Tuesday 18 March 2008

Album: Funky Nassau: The Compass Point Story 1980-1986 (Strut)

About damn time someone put together a Compass Point compilation. It's not just reckless hyperbole to say that some of the best music of the 1980s – all time, even - came out of that Bahaman studio. A combination of location, the right engineers, producers and musicians and a common goal to make it funky, above all else led to Compass Point gaining notoriety amongst right-thinking musicians at the time, making it THE place to record.

Strut's compilation gathers together some of the studio's lesser-known highlights and some you should know and love already, but it's by no means exhaustive. I guess the 'Funky' in the title should have been a signifier, but a more comprehensive look at CP's history wouldn't have gone amiss. So we get 'Genius Of Love', 'Spasticus Autisticus' and 'My Jamaican Guy', alongside obscurities such as laid-back, sun-kissed disco masterclass, 'Obsession' by Guy Cuevas, the dubby new wave of Cristina's 'You Rented A Space' and cosmic classic, 'Adventures In Success (Dub Copy)' by Will Powers.

There's no room, however, for any B-52s, Black Uhuru (a missed opportunity if ever there was one) or anything from Bjork's Post (the timeframe did for that). Hell, they could have squeezed 'Back In Black' on there for shits and giggles, surely. That's for another collection though and you can't argue with the riches here. Any compilation that features Grace Jones, Tom Tom Club and Gwen Guthrie and also acts as a primer for some of the most luxuriously spacious dance music ever created gets my vote.

http://www.highvoltage.org.uk/displaydemoreview.asp?num=3526&band=492

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