Hailu Mergia ‘Hailu Mergia & His Classical Instrument: Shemonmuanaye’ (Kaifa, 1985 / Awesome Tapes FROM Africa, 2013)

Parliament-Funkadelic. Underground Resistance. Wu-Tang. When you’re thinking about the great musical collectives of the past 50 years, your mind may not jump to the Japanese outfit Geinoh Yamashirogumi. 

Since the huge commercial success of Peter Jackson’s ‘The Lord Of The Rings’ movies, it’s been easy to forget the significance of the JRR Tolkien novel to the 1960s counterculture hippies.

It all began with a black and white photo, chanced upon in a book on the history of 20th century music.

An album can be revelatory in any number of ways. Perhaps it arrives at the right time in your life to be particularly resonant, or it might reveal a whole area of music you didn’t realise existed.

The artists that live on the fringes, the forward (or sideways) thinkers, have always drawn me in. This fascination really kicked in at university when, in the early 2000s, I presented a radio show with Erotic Volvo of Birmingham wrong-pop band Misty’s Big Adventure. As a kind of musicologist of the weird, his selections were never predictable and often a revelation.

The story is surely the stuff of legend: an uncompromising New York model hooks up with Burroughs and Basquiat and reinvents herself as an uncompromising musician and poet