Even with the departure of the smoky-voiced Shara Nelson, this English dance-pop outfit still delivers brilliant body music that doesn't neglect the brain. Cool, sexy stuff, it smoothly fuses dub, club and soul, grounding its grace in sampled hip-hop beats. With four vocalists on board — Everything but the Girl's Tracey Thorn, reggaeman Horace Andy, Nigerian-born Nicolette and rapper Tricky — Protection lacks the focus of the masterful 1991 debut Blue Lines. But it lingers longer. "Karmacoma," "Sly" and the instrumental "Heat Miser" sizzle and insinuate; band members 3-D, Mushroom and Daddy G are ruminators, too, who expertly render mixed emotion — passion crossed with sadness or the tension of glamour and threat that surges through "Eurochild": "I walk in a bar, and immediately I sense danger."

“All Along the Watchtower”

Jimi Hendrix got hold of Bob Dylan's early John Wesley Harding tapes and in late 1967 recorded a version of "All Along the Watchtower" with the Experience in London. Dissatisfied with that first development, Hendrix brought those tapes with him to New York in early 1968 when he began work on Electric Ladyland. Eddie Kramer, Hendrix's engineer at the time, told Rolling Stone that Hendrix "was still looked upon by his basically white audience as the mammoth black guitar hero. There was a constant fight within him to expand himself." Hendrix's successful take on Dylan's work has long been recognized by the songwriter. "I liked Jimi Hendrix's record of this and ever since he died I've been doing it that way," Dylan wrote in the liner notes to his Biograph box set. "Strange how when I sing it, I always feel it's a tribute to him in some kind of way."