Sweet & Nice

This is really worth seeking this out with its original tracklisting - rather than one of the various cut’n’shut versions like Play me Sweet and Nice — because its 36 minutes are absolutely perfectly structured. This is nominally a reggae album, packed with cover versions, and as such is easily on a par with classics of the genre like 1,000 Volts of Holt. But before it gets to that, there are four distinctly Jamaican takes on funk, soul and disco: the disco-paced version of “Everything I Own” is a dancefloor monster, and “Here I Am (Come and Take Me)”, “Green Grasshopper” and “Children at Play” have the slow southern funk of Al Green or Isaac Hayes at their best. The reggae tracks are glorious too, mind: most of all Griffiths’s take on “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” which can render the hardest heart to quivering jelly.