About 25 years ago I wrote a big exposé about one of the first New Age ambient albums, called Sacred Spirit.

Subtitled Chants And Dances Of The Native Americans, it set them against ‘tribal’ drums amid a mellifluous electronic soundscape, creating what would become the template for the whole “chill-out” genre.

The album cover featured a handsome Native American dude and the sleeve notes boasted that the proceeds from album sales would go to a non-profit organisation benefiting Native American Indians.

When the record became a sensation, selling seven million copies and making a fortune for Virgin Records – and presumably those lucky Native Americans – my boss at the Evening Standard told me to find out the story behind this phenomenon.

My inquiries led me not to the Wild West but to Ibiza, where the album’s creator, ‘The Fearsome Brave’, turned out to be a middle-aged German music producer called Claus Zundel.

It was he who was responsible for the synth music and even the ‘tribal’ drumming. And, awkwardly, the chants themselves.

It seems the real chants, sampled from the Navajo, Pueblo and Sioux tribes, just didn’t sound “authentic” enough to ears accustomed to the chants we grew up on in Hollywood Westerns. So Claus brought in to make some more authentic-sounding chants.

I also found out, eventually, after some calls to the Native American organisation mentioned in the album credits as benefiting from the project, that their windfall amounted to a measly $1,000 – and that it had to be divided between 12 Native American tribes.

You’ll be surprised to hear that my two-page exclusive didn’t go down too well at Virgin, whose press officer sent me a phenomenally rude handwritten note informing me that no one in the music biz would ever talk to me again.

Which turned out to be as true as those sleeve notes.
Bit my favourite part of the whole story came after publication when someone from Breakfast Television rang me up asking if I knew how they could get hold of the good-looking cover star to bring him into the studio.

They seemed crestfallen when I pointed out he had died more than a century earlier.

But I digress. And I mention this only because today I received a recording of genuine Native American chants by a fellow called Joe Rainey.

He is a real live Native American from the Ojibwe tribe in Canada, though he grew up in Minneapolis, where he is a respected “pow wow” singer.

If I’m honest, I’m not crazy about the music but I’m fascinated by pow wow culture, which was outlawed by the US government for a generation and defiantly maintained in secret by Native elders.

And there’s no doubt that Rainey is a real Native American. And, in case anyone from breakfast telly is reading, he’s still alive.