Musicians from York have collaborated to make a pop-punk charity single.

‘Do the right thing!’ was released in December by ‘Your Friendly Neighbourhood Punks’, with the aim to get musicians together and raise funds for local charity, York Neighbours. Behind the collaboration was local musician Sarah Bentham.

With us all being musicians, we are all missing playing live gigs to an actual audience, so I thought it would be fun to make a huge collaboration with all my favourite musician friends.

Jonny suggested we did it for charity, which was obviously a no brainer with how rubbish this year has been for such a lot of people. 

York Neighbours have been a huge support for the over 65 community across York during the lockdowns, helping with shopping and getting people to and from important appointments as well as being a friendly and familiar voice on the telephone.

It was a cathartic, and slightly crazy process for Sarah.

I wrote the song and lyrics and sent it out to everyone who in turn, recorded their own vocals and sent them back to me along with some amazing video footage. Steven then took on the huge job of mixing and mastering the track which has over 50 audio files on it!

Once it was all shiny and polished we set it to the animation (which was mainly created on my bus journeys to and from work using my iPhone) mixed it in with the live videos people sent and that was it finished.

The musicians took their influences from pop, punk and ska, and the upbeat tune and fab video, promises to uplift and have you dancing.

To date there has been 625 views on YouTube and 34 downloads with some people paying a tenner for the track. They’ve sold 33 T-shirt’s and have been donated £530 in total.In addition to this, the single was played on BBC Radio York

The group are also selling t-shirts, which Tang Hall Big Local paid for, with all proceeds going directly to York Neighbours.

Give it a whirl: