In 1972, the founder of Island Records, Chris Blackwell, served as executive producer on Perry Henzell’s ground-breaking Jamaican film The Harder They Come.
A vibrant, eye-popping, reggae-pounding, rude-boy film, Blackwell had suggested Jimmy Cliff for the main role and included some of his songs on the soundtrack. After the film became a hit, Cliff walked away from any deal with Island Records and signed with EMI.
Blackwell was disappointed: “I was upset about that because I knew the way to break him was through the rebel character he portrayed in the film. But when the three Wailers walked into the office, here was the real thing.”
Chris Blackwell today with his Blackwell Rum
In 1973, Blackwell advanced £4000 to Bob Marley and The Wailers for their first album Catch a Fire. Never had a reggae band recorded an album as a unified statement; previously they were albums made from a collection of singles.
Seeking a wider audience, Blackwell took the eight-track tapes and with The Wailers approval, added steel guitar, synthesizer, organ and clavinet for “more of a drifting, hypnotic-type feel than a reggae rhythm.” He was intent on making Marley a rock star, rather than a black musician restricted to black radio stations.
After The Harder They Come, Catch a Fire was his second Jamaican cross-over in two years. A film and an album that transported the energy of reggae, and its Rastafarian religious culture, to an unsuspecting world.
This double-hit from Jamaica was hugely successful and with Marley in his portfolio, nothing would ever be the same for Blackwell. Variety was later to call him: “indisputably one of the greatest record executives in history.”
Blackwell was brought up in Jamaica by wealthy parents: his mother was a Costa Rican born Jamaican heiress and his father came from Anglo-Irish roots. They were wealthy enough to provide him with rent, living expenses and start-up financing well into his adult life. And send him to Harrow in the UK for his public-school education.
Catch Fire Album Cover
Back in Jamaica during the 1950s, Blackwell immersed himself in the mento and calypso music of Kingston, laboriously selling records from the boot of his car to jukeboxes and the growing “sound system” dancehalls across the island. His expertise at choosing hit tracks and working the room with Kingston’s music production industry put him in prime position to select musicians when new sounds emerged – ska, rock-steady, reggae and dub.
At the age of 22, joined by Leslie Kong and Graeme Goodall (an Australian), with start-up funding from his parents (as you do), he established Island Records in 1959.
A record executive who still boasts of wearing shorts and “flipflops”, he relocated Island Records to London in the early 1960s where his inhouse operating style was generally regarded as “organized chaos”.
Above all, Blackwell believed in discovering virtually unknown talent who promised to have long careers, as he had done with Jimmy Cliff and Bob Marley. The “underdogs, misfits and rejects” he was prepared to support even when album after album failed, stemmed from his conviction in the integrity of their musical talent, and the likelihood of that talent becoming future household names.
Island signings included the Spencer Davis Group, Nick Drake, John Martyn, Fairport Convention, Free, Sparks, King Crimson, Traffic, Toots and the Maytals, Roxy Music, Cat Stevens, Bob Marley and The Wailers, Steve Winwood, Mott the Hopple, The B-52s, Jethro Tull, Grace Jones, Nico, Marianne Faithfull, Tom Waits, John Cale, Eno, King Sunny Adé, Angéligue Kidjo, Robert Palmer and U2.
He passed on Pink Floyd (“too boring, the worst thing I’ve ever heard in my life”); and Procol Harum’s Whiter Shade of Pale (“unmarketable”); and punk (“not enough bass and rhythm”); and Elton John (“too shy and even staid”). The Rocketman didn’t speak to him for another 15 years.
Island grew into what was regarded as the greatest independent record company in the world with 100 employees in the UK and 120 in the USA.
In 1989, Blackwell sold Island to Polygram for $300 million. U2 had negotiated 10% ownership in Island in return for a delayed $10 million in royalty payments for their album The Joshua Tree, payments delayed by one of Island’s many revenue crises. U2 collected $30 million from the sale of the company.
After the success of The Harder They Come and the follow-up Jamaican film Countryman, Blackwell set up an Island film company, with a distribution division that included Kiss of the Spider Woman, Koyaanisqatsi, The Hit, El Norte, and Stop Making Sense. He has 19 producer credits listed on IMDB.
Blackwell’s autobiography is heavily detailed, poorly indexed and lacking in personality insights. I lost count of the number of “my wife at the time…” without learning anything about them.
Blanche Blackwell, "constantly pursued" by Errol Flynn
His time with Errol Flynn, who he regarded as having “helped popularize Jamaican music” during the 1950s, is an exception. Flynn, who constantly pursued Blackwell’s mother, was a role model for the young entrepreneur and his only role model in this autobiography.
Among many Flynn anecdotes, the Tasmanian actor recommended a “crack” Australian group called The Caribs to Blackwell. A house band playing mento and calypso in a tourist hotel in Surfers Paradise in the 1950s, Flynn helped them move permanently to Jamaica where they played residences in clubs and formed the backing band for Blackwell’s early studio recordings.
Ever a pragmatist, Blackwell had unique ideas on album covers:
“I really believe if people see something that looks good, subconsciously they’ll think maybe there’s something going on inside, on the record. There were times when someone came out with a cover which was better than the record itself, so I’d have to send them back to remake the record.”
