It’s not too often you come across a record as rare as this one, but then away from the big hitters, Venezuela’s salsa history is still far from being told. Ramón Urbina was a musical prodigy, learning instrument after instrument by ear. He could have started a group with just himself, but he also wanted the camaraderie that came with a band, and so he formed Ramón y su Banda Latina in the early 1970s, a group which would later become Moncho Y Su Banda.

With both groups Ramón toured Venezuela, lighting up every club that they came to with their mix of Caribbean-inflected salsa, cumbia and merengue, with the odd bolero for the end of the night. Then in 1981 Ramón decided it was time to get one of his bands on tape, and Moncho Y Su Banda entered the studio. In truth, Ramón was unsure if the album would ever get released – they had no record label support – but it was impossible to ignore the energy and sheer imagination of his group. The album, Qué Bellas Son (How Beautiful They Are), sounded like a party, the kind of party you would do anything to be at, and a label picked it up, though only ever pressing 500 copies. Ramón carried on performing, and carries on to this day, but always from his home town of Charallave, where he has stayed loyal – perhaps too loyal, as Qué Bellas Son would be the only album he ever released during his career.

“Las 12” is one of the highlights of Qué Bellas Son, a burning salsa brava which, as is often the case with this kind of song, is about romance, but with a twist, for this is a song in which the man is under a woman’s spell. Written by Cuban composer Juan Bruno Tarraza in the 1940s it was with Beny Moré’s version, cast as a mambo-bolero, that the song first got attention, and its sentiment still sounds progressive with the male protagonist saying that it’s already midnight and still his love is not home. Only when she opens the door back home is he able to “duerme feliz” (“sleep well”). With a killer piano vamp, a horn section that knows exactly the right moment to turn on the heat, and a groove that flows all night long, it’s a fine introduction to an album that may not have got the attention it deserved on first release, but is destined to gain many more plaudits forty years down the line.