Album Preview: Various Artists, Funky Nassau - The Compass Point Story 1980-1986 (Strut)

In the early Eighties, Island Records founder Chris Blackwell’s Compass Point Studio in the Bahamas mixed disco and new wave.

On one level, there was an etiolated form of disco represented here by Will Powers’ tedious “Adventures In Success”; but more significant breakthroughs were being made by Talking Heads with the itchy precision of “Born Under Punches”, and particularly by their spin-off project The Tom Tom Club, whose “Genius Of Love” was an early electro-funk milestone.

Not all the clients were that talented, though: the studio became a haunt of artists on New York’s trendy Ze label, represented here by Lizzy Mercier Descloux and Cristina, snooty sirens too stand-offishly cool to be truly alluring.

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