“Mambo Nassau” was recorded at the same studio the Talking Heads two months before had laid down its tracks (in the summer of 1980) for “Remain in Light.” The studio, Compass Point in Nassau, Bahamas, was owned by Island Records founder Chris Blackwell, the man most responsible for bringing reggae to the American mainstream.
It’s fitting, then, that the two albums were among the earliest examples of rock incorporating African polyrhythms (Talking Heads had dabbled in Afrobeat on a couple of songs on 1979’s “Fear of Music”). In the Heads’ case, “Remain in Light” would become one of the band’s most respected album and spawn legions of imitators.
For French musician Lizzy Mercier Descloux, who never quite caught on with the general public, “Mambo” was just one in a series of artistic adventures in a life cut short by cancer in 2003. Descloux went on to record the less accessible “Zulu Rock” in 1984, a blend of African folk and French pop that topped many critics’ lists, followed by an album with Chet Baker a year before he fell out of a hotel window to his death (1986’s “One for the Soul”).
A fixture in France’s burgeoning punk scene by 1975, on visits to New York she palled around with Patti Smith and Richard Hell. It was there she recorded her first solo album, 1979’s “Press Color,” the peppiest slab of no wave to emerge from that short-lived anti-music rebellion.
Here is Descloux at her finest on “Room Mate,” from “Mambo Nassau.”
EARGGH! 