the Must Have Albums: Grace Jones - SLAVE TO THE RHYTHM

Having reached the end of her contract with Island Records after 1982’s Living My Life, Grace took a sabbatical from music to launch her film career with turns in Conan The Destroyer opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger and as the Bond villain May Day in A View To A Kill. Her spectacular return to music at the end of 1984 was to be her most avant-garde project to date.

Originally earmarked for Frankie Goes To Hollywood, the concept of Slave To The Rhythm, taking the genesis of a single song and reinterpreting it into different styles and arrangements, was a huge success for Grace, with her deadpan vocal delivery the perfect accompaniment to Trevor Horn’s stellar production and state-of-the-art experimentation. Snippets of an interview with Grace by Paul Morley were interwoven throughout the album, earning it the subtitle “a biography”(30 years later they reunited to write her autobiography). Slave To The Rhythm was as much an art project as it was an album. It was one of the fi rst multimedia packages, with a cut-andpaste sensibility running cohesively through the music, videos and the artwork.

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