Terrific, resilient, rootical lovers, with backing by the Revolutionaries, recorded in the late-seventies by Sonia Pottinger for Sky Note. The same rugged rhythm as Clifton Campbell’s
A New Civilisation, devastatingly contrasted with the sweetness and vulnerability of the singing.

Terrific close-harmony rocksteady bad tidings from 1967.
The flip doubles the murder rate: Tommy McCook’s Persian Ska, from the previous year.

A deadly fleet of Studio One sevens, and one almighty ten-inch, swooping in from the Far East.

In 1961 Sun Ra took off from Chicago – where he had established the Arkestra, his dedicated ensemble and the vehicle for his mission to better the planet – and with a scaled-down version of the band he landed in NewYork. Their first recording session was in Newark in October of that year. The Futuristic Sounds Of Sun Ra, recorded for the Savoy label, is a beautiful document of the material they’d honed during a long residency at the Wonder Inn at the end of the Chicago period. Among tracks left in the vault from that day in the studio were these two great ballads sung by Ricky Murray, both of them redolent of the bright popcraft that had long been part of Ra’s repertoire, with classic Afrofuturist themes of navigating outer space and altered destiny cloaked in sweet songs with tart arrangements.
“Marshall Allen especially liked playing I Struck A Match On The Moon,” recalls Ricky, “because he got a chance to light up a cigarette while we were singing.”