Met on Myspace, they rebuilt the West Coast sound in London

The partnership started with a mutual listen. Andy Platts and Shawn Lee met on Myspace in 2005, heard each other's music and immediately knew they wanted to work together. Both already had careers: Platts fronted the British soul-pop band Mamas Gun, and Lee had released dozens of albums with his Ping Pong Orchestra or under his own name, including the soundtrack for the video game Bully.

It took until 2012 for the pair to come together in London as Young Gun Silver Fox. The name sorts the two out: Platts, a British singer-songwriter, is the Young Gun, and Lee, an American multi-instrumentalist, is the Silver Fox. Their first single, “You Can Feel It,” and the debut album West End Coast arrived in 2015. The album title joins their studio in London's West End to the West Coast of the United States, the sound they were chasing.

That sound is a modern take on mid-to-late 1970s West Coast AOR studio music, as their former label Wax Poetics put it. Funk-driven grooves, crisp horn sections and Platts' falsetto are the trademarks, with influences including Steely Dan, the Beatles, James Brown and Alan Parsons. Glide Magazine called their second album, AM Waves, in 2018, the best yacht rock LP of the last 35 years, and Pitchfork singled out “Lenny.”

The catalogue keeps growing. Canyons in 2020 leaned on a horn section, Ticket to Shangri-La arrived on Candelion Records in 2022, and Pleasure followed in 2025. A live album, Live from the Troubadour & Paradiso, is listed for 2026. Tracks such as “Midnight in Richmond,” “Mojo Rising,” “Love Guarantee” and “Kingston Boogie” show a duo that treats warm, unhurried studio craft as the whole point.