Description

2LP Vinyl – WCV063

It could feel lame to start any paean to a favourite record with a claim for its significance; it makes it sound dry, academic, removed from the emotions it engages. And yet the story of Pirate's Choice bears re-telling, and what I've taken from it over the years is bound up in its multiple histories. This was an album recorded in 1982, but only released in the UK seven years later, when it helped kickstart a new-found fascination – among certain western listeners – with "world music". The band by that point had split up: their music deemed increasingly passé in Senegal itself, where once they'd be seen as harbingers of a new sound and style. But there's more than simply that: this seems to me to be a tale that reaches back much further in time, and crisscrosses the oceans more than twice over.