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