Album: Miriam Makeba, South Africa's Skylark (Nascente)

Football means diddlysquat to me, but at least the current World Cup has resulted a flood of great compilations with a South African theme.

And there's no musician more important to the history of this country than the singer and legendary civil-rights activist Miriam Makeba. Compiler Phil Meadley has inventively put all the traditional, more township jive-orientated material on one CD and the heavier, funkier and more politically motivated material on the other. A must-have collection.