The record collector and label founder Eric Isaacson recently told the story of rooting through a damp cellar in Portland, Oregon, finding rare LPs and promos amid the debris and dirt of an old bandleader’s life. The blind owner had spent his last few years scribbling furious messages to himself, or to posterity. On one scrap of paper, Isaacson read, “No one has God on their side except Nina Simone”. It’s hard, after listening to a new compilation of five classic Simone albums, to disagree, or at least to understand what the old man meant. When on form, and in later years she often wasn’t, she sang with a relentless fury, the depth and almost masculine timbre of her voice adding to the impression that Jehovah himself spoke through her. Add to that a hard-edge