To celebrate the 65th birthday of the first Black African women to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, we asked Angélique Kidjo to talk through the five of her most influential and life-changing recordings, starting with 1981 debut Pretty in Paris, recorded aged 20 with legendary Cameroonian singer Ekambi Brillant at the helm. A decade later she hit the mainstream with the commercial breakthrough Logozo, released in 1991 after the intervention of Island Records founder Chris Blackwell; next we discuss the trio of conceptual root-tracing records begun with 1998’s Oremi. And of course, we had to talk about Kidjo recruited legends including Carlos Santana, Alicia Keys, Peter Gabriel and Ziggy Marley for 2007’s Grammy-winning Djin Djin, before moving onto late-career orchestral masterpiece Sings (2015), and the subsequent collaboration with Phillip Glass it sparked. An incredible life, incredibly told by the singular human who lived it all.