After I devoted a whole show last year to records made in 1928, arguing that this was a vintage year for recording, several listeners wrote to ask me to do it again for another year. Reversing the last two digits brings us to 1982, another vintage year, particularly for African and Caribbean artists.

I was not aware of all these records as soon as they came out but, having been given licence to roam the world in a show called A Foreign Affair on London’s leading commercial music station, Capital Radio, in 1983, I began to catch up on these recent releases and each of them carries a powerful nostalgia while still sounding objectively good in their own right, for people now hearing them for the first time. Or so I believe.

The debut album by Segun Adewale was never released in the UK, partly because it sold so many copies as an import, the potential market had evaporated. Was I to blame for playing it so often? I don’t know. Sterns released the follow-up but it did not have a track to match side one of this debut. From the opening statement of the title, through the rapid fire vocals that follows, all the way to the melodic steel guitar, the entire tune still flows through my blood. 1982 was also the year when I first heard King Sunny Ade's new album on Island, but Segun Adewale just might have outpointed it, then and now.

Having found a vinyl copy of the album by the Senegalese group Orchestra Baobab, now known as Pirates’ Choice, in a shop in Amsterdam, I soon became entranced with its gentle rhythms and heart-touching vocals. I’m not sure I realised how Cuban-influenced this music was, but I definitely recognised how different it sounded from Youssou N’Dour’s intense mbalax (also launched in 1982, by the way, with Immigrés). A year or two later, the Baobab album surfaced in Sterns, and when Andy Kershaw was given his own show on Radio One, I took him on a guided tour of the shop’s shelves, insisting he pick up a copy. Andy honed in on the slow burning ‘Utru Horas’, whereas I had favoured the uplifting ‘Coumba’, featuring Rudy Gomis (from Guinea Bissau). Between us, we inspired Nick Gold at World Circuit to contact the owners and licence the album. For reasons I never understood, Nick started his CD with alternate versions of the two songs we had been playing, adding the better known versions at the end. When he subsequently reissued Pirates’ Choice ten years later, he left off the originals altogether, so you still need to track down the 1989 release if possible.

Back in those days, British followers of African music had not yet focussed on a particular region of the continent, and we were equally happy to jump around to South African of even East African music. As a DJ playing sometimes in clubs or between sets at live gigs, I discovered that any of the tracks from the album by Samba Mapangala and Orchestra Virunga were guaranteed crowd-pleasers. In particular, we treasured ‘Malako’, nine minutes long and full of extra details as it raced along, with marvellous horns lines swirling around the singer’s voice. Samba turned out to be Congolese, but he put his band together in Nairobi. Once you become familiar with styles of playing bass, this is unmistakably an East African record.

I had long been a fan of American singers with high voices – Smokey Robinson of the Miracles wailing ‘Going to a Go Go’, Eugene Record of the Chi-Lites asking ‘ Have You Seen Her’ – so it was fascinating to discover that this approach was a specialty of several Congolese singers, notably Mapangala and Nyboma, who also sang with Les Quatre Etoiles. Recorded in Paris, Nyboma’s album Double Double only had four tracks, but they all zipped along with a joi-de-vivre I had never heard before. Dancers were delirious with delight.

Coincidentally, Soca music in the Caribbean went through a renaissance that year, and the programme finishes with the two that had most impact in the UK. Explainer had been regarded as a second division performer in Trinidad until the news got out about how many times ‘Lorraine’ was played on Radio One. It did not make the chart, but felt as if it must have done – everybody recognised its opening ‘taxi, taxi, Airport Kennedy’ as Explainer announced his decision to leave New York and go back home.

Arrow’s ‘Hot Hot Hot’ did make the chart but only just. Nobody knew what to do with a track that lasted for more than six minutes and had no obvious edit points. The British record label cut off the long bass guitar into, but that served only to lose much of the impact. Arrow is from Montserrat, and although ‘Hot Hot Hot’ looked like a classic one-ff single, he made several other good records and managed to build a proper career. This collection King of Soca is good throughout.

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