Most music industry memoirs are replete with celebrity attribution. The Islander: My Life in Music and Beyond, by Island Records founder Chris Blackwell – whose success with Bob Marley, U2, Steve Winwood and Grace Jones would have had much to offer – begins with a parable instead.
In 1955, Blackwell was a wealthy 18-year-old Englishman whose family was part of Jamaica’s colonial elite. Lost and thirsty after his motorboat ran out of gas, Blackwell encountered a Rastafarian man – a member of a then-outcast group feared by Anglo-Jamaicans as menacing “black-hearted men”. But this dreaded Samaritan accepted Blackwell into his community and offered him food, water, and a place to rest; The young visitor awoke to find his hosts quietly reading from the Bible.
This encounter set Blackwell on a remarkable journey through music, with Jamaica at its heart. He’s one of the main contributors to popularizing reggae around the world, and as Iceland grew into a transatlantic mini-empire of rock, folk, reggae and pop, it’s become a model for nimble and eclectic indie labels everywhere.
Still, it may now be impossible not to also view the Rastafari episode through the lens of race and colonialism as the story of a privileged young man who is given access to the primarily black culture that would make him wealthy and powerful. Blackwell, who turns 85 this month, admitted the debt in a recent interview.
“I was just someone who was a fan,” he said, in a soft upper-class accent inherited from his time in British public schools. “I grew up among blacks. I spent more time with black people than white people because I was an only child and I was ill. They were the staff, the gardeners, the orderlies. But I cared for her very much and realized early on how different her life was from mine.”
When asked why he started the label in 1959, he said: “I guess I just thought I’d give it a go. It wasn’t about Chris Blackwell making a hit or anything. It was really an attempt to uplift the artists.”
EVEN THOUGH HE IS from the same generation of music impresarios as Berry Gordy and Clive Davis, who have cultivated their public reputation for decades, Blackwell is perhaps the most reclusive and least understood of the so-called “record men”. As label boss or producer, he’s been behind epoch-making music by Cat Stevens, Traffic, Roxy Music, the B-52’s, Robert Palmer and Tom Tom Club, not to mention U2 and Marley.
But in his heyday, Blackwell went so far as to avoid the limelight that there are few photos of him with Marley – he didn’t want to be seen as a white Svengali for a black star. Blackwell met last month for coffee and eggs near the Upper West Side apartment where he spends a few weeks a year. Blackwell had a thin white beard and was dressed in faded sweatshirts and sneakers. Back in Jamaica, his footwear of choice is flip flops or nothing at all.
“It’s no exaggeration to say that Chris has been a role model for some of us in life,” U2’s Bono wrote in an email. “I remember once he said to me as he was standing in front of one of his properties, ‘Try not to shove your success in the face of people who aren’t having as much success. Try to be discreet.’ His perfect manners and clumsy tremolo in one voice never came across as pretentious. He was always himself.”
Paul Morley, the music journalist who co-wrote “The Islander” with Blackwell, said it wasn’t until after Blackwell sold Island to PolyGram — it’s now part of the giant Universal Music Group — for nearly $300 million in 1989 — that he started doing something to show interest in maintaining his place in history.
“Chris always likes to be in the background,” said Jones, who released her first Iceland record in 1977. “I’m actually surprised he did the book.”
BORN 1937 Blackwell comes from a family that made a fortune in Jamaica growing sugar cane and making rum, and grew up on the island with wealthy Brits and celebrity vacationers. His mother Blanche was friends with Errol Flynn and Noël Coward. She also had a long-running affair with Ian Fleming, who wrote his James Bond novels at the nearby GoldenEye estate — though in the book and in person, Blackwell goes no further than describing the two as “the very best of friends.”
In the late 1950s, Blackwell was involved in the burgeoning Jamaican pop business. He supplied records to jukeboxes and the operators of “sound systems” for outdoor dance parties; “I was pretty much the only one there with my skin color,” he recalled.
He soon began producing his own records. In 1962 Blackwell moved to London and began licensing ska singles – reggae’s bubbly, upbeat predecessor – which he sold from the trunk of his Mini Cooper to shops catering to Jamaican immigrants.
In 1964, he landed his first hit with “My Boy Lollipop,” a two-minute piece of exquisite slobbery sung by a Jamaican teenager, Millie Small. The song peaked at number 2 in the UK and US and sold more than six million copies, although Blackwell was appalled at how quickly fame had transformed Millie’s life. Back in Jamaica, her mother, Millie, hardly seemed to recognize her and curtseyed to her daughter like she was visiting royalty. “What had I done?” Blackwell wrote. He vowed to stop chasing pop hits as an end in itself.
The Islander, which arrived on Tuesday, makes the case for the record label boss not as a domineering captain but as an enabler of serendipity. Shortly after his success with Millie, Blackwell saw the Spencer Davis Group, whose singer, teenage Steve Winwood, “sounded like Ray Charles on helium.” In 1967 Blackwell rented a cabin for Winwood’s next band, Traffic, to jam and seemed content just to see what they had come up with there.
A little over a decade later, Blackwell assembled Jones with the house band at Compass Point, the studio he had built in the Bahamas. Jones said the results made her a better artist.
“I found my voice working with Chris,” she said in an interview. “He allowed me to be myself and expand in a way by connecting me with musicians. It was an experiment, but it really worked.”
When U2 began work on their fourth album, The Unforgettable Fire, the band wanted Brian Eno to produce. Blackwell, who considered Eno an avant-gardist, dismissed the idea. But after speaking to Bono and The Edge about it, Blackwell accepted their decision. Eno and Daniel Lanois produced The Unforgettable Fire and its follow-up The Joshua Tree, which established U2 as global superstars.
“As he understood the band’s desire to evolve and grow, to access other colors and moods,” added Bono, “he avoided a relationship that proved crucial for us. The story reveals more about the depth of Chris’ dedication to serving us, rather than the other way around. There was never bullying.”
BLACKWELL’S MOST FASCINATING Artist relationship was with Marley where he used a stronger hand and had an even greater impact.
Although Island had distributed 1960s singles by the Wailers, Marley’s band with Bunny Livingston and Peter Tosh, Blackwell did not meet her until 1972 after the group had wrapped up a UK tour but needed money to return to Jamaica. He was immediately struck by her presence. “They didn’t look broken when they walked in,” he said. “They looked like royalty.”
But Blackwell advised them that to get radio play they had to present themselves not as a simple reggae band but as a “black rock act” and aim for “college kids” (code for a middle-class white audience). Blackwell recalls that Livingston and Tosh were skeptical, but Marley was intrigued. The three recorded the basic tracks for their next album in Jamaica, but Blackwell and Marley then reworked the tapes in London, bringing in white session players like guitarist Wayne Perkins and keyboardist John Bundrick.
The resulting album, Catch a Fire, was the slickest-sounding reggae release of its time, although it also sparked a debate that lingers to this day: How much did Marley’s Blackwell and Island sound and image become in favor of a white crossover? That question becomes clearer as Blackwell recounts the origins of Legend, the hits compilation Island released in 1984, three years after Marley’s death.
In the book, Blackwell writes that he gave the job to Dave Robinson of Stiff Records, who came to Iceland after Blackwell made a deal with Stiff. Robinson, surprised by the low sales of Marley’s catalogue, aimed at mainstream white audiences. That meant refining the track listing to favor uplifting songs and narrowing down his more confrontational political music. Marketing for the album, which included a video starring Paul McCartney, downplayed the word “reggae.”
It worked: “Legend” became one of the most successful albums of all time and, according to Blackwell, sold 27 million copies worldwide. And it hasn’t erased Marley’s legacy as a revolutionary.
Marley’s daughter Cedella, who runs the family business as chief executive of the Bob Marley Group of Companies, had no complaints. “You can’t regret ‘Legend’,” she said in an interview. “And if you want to listen to loving Bob, revolutionary Bob, playful Bob – it’s all there.”
In The Islander, Blackwell drops startling trivia. He declined to sign Pink Floyd, he writes, “because they seemed too boring to him,” and Madonna, “because I couldn’t figure out what on earth I could do for them.”
Still, it’s sometimes puzzling what Blackwell omits or downplays. Despite reggae’s centrality to Iceland’s history, giants of the genre like Black Uhuru and Steel Pulse are only briefly mentioned. Blackwell writes about former wives and girlfriends, but not his two sons.
Even those who might be offended still seem to be in awe. Dickie Jobson, a friend and collaborator who directed the 1982 film Countryman, about a man who embodied Rastafarianism, gets little ink. “Chris’s best friend in life was my cousin Dickie Jobson, so I was a bit disappointed with the book that only mentions Dickie three times,” said Wayne Jobson, a producer also known as Native Wayne. “But Chris has a lot of friends,” he said, adding that Blackwell is “a national treasure of Jamaica.”
The final chapters of the book are the most dramatic, with Blackwell recounting how cash shortages — Iceland once couldn’t pay U2’s royalties, so Blackwell gave the band 10 percent of the company instead — and bad business decisions led to Island selling. “I have no regrets because I brought myself there,” Blackwell said. “I made my own mistakes”
After selling most of his music interests, Blackwell has devoted his last few years to his resort properties in Jamaica, seeing promoting the country like an artist as his final legacy. Any improvement or adjustment to GoldenEye, for example, he sees as “remixing”.
“If you say it yourself, it sounds sloppy,” Blackwell said. “But I love Jamaica. i love jamaican People from Jamaica took care of me. And I always felt like I would do anything to help.”