Doris: Did You Give the World Some Love Today Baby [MR. BONGO]

Why you'll love it

Mr Bongo's reissue presents the original 1970 Odeon album in stereo, licensed from EMI. Its songs have since turned up on eleven retrospective compilations across Europe, and Blaxploitation.com counted it among the forty essential funk albums.

This edition

• Stereo

About the album

Some records take the long way round. Born in Gothenburg in 1947, Doris Svensson had been singing since 1962, cutting singles with The Strangers, Plums and The Dandys. She recorded this one at EMI's studio in Stockholm across four days in April and May 1970, and Odeon issued it in Sweden that year. It took a quarter of a century, and Mr Bongo's 1996 reissue, for the rest of the world to find it.

Jazz pianist and TV producer Berndt Egerbladh composed the music and wrote the big-band brass arrangements, Scottish writer Francis Cowan supplied most of the lyrics, Janne Carlsson of Hansson & Karlsson pounds the drums and Lucas Lindholm plays bass. The title track swings, "Don't" and "Beatmaker" bring the funk, and "You Never Come Closer" is the psychedelic jazz number The Sunday Times likened to Hendrix backing Björk.

Montreal's Mirror summed it up as perfectly hilarious and hilariously perfect. We've since tried to get that printed on the staff T-shirts.

Also at Kops: more Doris on vinyl · browse Pop

Tracklist

Listen

On Mr Bongo / Odeon (cat# MRBLP010), a reissue of the 1970 album.