LOS ANGELES (Top40 Charts/ Universal You Official Website) - Universal You are Paul Finnie, Gulzhan Ibraveya and Mark Grant - the band hail from Scotland, via Kazakhstan.
Paul and Gulzhan first met in Kazakhstan when both were working in the oil business where they started writing songs together and performing for their co-workers and the locals. They have since recruited Mark Grant as the lead guitarist in the band.
'Your Sin City' is their first single.
One of the first gigs the band ever played was headlining a free outdoor concert in Kazakhstan, which was attended by more than 12,000 people; highlighting the cultural differences between Kazakhstan, where no bands ever play and the UK, where we are often spoiled for choice. Upon their return to Scotland, Universal You (named after a song by The Cult) began to record some of the material they had written and performed a number of gigs across Scotland.
Paul wrote 'Your Sin City' in a hotel room in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, a city filled with beggars, prostitutes, oil tycoons, religion and sin; you have to go there to fully understand the meaning behind the song; but you may not want to.
The single is a powerful, dark and brooding rock number and exhibits similarities with some of the music world's most notorious and powerful female vocalists, from Garbage's Shirley Manson through to Beth Ditto and PJ Harvey with a number of stops in between. The similarities are not limited to the recordings with the band's notoriously explosive live shows showing that Gulzhan, augmented by Mark's jaw dropping guitar work, can hold a crowd as well as any of her contemporaries.
The band will be performing across Scotland and London over the coming weeks.
