My introduction to African music came in 1972, when I saw Osibisa playing with Roxy Music at one of the Crystal Palace Garden Party concerts. Led by the Ghanaian saxophonist Teddy Osei, the band also included a couple of West African drummers and a bassist and lead guitarist from the Caribbean. As an 18–year–old rock’n’roll fan, to me they were just another band, albeit one with an exotic, tropical influence. Indeed, it rather shows how ignorant we were about world music at the time, for I distinctly remember thinking of them as being a UK–based equivalent of Santana. In fairness to my younger self, however, listening to The Very Best Of Osibisa today, I can hear why. Antiguan guitarist Wendell Richardson had clearly modelled his playing on Carlos Santana and some of the rhythms have a strong Latin tinge, as so much West African music did at the time. More importantly, many of their songs still sound terrific today, from the driving Afro–beat of 1971’s ‘Music For Gong Gong’ and the gentler ‘Woyayo’ to their 1980 dance floor update of Miriam Makeba’s ‘Pata Pata, via their 1975 highlife/disco–pop hit ‘Sunshine Day’.

Astonishingly, Osibisa are still going strong today. Although Osei is the only remaining original member, there’s a strong feeling of stepping through a timewarp to Osee Yee, enhanced by the fact that the cover features new, phantasmagorical artwork by Roger Dean, who did the striking flying elephant sleeve designs for their early albums almost 40 years ago. Little has changed musically, either, and the current nine–piece band create a pleasing African jazz–rock fusion with subtle Latin and R&B embellishments that never strays far from the original trademark sound, heard to best effect on the explosive ‘Watusi’ and ‘Yen Ara Ghana’. Only an anodyne cover of George Harrison’s ‘My Sweet Lord’ really misses the mark.