Andy Platts (Young Gun) and Shawn Lee (Silver Fox) have a true appreciation for timeless music. From ’60s soul to ’70s R&B to ’80s pop, the duo’s output pays homage to the past—not as tongue-in-cheek parody, but as torchbearers carrying these sounds into the future.
Young Gun Silver Fox’s latest album, the aptly named Pleasure, wears its influences proudly. The first single namechecks Stevie Wonder and Sly Stone in its title, while throughout the record you’ll hear shades of Steely Dan, Hall and Oates, and The Doobie Brothers. While some of the ’70s and ’80s artists scoff at the Yacht Rock classification (Daryl Hall calls the term a “fucking joke”), Young Gun Silver Fox embrace their place in that lineage—they’re simply focused on crafting irresistible songs that connect across generations.
Platts and Lee recently joined me to discuss the album making process, lyrical inspiration, and making videos.
I did an email interview with you guys in 2020. I think of 2020 as being the lost year of music because nobody knew what was going on. How difficult was that for you to sit through and not know what was coming?
SHAWN: We released that album which was Canyons, and we went on tour. We were in Holland and Covid had already started. We had played the Java Jazz festival in Jakarta, Indonesia at the end of January or beginning of February. It was very much a Far East China thing at that point. We came into the airport, and they had a temperature gun, and if you had a temperature you didn’t get in. There was loads of hand sanitizer and some masking but not loads.
I was thinking this is stuff that stayed where it started and didn’t make it geographically out of there. We got to Holland and played one gig, and then they were like the next day, “It might cancel tonight because it’s in the hot zone, but the next gig is on.” So we decided to drive to the next city and wait for the gig the next day. Then we got there, and they got on TV and announced, “We’re locking down Holland. This is it. This is the end for the foreseeable.”
We went back that day not knowing, thinking it was gonna last for three weeks or so. After that, it was just like, “How long is a piece of string?” The world really abruptly stopped, and nobody knew what was going on. When are we gonna be out of lockdown? When can we move around? When can we play again? That just struck on, man. It became like this really thing that was no end to, and it was hard to pace myself.
I will say this: we weren’t able to promote that record, and I felt like it cut the album off at the knees. I thought this is a really good record. But what ended up happening was a lot of people discovered us online. That record really grew, and in retrospect, the pandemic worked to our advantage a bit. The album spread organically without us having to do anything, and I don’t feel like we lost momentum on that record.
ANDY: We got a lot of “We discovered you during the pandemic, and that album got me through the pandemic.” It definitely caught fire.
Looking at dates, you guys are on like a two-and-a-half to three-year cycle. Is that by intention?
ANDY: I think it seems to be our natural strike rate. We were pretty good at keeping it every couple of years, but it’s not always possible to maintain that rhythm. Two and a half, three years isn’t a bad strike rate at all. It’s ten years this year that the first album was released, and we’ve just spunked out our fifth. In ten years to make quite a lot of music, and to say quite a lot across five albums.
Where we came from in terms of probably being the only band really, lovingly, authentically carrying on the lineage of this music that was kind of stopped and left off somewhere in the ‘80s, to making music that is our own that is identically, identifiably ours and not parody, and not heavily referencing other people. It just sounds like Young Gun Silver Fox now, I think.
Do you know when it’s time to make a new record, or does it just happen naturally?
ANDY: We know when it’s time. We have to align when we pull our fingers out our asses. Shawn is pretty diligent and proactive. He’s always making music. He’s always putting out records, serious musical statements, fun records, stuff that no one’s thought of. He’s really creative in that. He’s a music producer. He doesn’t make demos. He makes records, and he puts it out.
He’s always chucking stuff my way, so there’s always something to be working on when the time allows. However, this record was a bit different. We made over half this record in one go in a matter of days because we got to mid December last year, and we knew that the deadline for the new record was the end of January. So we were like, “Shit.”
We’d got to that point not having got much in the can because we’d made a few songs, but these weren’t suggesting what the album should be. Personally I felt we’d pushed this process of sending files on the Internet as far as it can go right now. I felt like we needed to do a right turn and change it up a bit. So we got in a studio and got our hands dirty and really focused on music making.
SHAWN: What Andy said was absolutely right. It was a master stroke for us to make that big change up and get together and do it in person. I think we had a great run with the first four records doing it that way. We’re both comfortable with working that way. It’s efficient, and it’s good, and it has a lot going for it. But we had not done a lot, and lacking in a way a real focused direction. Having that looming deadline forced the hand.
Luckily Andy had the foresight to suggest that I come to his place when we were on our way back to England from Holland, when we were on tour in mid-December. I felt straight away it was a great idea, and I knew something good would come out of it. I didn’t know how much. It went a lot better than I could have ever imagined.
You never know when you get together and write with people how that spark is gonna come down. You can get together with somebody and come out with some half baked ideas or kernels of ideas, and not really nail something. That’s probably what happens most of the time. Us getting together wasn’t by any means a sure shot, but it ended up being that. The first day, the first three songs on the album, we did those tracks in the first day, which was roughly five hours, maybe six at the most, to get the first three tracks written and recorded.
That’s pretty scary. I would never want to bet on that. The fact that we did accomplish that in the first day, I felt the momentum of that and the positivity. I thought we’ve got this. We’ve got momentum now, and I felt like that was going to carry us however far it carried us.
You did all the recording in your studio?
ANDY: Half of it was tracked here in person, and then half of it was using the same process we had before at our respective studios, but all the work and all the tracks was completed through both of our studios.
If you have the means to record yourself, is it the deadline that tells you when the song is done, or are you the perfectionist who might sit on a song?
ANDY: There’s a couple of aspects to that. The deadline in this case was really good for lighting a fire under us and getting shit done. But in terms of the songwriting aspect, the putting the lyrics and melodies together, for me that’s much more of a meditative thing. I’ll often write one, two, or three songs on the same piece of music sometimes, if it’s trying to hit the nail on the head. You can agonize over lyrics. It’s the thing I spend the most time on now. It’s often the thing I start with, the older I get.
A lot of the time songs are about what are you trying to say? You want to mirror that with the music to the same level. You want to hit equally. It shouldn’t just be “that’s okay enough to write a song.” They should meet. They should be equals. That’s a difficult thing to get right separately together, however you do it. But it requires a really close relationship, a lot of trust and a certain lucky alchemy that we seem to have still got.
Do you pick and pull from different songs to make something together?
ANDY: That has happened. A verse from a certain song, just the lyrics you suddenly find, “Oh, they scat rhythmically perfectly over this section of this song. So why not?” Then you can shape the whole song around that. Those Frankenstein kind of things aren’t uncommon. You go where the music takes you. You go where the idea and the intention wants to go. And if that means you’re getting some kind of funky fusion on, then so be it.
SHAWN: It’s a very efficient thing to recycle or upcycle an idea that you had before. That was a good idea, but just didn’t seem to have the right other things around it that it needed to get where it was going. That core progression, or that riff, or that lyric or that groove, you can repurpose it. It’s kind of gratifying to take something that’s laying around that didn’t have a home and then for it to find purpose in another thing. It’s like taking somebody off the bench, a good player, putting them in the game, and then they help score a goal. Stuff sitting around on the shelf getting dust is a sad thing in the creative world. Things need an opportunity to shine.
ANDY: The last time I did that was on the last record. There’s a song called “Winners,” and I had this chorus, and I knew it had the thing, and I couldn’t knock up a verse. So I pulled the verses from a song that I wrote in like 2001. Years and years old, but the lyrics were a bit suspect. So I just changed the lyrics, but melodically and harmonically it was all there. That was a classic Frankenstein.
Where do you find inspiration for lyrics?
ANDY: They come from anywhere. They can come from the news. I do a lot of reading. They can come from books, conversations, other people’s stories. I’m always interested in meeting people and hearing about their stuff. Any kind of actively engaged songwriter is always on. Your ears are picking up, anytime I hear a phrase I’ve never heard before, or some tradition in a culture or something, I’m like, “What’s that all about?” And immediately going, how can I turn that into song?
I’m harvesting titles forever. They just go on and on and on. A good title will write the whole song for you, even if that doesn’t appear in the song. Quite often, though, you might end up with a better title. But that gives you the playground in which to work.
Are there lyrics that you write that are related to something in the public sphere that you’ve sort of hidden as a lyric?
SHAWN: I can think of a couple of Andy’s. “Sierra Nights” – I think people listen to that song would never make the Don Quixote connection.
ANDY: People hear that and they think I’m just thinking about cowboys or something in the Sierras in the US. But no, that’s basically a portrait of the two leading characters in Don Quixote, trying to marry life struggles with the great outdoors.
SHAWN: “The Greatest Loser” is another song on the latest album that people wouldn’t know the true meaning behind unless you told them.
ANDY: “Greatest Loser” is kind of my open letter to the former Prime Minister, David Cameron, for absolutely shafting the country with the referendum on Brexit. My impression of that whole thing was him just setting things in motion, torching all the bridges between our country and Europe, and then just scuttling away to keep doing what MPs seem to do when they’ve been Prime Minister, which is go around earning loads of money, being an envoy, or making talks.
In that song, I riff on Lou Reed’s line, “I met your mother, and we went walking on the wild side.”
In the last year or two, HBO did the Yacht Rock documentary. Have you guys got any residual effects from those kinds of articles written about the documentary where people are looking for something that can bridge the gap between old and new?
SHAWN: That’s an interesting question. The simple answer would be yes, in some way, shape or form. But to be perfectly honest, had we been mentioned in the movie, then yes, definitely, that would have turned a lot of people onto us that didn’t know about us more so than the people posthumously reading between the lines.
We were in the BBC documentary, a two-part yacht rock documentary years before this HBO one, and we were interviewed in it. There were a lot of people in the UK that discovered us from that documentary. These kind of things can open doors quite quickly. The whole Yacht Rock Movement, we’ve been associated with it in various forms over the years, and it’s connected us with people and lovers of that kind of music. It’s like this weird global appreciation society. We’re the modern gold standard, the torch bearers.
You mentioned something earlier that I appreciate – that the band is not like a parody of it, which I appreciate. The stuff you’re playing is rooted in the pop music you grew up with, right?
ANDY: The beautiful thing about what we’re doing, this ocean in which we’re swimming is that it’s comprised of so many genres and so many converging streams of music. You’ve got soul music blues. You’ve got the harmony of jazz in there, and you’ve got funky bass lines. You’ve got the grit when you want it. It can be super smooth and polished, and like the shiniest pop record. It can have acoustics all over it. It could just be Crosby Stills and Nash kind of harmonies. It can be bent to whatever and still come under this umbrella, which I really would just say is classic pop music.
It’s amazing the kind of diversity it pulls out from music fans. I remember watching something on the famous UK hard rock festival, Donington Monsters of Rock. At the end of the show, or one of the band’s shows, like the heaviest band, they played Andrew Gold’s “Never Let Her Slip Away,” and all of these big bikers or whatever metal dudes with hair and tattoos and jackets just singing this song at the top of their lungs. I think there’s something about this which is very connective.
Are you music listeners, are you music consumers, or are you more music makers?
SHAWN: I’d say I’m definitely both. I’m a voracious listener of music, and have been my whole life. I’m also beast mode in making records as well. I think the two go together very well, but I’ve come across a lot of people that don’t seem to listen to very much music that make music. I always find that a little bit weird if I’m being honest.
There’s that thing about isolating yourself in your own vacuum packed world, and you shut out the outside world of music. You can kind of go inside of yourself, which can be a double edged sword. You’re not being directly influenced by what people are doing at the moment, and that can be cool. But it’s good to keep your head down. Sometimes that kind of thing is like shutting the doors and the windows, and tuning out all the hubbub, and just getting down into your own kind of world of creating what you want to do is a very good thing to do.
But I think it’s also very good to have a quick look every now and again to see what’s going on around you, even if it’s like “fuck that shit.” Every now and again I find myself hearing whatever the popular thing is of the moment, and I’m like, “Who’s this person? What do they do?” And then you hear it and you’re like “holy shit. This is like hell no. I wish I’d never heard this. This means nothing to me. This is further away from where my head’s at.” Then you just think it’s cool to stay in your own lane and do your own thing. You can just create your own world, your own atmosphere, and that’s quite good.
I feel like in a way sometimes that we’re kind of in this parallel universe vibe. It’s going on at the same time, but it’s on its own kind of path. Some of these other things, they’re far away.
ANDY: I’m definitely like the meerkat that pops his head up out the parapet, and I do like to know what’s happening. However, I think my big kind of listening years are behind me where I just had to know, and I had to find out who did that and had to listen to everything. Life gets busier in a different way the older you get with owning homes and children. For me, being in two bands is a bit of a head fuck as well.
I find it difficult to detach what I do and being a fan of music. I am still able to listen to music for pleasure. That’s why I like seeing shows. Because you’re in the moment. I get a lot of inspiration from that. But because I think of what I do as writing songs a lot of the time, I’m looking at everything. I’m looking at what I read, my relationships, and in terms of interfacing with music, I’m looking for it in a different way.
Nine times out of ten, I’m just disappointed. Even stuff that people who I love and whose music opinion I respect, they’ll go, “check this out,” and I go, “What a load of bollocks.” I just want to be moved. I want to be moved by music, and I want it to rock something in the center of me in some way. It doesn’t have to be deep and slow. It doesn’t have to be like the inside of Thom Yorke’s heart. But it has to have something good going on. There’s a lot of stuff that sounds good and is not good. My default position is, I hate everything.
SHAWN: You’re a lot more harsh with other people’s stuff than I am, even though I’m the same in terms of I want to be moved. Obviously, I think a lot of stuff is shit as well. The glass is always half empty. But I also will like things that are just good. For me the thing is doing the radio show. I’m always looking for new music, so I discover more new music because of the radio show. A lot of times that stuff’s good enough for the radio. At least I’m supporting and playing new artists. But if I wasn’t doing the radio show, I probably wouldn’t go out and buy a lot of those records because I love them enough to invest myself in them. I would just listen to them. It’s cool, but it wouldn’t move me that much.
I like something because I like the reverb on it. I like the drum track, or that’s a cool guitar sound. I like it for aspects, or like the way that the whole sonically how it sounds. The big place that most modern music that’s done now really lacks is in songwriting. The songwriting’s not there. There’s not that many great songwriters out there. It’s people that have a vibe and a cool production, but the quality of the songwriting, most of the time it’s not there. In a way, that’s where you really shine, man.
ANDY: This is an interesting area. However you frame what is good is different for probably whole generations of people. I think there will be people in the 20 to 30 age bracket, or even the 30 to 40 age bracket now, who would cite certain works as being gold standards of writing craft that I would probably think, “Really? I don’t think so.” However, I don’t have their cultural shorthand. I haven’t come up with them, so I can’t view it in their way.
But I do know that there is music which is just enduring from the sixties, seventies. There’s obviously still great stuff being made in the eighties and nineties. I was a teenager in the nineties, and I still rate a lot of the stuff, especially some of the rock music from that era. But it’s just the real craft, how you put your words together, rhymes, internal rhymes, just the shit that people really used to care about.
As someone who grew up on ‘80s rock, I often wonder who the Phil Collins or Huey Lewis is of the modern era and can’t really come up with anyone.
SHAWN: You say, “Who’s the Phil Collins of today?” The real deal answer to that question is, they don’t exist. There’s nobody that good. There’s nobody as good as Huey Lewis. There’s nobody as good as Kim Wilde. Take any kind of pop singer from the eighties that had a lot of hits. There’d be nobody near the talent level of those people. It just does not exist now. We live in a different world, and the standard that you had to be in the past was so much higher, and people were so much more knowledgeable, and people had spent more time and had more experience, and had grown up listening to music which had a lot of meat on the bone. So they’re building on that. They’re learning from that.
You could say if we’re talking about food, because McDonald’s serves millions of people, are they the greatest restaurant of all time? Do they have the best food? No. So you can’t say that whoever makes the most money and has the most millions is the best at what they do. It’s like they’re the most popular in whatever that era is, but it doesn’t mean they’re the best. You can’t compare Taylor Swift to Joni Mitchell.
ANDY: I do think they exist, but not in the charts. Exactly what we’re talking about is comparing the mainstream, the top 10% of the mainstream music scene now with the mainstream from back in the day. And you’re not going to get it. The money and infrastructure was there. You could have three, four, five albums before you hit your stride. And they let you do that because the money was there. You’d have the guys in suits taking advice. “These kids seem to like it. Let them stick out another one.”
That’s just got to be risk free in the mainstream now. It has to be absolutely risk-free. Hence televised audience, Pop Idol, blah, blah, blah. It’s all about maximum gains, minimum risk, and you can’t have an exciting creative business model based on that and expect to compete with the very best of yesteryear.
Videos – necessary or fun or both?
ANDY: Labels won’t ask for them these days. They say we don’t need a video. What we need is content. But I think me and Shawn still very much love a music video. You can harvest from them as well for content. But you also have to think about your audience. A lot of our audience grew up engaging with music videos, and it’s another chance to tell another side to you. For me, the music video joins perfectly with the vinyl record. It’s just another branch of that storytelling.
SHAWN: People go, “We just want a TikTok thing. We just want like a 30 second reel.” Because people have short attention spans. That might be true, and people do have short attention spans. But when you pander to people’s short attention span by giving them that thing, then you’re perpetuating that as well.
We’re artists, man, and we love records. We love the art of making an album, a ten song album, side one, side two. That’s an art. That’s a real thing. If somebody told me, “Nobody buys albums anymore,” I’d be like, “Well, fuck you. I’m still making an album. I don’t care. This is for me, and there’ll be somebody that wants to listen to it.” Maybe an eight-year-old kid doesn’t have the attention span, but they’re not my audience. We have to do the things we want to do in this life. If you say nobody does this anymore, then “Oh okay, well, we’ll stop doing that now,” that’s really lame.
Sometimes by going against the grain and just being like, “Well, fuck all that. This is what I want to do,” you could help you stick out. They’re different. They’re going down their own path and doing it their own way. There’s something to be said for that, sticking to your guns, and creating your own space. Really, that’s what we’ve been doing for the last ten years. It’s real, it’s organic, it’s natural. We’re staying true to where our hearts and our heads and our aspirations are. You can’t fault that way of thinking. If anything makes sense in this world, that does.
You guys do other stuff. Andy, is there new Mama’s Gun stuff coming?
ANDY: I won’t be working on it just yet. I’m very much being the young gun to Shawn’s silver fox at the moment. We’re going to do a bit of recording in the summer and try and get an album to put out next year. But this year is the year of Young Gun Silver Fox. We’re gonna make the most of this album, tour everywhere. We’re gonna come back to the US and tour in October. Three or four weeks around the country. Really get the mileage out of this record. Then next year I will turn my attention more to putting out a new Mama’s Gun record, which takes a whole different mindset and different energy and different kind of angle on things.
Shawn, I interviewed Barrie this morning. He says to say hi and that he needs to get back in touch with you.
Shawn: Little Barrie! Barrie’s incredible, man. What a wonderful musician and guitar player, and just a super nice, genuine guy. One of the good guys. We definitely want to do a second record together. The only reason that we got that last one done was the pandemic, because we’re both always so busy, and he tours a lot. He’s got his own band plus he has other projects, and he does a lot of guitar playing with different artists. So he’s in demand. He’s just not around.
We talked about making a record for a long time. I think we talked about it for ten years or something before it ever happened. We had the name of the group as well, and we had the concept for the record and the name, and we still couldn’t get together and do it. I don’t know when it will happen. It might be cobbled together here and there, and take a couple of years. It’s really hard when you don’t have the time and the momentum and a record just drags on, and then stuff becomes old.
He told me a story about you finding a guitar online, and you went to the guy’s door and knocked, and the guy said it only had one string on it.
SHAWN: I’m looking at it right now. It’s the Mattel star guitar. I think it took me about ten years to get that. They’re pretty rare. It makes the monster sound, man. I like sounds, and I like toys, and I like things that aren’t in a way real conventional instruments. It’s almost like what you do is you pull something out of a really limited thing, and you conjure up music. It’s intention. It’s about how you contextualize it. How do you take that stupid sound and put it into making it musical when people would just whack something and laugh? I really like those things. I feel like they’re like a porthole into another dimension.
On me and Barrie’s record there’s a lot of stuff like that. There’s like a one stringed badminton racket, and I play that on it, or I’m bouncing a rubber ball on the floor, or I’m doing a lot of really weird off the cuff ideas. It’s a fun way of working. I do enjoy going off into that kind of quirky little unconventional world. I feel like that’s really for me. That’s really easy. I could just make goofy, silly, weird stuff all day long, and there’s no chance in that. It’s just fun and natural.
It’s actually, in a way, more difficult to go into a more musical thing like what we do together. That’s real musical stuff, so I’m applying myself to do Young Gun Silver Fox. I’m putting myself to task and having to level up to my ears, my instincts, skill-wise. But it’s very – if you’re a creative person, it’s really good to do different kinds of things. It’s really good for your creativity, and it keeps you from getting stuck, and it just keeps you open and exploring.
One of the things I’ve been able to do more and more is to take some of these more esoteric things that I’ve done in isolation and then how do I bring this into a very normal musical context? How do I take something that’s like a weird texture or weird sound, and then weave it in to like a different context where it doesn’t sound like “what the fuck was that?” but sounds like “oh, what the fuck was that?”
You can only do these things if you have to go out into the wild and you gotta know boundaries and explore, and then it’s almost like domesticating a wild animal. You bring it in like, “How do I make this my pet? How do I make this behave and be one of the family?” There is a part of me, honestly, I feel the most me when I’m just doing weird shit. But I also know that that’s a trap. Just go to the easiest default position. Sometimes you need to focus yourself. It’s a little bit of discipline to make yourself not do that, even though I’m all about doing what’s natural.
Making music’s always different. It’s always different day to day, and there’s a lot of possibilities. I love the process of making music. That’s why I like doing it all the time, because it’s really interesting. It keeps me alive, and it makes me feel like I’m doing something with my life, and that I’m reliving my true purpose. What makes me tick is this, and so I respect that. I want to give it all I can give it because it’s given me so much.
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Upcoming U.S. tour dates
June 26th – Brooklyn Bowl, Brooklyn, NY
June 28th – Troubadour, West Hollywood, CA
(More U.S. dates to be announced shortly)
