It's hard not to squirm reading the sleeve notes to this compilation. "Women," they announce brightly, "have taken integral roles throughout the Studio One empire." Indeed they have: doing the filing, teaching the men how to sing and, in the case of Clement Dodd's mother, cooking for the assembled throng of musicians and producers. Anyone who owns even a fraction of Soul Jazz's umpteen Studio One compilations will know from the track listings how rarely women got to record music in their own right.

When they did, the singers had a neat line in revenge: "Tell me where have all the good men gone?" asks Jennifer Lara, her voice steeped in honey. Angela Prince is even more brilliantly forthright in You a Fool Boy, a wonderful put-down to a man under the mistaken impression that he can mess around.

Occasionally, you get the sense that these recordings were made in the spare hours when the male stars were failing to get their act together: you have to root around to find the musical experimentation that made Studio One famous. It emerges on Hortense Ellis's I'm Just a Girl, a sweet song that unexpectedly rockets into space halfway through, erupting with weird bubbling noises and radiating moonbeams. More surreal still is Denise Darlington's War No Right, a song advocating peace and unity peppered with the violent sound of whips cracking. More of these sorts of surprises would have made an intriguing compilation a fantastic one.