‘Them leave sorrow, tears and blood, Them regular trademark… My people self dey fear too much, We fear for the thing we no see… We fear to fight for freedom.’
Magnificent defiance from 1977.

‘Another underground spiritual’, as the opening puts it, about Botha and apartheid,and supporters like Thatcher, Reagan and the Dis-United Nations. (‘One veto vote is equal to 92 or more, or more’).

Shakara is killer, with Fela and Africa 70 right at the top of their game. London Scene has Egbe Mi O, where afrobeat is joined spine-tinglingly by the Abbey Road house choir.

50th Anniversary Reissue; ‘Igbo smoke vinyl’.

Scorcher! An all-time funk favourite of Afrika Bambaataa.
Anniversary edition, with extras.

The song Original Suffer Head — an angry homage to working-class Nigerians — presented in its full-length, 25 minutes, 24 seconds glory, restoring four minutes of ‘lost’ material, including a superb keyboard solo by Fela, which appeared on the original pressing, but has been omitted from subsequent reissues. The version used here starts and finishes with this characteristically visceral, futuristic keyboard work.
This was the first album Fela released under the name Egypt 80 (after disbanding Afrika 70 in 1979).

‘The penultimate album of newly recorded studio material released by Fela before his death in 1997.
‘Like its immediate predecessor, Beasts Of No Nation (also 1989), and its follow up, Underground System (1992), the album finds Fela continuing to campaign for human rights and social change despite the relentless beatings, jailings and general harassment he had received from successive military regimes since the start of the 1970s.’