ALICE CLARK

It was a late summer’s day in 1990 when Marc Lessner appeared in the Acid Jazz office and suggested that Ed Piller and I might want to adjourn to his van as he had something a little special for us.

Marc ran the Soul Trader van service, where he sold the latest releases around the network of small record shops that were everywhere in London. He had been importing in-demand deletions from the US and his recent trip to Chicago had yielded a couple of dozen copies of his latest discovery. From a box he pulled out two copies of an album with a mainly white cover and a picture of a woman in a hexagonal box in the centre. He flipped it over and pointed to one track – “‘Don’t You Care’, an absolute killer” – and told us that it would cost us £12 for a copy. I was never one to doubt a musical judgement from Marc, a man of impeccable taste, so cash exchanged hands and Ed and I walked away with a record that would soundtrack our lives for the next few years.