Trying to select seventy minutes of music to represent a wide-ranging body of work was starting to look impossible. But we couldn’t give up so we chose the top 25 from that list, created an online poll and then asked everyone on the Blacklist (Colin’s mailing list — no pun left unpunned) to vote for their favourites. This compilation is the result. Here are the top fifteen tracks as voted by the fans plus, as an added bonus, a brand-new re-mix of a song from Colins studio album, Water On Stone; Tomorrow is Another Night and a second disc of 10 further tracks.

Colin Vearncombe first stepped onto a stage as Black in January 1981 and a journey began. Over the course of the next decade, four Black albums and more than a dozen singles were released by three independent labels and two major record companies resulting in several million record sales. ‘Wonderful Life’ and ‘Sweetest Smile’ being amongst the highlights. By 1992 he‘d been to most of the places he’d ever had a hankering to visit, endured the terrible highs and fabulous lows of fame and learned many things — largely about himself. Two of these self-realisations were that first; he had no desire to follow a path that was commercially interesting to a modern record label and second; he craved the creative freedom and control over his work that he could only obtain by owning his own label and copyrights. Nero Schwarz was formed for that exact purpose and has since released eight studio albums, four live albums and one collection of mainly unreleased recordings and now it’s time to compile a record that represents some of the highlights of the journey — so far.

Tragically that journey ended on 26th January 2016. Colin never regained consciousness following a road traffic accident 16 days earlier. In tribute Volume 2 of the vinyl, brings another 8 tracks from the fans online poll.