has spent the first three months of 2010 in the Top 20 of the UK's album chart, soaring beyond 350,000 sales in the process. The four friends have been on the cover of the NME, sold out a triumphant British tour and secured some great slots at the summer's biggest festivals. And it's not just in the UK where things are sky-rocketing for them. The band were in Australia at the beginning of the year, where 'Sigh No More' knocked Susan Boyle off the top of the album chart and stuck around at the summit for four weeks, achieving double platinum status

Violent Soho ‘Bombs Over Broadway/ Son of Sam’ Monday 3rd May 2010 Violent Soho have gone from self-releasing their debut in their native Australia to signing to Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore’s Ecstatic Peace! label, home to Be Your Own Pet, Free Kitten, Awesome Color and other freak-rockers. Ecstatic Peace! step out of their usual modus operandi with Violent Soho to release it on new UK imprint Defacto through Island/Universal . They are the most visceral, mushroom-munchin’, bong-tokin’ slacker guitar foursome to be punishing their amps in a long time and have impressed rawk royalty wherever they park their van. They played for Rick Rubin at his Malibu Condo. Thurston Moore was at the front at their first NY show at Lower East Side hang out Pianos. And passing the grunge baton on a generation their album was produced by The Pixies/Foo Fighters/Distillers producer Gil Norton at his Rockfields studio in the Welsh countryside (in between playing darts on Black Sabbath’s favourite d

Night Bus ‘I Wanna Be You’ Monday 17th May 2010 Newcomers Night Bus have concocted a sleek, sexy nocturnal anthem. A love song breathing sweet-nothings into the late-night ether. Formed in the after-hours haunts of Hackney and channeling the spirit of Stardust’s ‘Music Sounds Better with You’ if Blondie were playing it, Night Bus have re-skinned pop for a disco bloodbath in the new decade. With their glittering looks and glam hooks, Night Bus are the house band from Studio 54 entertaining the terrace at Space, Ibiza. Lead by Anglophile LA-emigré Jackson Kennedy , Night Bus are in a four-way relationship with each other. Jackson met drummer Laura Conway when she was living in Hollywood, then they moved back to London together and slept in the same bed for months. Co-vocalist Hannah Melbourne is fashion-worker by day and a dazzling disco-chanteuse at night. Meanwhile they stole dark-featured heart-throb Ben Tarrant-Brown from a Camden indie band. ‘You can turn me on like a drug, I