One of the many extraordinary details/anecdotes I took away from Imogen Willetts' fantastic Up All Night is the tale of how Detroit techno came to be so enthusiastically embraced in Berlin. Ultimately, it all boils down to Jim Nash of Wax Trax! taking a shine to Clock DVA's 'The Hacker' and inviting the boss of their West German label InterFisch Records, Dimitri Hegemann, to visit. Nash invited Hegemann to stay and then to pick what he liked out of a stash of demo tapes at Wax Trax!'s warehouse. By complete coincidence, Hegemann selected and was instantly smitten by a tape by Jeff Mills, and the rest is history.
That incident (as well as the infamous Sex Pistols gig in Manchester in 1976, among other shows) sprung to mind when I came across this Guardian article on another remarkable sliding-doors moment in music history. There may already have been a compilation album released by Analog Africa ten years ago, but there's surely also a film to be made about the fact that the signature sound of Cape Verde owes its existence to a ship's lost cargo of keyboards and synths washing up on the archipelago's shores in the late 1960s/early 1970s.
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