After the highly successful and upbeat Stand! the follow up took two years to make while Sly's mental health collapsed and his cynicism and disillusionment flourished. His fan base found themselves at concerts waiting for hours. Often to no avail. Then There's A Riot Going On emerged to a reaction of bewilderment, annoyance and confusion, and that was just about the cover.

Sly's head was full of drugs and frustration. He was bombarded with political expectations, many people within the civil rights movement implying that his up tempo calls for peace and unity were not militant enough. But an album that could have been an angry 'call to arms' was tempered by his personal angst and inability to musically express anything louder than annoyance. It was a strange concoction.

This album might as well be encased in mud. Bass lines that sound like minor bruising barely wrap themselves around some of the most sarcastic and depressed lyrics you'll have heard. Even after innumerable listens the album sounds like its about to disintegrate at any point. Its arrangements seem designed to disguise the wafer thin funk with instruments and vocals tossed in almost haphazardly.

The man is, however, a genius, and this genius emerges triumphantly through. Possibly because he has been removed from the restraints of 60s pointless positivity for the first time. Give it several listens and you'll see how much it has influenced, more from its carefree despondent anger than anyone's ability to reproduce what remains a unique sound.

Despite all I said earlier it's genuinely hypnotic and totally enthralling. you may be watching a man drown but it's about as good as that gets. In fact I just might have to plead with you to listen to this as one of the most significant antidotes to the many empty hippy platitudes committed by musicians. Many of them by Sly himself. Paul Tarpey

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