There’s got to be a first time for everything, but it’s still pretty astonishing that after 45 years of funkin’, even the Groove Overlord misses some thangs. Just within the last couple of months, I was hipped to two classic funk acts I don’t recall hearing of before: Cymande and Maxayn. As the 2022 documentary film Getting It Back: The Story of Cymande makes clear, this UK funk/reggae band was not particularly obscure: from the very beginning of the disco era, DJs were playing their music; they backed Al Green on tour in the mid-1970s; and they were idols to dozens of hip hop artists. During their too-brief heyday, Cymande was more popular in the US than in the UK. Usually it’s the other way around.

Like British reggae bands Aswad and Steel Pulse, Cymande’s members were the sons of the Windrush Generation, immigrants who came to the UK from the British West Indies in the 1950s. They grew up in a hostile, overtly racist environment, facing harassment and violence from the police and white Britons who didn’t necessarily want to do the jobs the newcomers were doing, but also didn’t like them being there.