‘Performed in Berlin at the Haus am Waldsee in July, 1985, it was every bit the chamber concert — super intimate and interactive, gorgeously recorded by FMP’s Jost Gebers in an ideal acoustic room. Rather than alternate between one and the other, Lacy and Parker explore middle-terrain the whole time, perhaps skewing a tad more Lacy’s funky-tuneful direction, becoming a single soprano entity made of fragments of sound sometimes accreting into perfectly imperfect lines. Two long tracks, Full Scale and Relations, are completed by a final four-minute coda aptly titled Twittering. Indeed, the whole program has the joyous interactivity of Paul Klee’s painting Twittering Machine: birds aligned on a line, proposing and picking up lines, nothing cruel or mean-spirited, free play all a graceful twitter.’

With Barry Guy and Tony Oxley in 1971. Gatefold sleeve.

The first decent compilation, from the early honky tonk and rockabilly sides — total killers like the tanked-up, randy-as-a-stoat I’m Coming Home — through to the witty country hits.
‘Get your face all pretty and your hair done right / ‘Cos we’re gonna do the town tonight / Well I’m comin’ into town and right on time / I still got your lovin’ on my mind… Well I came to a hill and the truck looked down / Throwed in low and she’s huggin’ the ground / Scratchin’ gears but I’m goin’ again / I’m comin’ home baby /  I’m doggin’ it in.’

‘Turbocharged highlife from 1980s Ghana… It opens in fine style with Nka Bom, horns sharply descending over a disco bassline, with a triumphant electric piano solo and a lengthy percussion interlude. Other highlights include the growling Gbenta, with a bluesy bassline and machine-gun drumming, and the trumpet voluntary and dubby choral singing on Moonlight Africa’ (Financial Times).
Produced by Eno, who discarded his own contributions as ‘clumsy and unnecessary compared to Edikanfo’s witty, light funkiness… What they’d given me was finished — there was nothing else I could add.’

A rockers update of Bob Andy’s almighty scorcher, mimicking Marley’s yodeling vocalese for extra authority.

From the Black Ark; a local hit in 1975. Clarke’s tale has the hapless, resilient innocence of Buster Keaton. Nice, basic melodica. The production is credited to Mike Johnson — who also stumped up for I-Roy sessions at the Ark around this time — but the rhythm and dub are Upsetters through and through.