AA. VV.
Funky Nassau - The Compass Point Story 1980-1986

Cristina Monet-Palaci, better known (by those who know her) simply as Cristina, is one of the curiosities that most intrigue the aficionados of ZE Records. That is, of the other music that was played and produced in Manhattan between the 70s and 80s.

Around Don Was and Kid Creole & The Coconuts - flirting with rap, No Wave, and mutant disco - Cristina was rethinking and reinterpreting well-known classics in her own way, like the Beatles' Drive My Car. Giving an idea of what rock - an old substance, therefore eager to transform into a hybrid creature - could become for the artists of the Lower East Side.

Here, in reality, the question is not so much about Cristina herself, but about retrieving the cover of the beautiful Sleep It Off - 1984 - and noting how it resembles a much more famous album, which came out a year later. An album whose fame does not require digressions.

Both covers are the work of Jean-Paul Goude, who greatly contributed to the creation of a different feminine imagery in the '80s - different much like that genetically altered rock that other New Yorkers, like Cristina, had envisioned with equally monstrous results. Those who remember the Citroen CX emerging from the mouth of a gigantic Grace Jones head in the middle of the desert - an idea also born from the complex psyche of Jean-Paul Goude - understand the kind of imagery we are talking about.

There isn't much in common between Grace and Cristina, to be honest. Apart from their covers. After all, we are comparing an artist whose visual impact was one of her many strengths with another of whom we barely know what she looked like. Except that the sound of both evolved by passing - to then emerge changed - from the Compass Point Studios in Nassau.

Here is the issue. Paradoxically, so much of that music associated with Manhattan, No Wave, and the Lower East Side's mutant disco did not take shape in New York. But, indeed, at entirely different latitudes. Many kilometers further south.

In 1977 - a crucial year - the Island guru Chris Blackwell was based there, a white man who had a considerable impact on the entire history of reggae and not just reggae (ask a certain Steve Winwood, among others). State-of-the-art studios, implicitly. Designed by someone who had learned something about production techniques in Kingston.

So much so that many went to Nassau to record back then. Names that had nothing to do with reggae (AC/DC, Iron Maiden, Dire Straits) or who were converting to the upbeat rhythm with a good dose of opportunism (the inevitable Stones, perhaps with the excuse of a usual health trip to the tropics, good for wintering and shedding the doses of world tours).

From the newly established Caribbean studios, a sound started spreading, which in a few years would cause quite a stir - in rock and in disco itself, contaminating both underground and pop chart music with few distinctions. The goal: breaking down barriers, creating a special sound alchemy. A pastiche with which to understand each other even speaking different languages.

This compilation (on the golden years of Compass Point) is almost 10 years old and it is excellent. It does not pretend to be complete - ultimately, how much history can a single CD hold? To think of it as a starting point (from which to begin delving) is the best way to enjoy it. Keywords: bass, reverberated drums at the console, Prophet-5 of the type handled by Wally Badarou, the deus ex machina of the Bahamian aesthetic and primary inspirer - with Billy Cobham - of trip hop yet to be conceived. Discover why.

Missing (as I just said, completeness is not claimed) is the artist who could have summarized in a career the evolution of the Compass aesthetic better than anyone else, and that is Robert Palmer. We miss him because he was an extraordinary pop artist, but also because - watershed Clues, the album of Johnny and Mary - few other discographies explain so well the transition from the '70s to the '80s (Secrets is still a '70s album, but the synth sound is clear). He recorded so much music in Nassau that calling him a naturalized Bahamian would be anything but a stretch.

He is nonetheless present as author and producer of You Rented a Space by Cristina (that Cristina mentioned above). Many things come together, as you can see.

We won't say much more about the obvious (Talking Heads, and consequently Tom Tom Club), except that the choice fell on Born Under Punches and Genius of Love. Nor about the No Wave icon Lizzy Mercier Descloux, whom we know explored uncharted territories around Remain In Light. Instead of Grace Jones' Nightclubbing, the less cited Living My Life with the 12'' dancehall of My Jamaican Guy was chosen, which has the merit of sounding perfect and prototypical, from the line-up that recorded it: Sly Dunbar on drums, Robbie Shakespeare on bass, Mickey “Mao” Chung on guitar (and Wally Badarou, the omnipresent one, on keyboards). To those less familiar with these names, I would say that I would buy an album with such credits blind.

Sly and Robbie are found again (the importance of credits, once more) as producers of much other music, from the hit Don't Stop the Music by Bits and Pieces to the equally famous Padlock by Gwen Guthrie, all material extensively sampled in the decades to follow. And the same Talking Heads wouldn't have conceived Speaking In Tongues (in which studios it was mixed remains a mystery...) without the path set by the Jamaican Rhythm Twins.

There is also Ian Dury (the often-censored Spasticus Autisticus) and there's Ian Dury's guitarist - that Chas Jankel who produced abundant Disco-Funk material in Nassau, never too far from the New York underground of the times, and here in collaboration (see, they were really all there, and Manhattan was indeed close to Nassau) with Laura Weymouth, the lesser-known sister of the two. The role of the outsider is played by the Cuban DJ Guy Cuevas, perhaps the least familiar to the average rockcentric listener - with his Obsession all bass in Bernard Edwards' style.

A world can open up with this collection, or it can make the known world seem even bigger.