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

Multi-platinum-selling, Grammy-winning singer-songwriter-actress ERYKAH BADU, one of the best loved, most constantly challenging and uniquely creative artists currently working in popular music, releases her new single ”Turn Me Away (Get Munny)” on August 2nd . The release of the single, taken from her universally acclaimed new album New Amerykah, Part II: Return of the Ankh, comes the week after Badu blesses the Brixton Academy with a sold-out one-off UK date on Saturday July 24. The new album is the Dallas native’s follow-up to her equally critically acclaimed 2008 album, New Amerykah, Part I: 4th World War. In contrast to New Amerykah, Part I: 4th World War, which was digitally produced and political in tone, New Amerykah Part II: Return of the Ankh features lush live instrumentation and taps into Badu’s emotional side by thematically focusing on romance and relationships. “ With Part I, I was standing at an apex, looking at what was going on around me politically, socially, and ec

Named as one of Rolling Stone’s Best New Bands of 2010,  release their racy bedroom blues single ‘Paris (Ooh La La)’ on August 15th. Doing a much better job of hotting up the summer than the UK’s reliably unreliable weather, this sultry, saucy song is Grace and the gang’s strutting tribute to getting down and dirty. A classic rock shakedown packed with guttural grunts and shrieks, it’s probably best that we hand over to Grace for a more detailed description of the tracks’s subject matter…“ When I wrote ‘Paris’, I was listening to the Kinks non-stop, and I was going for something with a big primal riff, like ‘You Really Got Me’. It was the first time I ever really just said ‘I’m not going to try to tell a story, and I’m not going to try to communicate an emotion. I’m just going to say, basically, ‘I want to have sex right now. ’ Produced by Mark Batson (Dr. Dre, Eminem, Jay-Z), this Vermont five-piece have more than earned their chops at home in the USA, gaining a reputation as one of

Little Fish singer, writer and guitarist Juju says that the band’s recent single ‘Am I Crazy?’ is about “the pain you go through when falling in love” but the title could equally refer to the crazy ride the band have experienced in the last year or so since legendary songwriter/producer Linda Perry heard their demos, flew to the UK to see them play at a pub in Oxford, signed them on the spot and took them out to LA to produce their first album. This has been followed by a hectic touring schedule supporting a who’s who of rock bands including Placebo,Them Crooked Vultures, Hole, Juliette Lewis and, most recently, Blondie. This, plus having three songs on the Rock Band game, a song in the new Hilary Swank movie ‘The Resident’ and a host of great reviews for their live show, as well as Radio 1 play and playlisting on XFM and Kerrang! TV have brought the band to the public’s attention even before the release of this, their first album. The addition of a Hammond player to the Oxford-based