Soro

Sometime in spring this year, I drove to our old stamping ground of Tulle, the unlovely prefecture of the Corrèze, to visit a genuine record shop. They're few and far between these days – and just as well because there aren't too many bargains to be had since vinyl's resurgence. I'd been to check out a little shop in Limoges, packed to the rafters with treasures, and come away with yet more records that I didn't need, so restraint this time was a pre-requisite.

The Rev is a tiny little shop on one of the quaies or embankments of the Corrèze river, which flows through the centre of Tulle. Since it opens half way through the customary two-hour lunch break, I had the shelves to myself while the owner picked out tracks at the counter from a pile of new second-hand stock. I found a couple more of the Prestige, Milestone and Riverside label jazz doubles that I've been casually collecting since they came out in the mid '70s. But my heart really missed a beat when I pulled out a mint copy of Salif Keita's Soro.

It's been a part of this household since we moved to Sheffield in the late '80s and embarked on the adventure of married life – but in cassette form. And therein lay a bone of contention, since it was my ex-wife who had sent it to me as a kind of listen-to-what-you're-missing type of goodbye gift. There was probably a subtle dig, too, since it was recorded on a humble D90. If you think you're getting an AD90 from me, moosh, you've got another thing coming. And don't even think of a high-fidelity SA90.

But I mustn't be ungracious. Even on a lo-fi tape, both of us could tell that this man was someone truly special. I might have had one or two records by African artists at this point – I seem to remember picking up something by King Sunny Adé and by Sonny Okosuns, both worthy Nigerian artists, in Cheapo Cheapo Records, the shop in Soho that I would haunt with my friend and work colleague, Pedro, during the couple of years when I worked in the centre of London – but nothing like this. The extraordinary voice of the albino griot from Mali opened my ears to a whole new continent of music.

A year or so later, the Good Wife and I went to see Salif Keita with band, chorus and dancers at some squalid dive in a suburb of Manchester. We slipped an urchin a couple of quid supposedly to keep an eye on her beautiful convertible bottle-green Beetle, in which we would toured this part of France and espied our first future home. It was a fabulous concert, but the music couldn't quite dispel the image in my head of the VW Beetle in the car park with all its tyres slashed. Fortunately, it and we got back to Sheffield intact.

We saw him a second time under very different circumstances some 20 or so years later, playing in the now annual Brive Plage festival (where they dump a lot of sand in a central park and turn it into a kind of pre-fab tropical island). Keita still sang like an angel, but the youthful frisson of that Manchester gig was no longer there. Perhaps we'd grown progressively more blasé with each new edition of our friend Pete's Africa series of tapes and, later, CDs. We met him not long after that first gig and have benefited ever since from an apparent mission in life to promote the music he felt so passionate about.

Finding that gatefold album on the Sterns label in The Rev gave me an injection of youthful excitement. Hearing it back home on the record player in living, breathing stereo was akin to re-discovery. The African nobleman who had been cast out of his community due to a pigment disorder had gone three-dimensional in Cinemascope with Sensaround Sound. Now, that extraordinary heavenly voice just soared up skywards from the speakers.

Our friend Pete will certainly disagree with this choice, because electronic keyboards and modern production techniques do not go with the singer he would have first heard as vocalist for the Super Rail Band de Bamako or Les Ambassadeurs. Soro came out in 1987, by which time Salif Keita had moved to Paris to seek international fame. Inevitably, the production is more sophisticated – even slick, as detractors have suggested – but my God!, the power and the glory. The horn section alone is like Earth Wind & Fire's Phenix horns on steroids.

Apart from blowing my mind, what Soro did do was to send me figuratively scuttling back to West Africa in search of those earlier recordings. And very fine they are, too. Came the current century, this direct descendant of the warrior king who founded the empire of Mali back in the 13^th century went back to live and record in Bamako.

In 2002, he delivered unto us Moffou, which in some ways combines his older, traditional music with that which emanated from the French capital. There are many who cite it as his finest recording, and I for one wouldn't argue. By then, though, I knew more of what to expect. Soro, I suppose, was more like my first love. Nothing thereafter will ever quite be the same.

Having survived, fool that I am, for far too long with the flattened peaks of a basic cassette tape, I find myself in idle moments lowering the stylus on 'Wamba', the funked-up first track, and boosting the volume just to re-experience that spine-tingling first moment when Keita's voice leaps forth above the female chorus like an antelope being flushed out of its shelter by a lion. Words can't really describe a voice like Salif Keita's; you simply have to pin back your lugholes and experience it for yourself.

The man is in his mid-'60s now. Maybe unsurprisingly, he's gone back to his roots and is currently touring with an acoustic line-up. My friend Pete met the man when he was writing for a music magazine and by all accounts he's a charming individual. His 2009 release, La Différence, won an international award and pleads for tolerance and compassion towards albinos. Difference, the singer argues, is not a bad thing. I second that emotion. It's more than just a physiological difference that sets Salif Keita apart from the crowd.

Abbey Road

I somehow seem to have acquired two copies of this album over the years, which suggests how much I value The Beatles' artistic swansong. I think I snapped up my second copy in Cash Converters in the days just before vinyl had its second coming. It was going for a song and I rather fancied the idea of an Apple album made in France by Pathé Marconi.

My sister and brother-in-law have two copies of Sergeant Pepper hidden away in a trunk full of Cat Stevens and Rod Stewart albums that never see the light of day. Being an acquisitive collector, I am of course jealous, but it was actually Abbey Road and not its more lauded iconic predecessor that re-kindled my love affair with the Fab Four.

Earlier in my life, after a period of my childhood when my siblings and I would divide up our meals into four portions, one for each Beatle (and the best bits for our particular faves), over-exposure and perhaps an innate rebelliousness led me to jump the yellow submarine for a few years' close allegiance to the Rolling Stones. That lasted up to and including Let It Bleed, whereupon I became far too caught up in the progressive-music underground bandwagon.

Emerging, though, from a darkened bedroom where I would listen to the questionable glories of Yes, King Crimson and Van der Graaf Generator, spread-eagled on my bed between the two tinny speakers of my first very own stereo system, I bought my first copy of Abbey Road to see what all the fuss was about. My decision was no doubt assisted by that simple but evocative cover of the now shaggy-headed foursome striding across that famous North London zebra crossing.

It's all part of the album's mystique: from all those absurd rumours about Paul's barefoot death to the various homages that have appeared over the years (and what initial indignation I felt when I first saw Booker T. & the MGs' McLemore Avenue, before remembering that imitation was the sincerest form of flattery). And how appropriate it is that their last sojourn in the Abbey Road studios was to produce this their final masterpiece, so they could bow out with a creative bang rather than the desultory whimper that was Let It Be. Giving it this simple title was a nice way to acknowledge the importance of George Martin and his recording domain over the course of their career.

There's also something appropriate in the way that George's contributions finally equalled and even perhaps trumped those of Lennon and McCartney after all those begrudging allocations of a little space on each album for his song-writing efforts. Right at the last, George asserts that he was quite competent after all, thank you very much – only for Frank Sinatra (was it?) to go and spoil it all by saying something stoopid like 'Something' was his favourite Lennon and McCartney number.

While George graduates summa cum laude, it's Ringo's turn to provide some padding, although 'Octupus's Garden' is certainly rather charming and every bit as worthwhile as, say, Paul's 'Maxwell's Silver Hammer', which pales into insignificance beside the first two tracks on Side 1: John's 'Come Together' with its memorable cryptic lyrics, followed by 'Something'. 'Oh Darlin' is notable for Paul's superb singing and the side ends with the long and winding and ultimately somewhat tedious 'I Want You'.

In truth, it's not their finest half hour, but the second side makes up for it with knobs on and transforms Abbey Road into a truly great album. When I first heard it, I was a little mystified. I'd never heard anything quite like the suite of song snippets that follows George's lovely 'Here Comes The Sun'. They all segued into each other, 'Sun King' seemed a curiously close echo of George's song, themes fade out only to reappear a little later and to drop the arm on an individual track demanded guesswork and a lot of luck.

Once I got used to it, though, it would become my single-most played and beloved side of a Beatles' album. It's audacious, creative, dramatic and chock full of such tuneful delights as 'She Came In Through The Bathroom Window', 'Mean Mr. Mustard', 'You Never Give Me Your Money' and 'Carry That Weight'. My wife and I would sing 'Golden Slumbers' to our daughter at bed time and she grew up to love this album as much as we do. Or more accurately, she grew up – as many of her generation have done – to love The Beatles as much as we do.

It has been with me for longer than I care to think, followed me on all my travels – from Northern Ireland to England and then on to France – and I shall give that second copy to my daughter when finally she's ready to flee the parental home. It's a testimony to an album's creative endurance when it can be handed down from one generation to the next without any kind of condescension.