Music Arcades: Various: The World at One

I had to open my packing case of audio cassettes under the stairs to dig this one out. That case hasn't been opened since I left Sheffield, over three years ago.

This is a compilation that the NME put out in 1987 — not a cover-mounted giveaway, mind you, but a cassette you had to order, sending your cheque by post. (A person could learn stuff from the NME in those days, and not just about non-mainstream music: my interest in Burroughs' writing and Tarkovsky's films was first sparked by NME features on them; but then in the late '80s the middlebrow generation of journalists moved in, and they made it more fun, and more financially viable; but something was lost along the way, and the music press has never been the same since — even if The Wire took on the mantle of the risk-taking, broad-minded parts of the NME — end of grump.) Roy Carr played a part in compiling this and other NME cassettes that I have. He did a great job.

Comparing this with the earlier 1980s world music compilation in my collection, it shares three cornerstone elements: a track by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (he was ubiquitous then, and carried a lot of world music weight — even now his nephew keeps the band going, and I saw them play at the Barbican last November), a Balinese gamelan track, and a griot from West Africa accompanied by a kora.

It also has tracks by Salif Keita and Ofra Haza, both of whom released albums around that time that managed to combine the aura of authenticity from their native traditions with 80s high-tech and production styles.

When you hear just how disparate the music, the instrumentation and the styles are on this compilation, you wonder how the term World Music has managed to hold on at all. But it has.