This sounds so incredible on my stereo. I thought my ears weren't good enough to pick up the difference between vinyl and CD, but the African drums on this just have that warm, rounded, almost tuned 'douffff' to them, and the guitars (sounding curiously similar to the playing on the contemporaneous Ice Cream for Crow, by the way) are in a different space in the, ooh, sound image. I've never heard a CD sound as good as this.
I think I got this probably in early 1984: my memory was saying it was the Our Price in Bridge Street, and the £5.69 sticker inside backs up at least the Our Price part of this. For me this was one of my earliest experiences of African and 'world music', and I'd just heard of King Sunny Adé via NME or Eno or some combination.
What I'd really like to know is how my ears have changed since the time when I bought and first played this record. On initial listening this time around, I heard a resemblance to Sun Ra in one of the tracks — a reference that I could never have made in 1984, when the range of music I'd heard was… a quarter? a tenth? of what it is now. But what my ears lacked in experience, they made up for in lack of preconceptions and general openness. Now I'm too quick to let my ear skim over the sounds, like an eye might skim over a text when you think you know what it says.
I hadn't realised until I checked up on the web that this was King Sunny Adé's first album to be widely released in the northern hemisphere. Apparently he's still around, though I've heard very little of him for at least fifteen years. His music isn't so dance- and party-oriented as The Bhundu Boys or as overtly political as Fela Kuti, so perhaps that meant that journalists and other media couldn't write features about him so easily (they'd actually have to focus on the music rather than the back-story).
 MusicBrainz entry for this album
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