NThe year sixty-two was a great year for both Jamaica and Chis Blackwell. The country gained its independence and hosted the first James Bond film, Dr. No, where Blackwell worked as a repairman, recommending locations and recruiting his musician friends as flu, extras, even as musicians. Co-producer Harry Saltzman was so impressed that he offered Blackwell a job as a PA. The 25-year-old scolded; he was already on his knees in the hectic Jamaican music industry and about to leave the island to establish his own label, Island, in London. Only after consulting “a Lebanese fortune teller from the center” did he choose the music before the film.
His decision was the good fortune of the world. For the next 40 years, Blackwell helped revolutionize popular music, his label becoming synonymous with uncompromising arts and acts that shaped the era. Traffic, Cat Stevens, Free, Fairport Convention and Nick Drake arrived in the 1960’s, followed by Roxy Music, U2, Robert Palmer and Grace Jones. Then there were the curious ones who passed by (Sparks, Frankie Goes to Hollywood), venerable boos like Tom Waits, and there was always reggae; from the international hit Millie Small in 1964, My Boy Lollipop, two minutes of teenage joy, to Bob Marley, the downtown rebel who became the first superstar in developing countries.
Born into the upper classes (think Crosse and Blackwell), Blackwell has an exotic background. Her father was an Irish guard officer, and her mother, Blanche, a Jamaican heiress born in Costa Rica and a glamorous socialite, pursued, after her divorce, Errol Flynn and Ian Fleming, both regular visitors to the island. of the Caribbean where Blackwell grew up. . As a child, he was ill and lonely, conditions that the fact of sending him to English public schools did not help much to cure. He hated Harrow, where his voyages led to a public whipping and expulsion at the age of 17. He found work at both ends of Jamaican society, becoming a gopher for Governor Sir Hugh Foot and the holder of the Wurlitzer jukebox license, which involved crossing the island. load the important local jukebox with aspects of black America and, increasingly, JA’s booming music scene itself: “a job for which there was no qualification and I was good.”
Blackwell’s account of his time fighting for Jamaica’s young music scene, dealing with boastful producers like Coxsone Dodd and an array of sound systems and stamps in brazen competition, is a rich cultural history. At first, Blackwell was an exporter, sending ska songs to the UK expatriate market and licensing his own imprint on the island. In London he carved a cheeky, good-looking figure, an upper class, a West End mews house and a model bride, bowling Neasden or Lewisham, his green racing Mini Cooper stuffed with Derrick’s 45-box Morgan and James Brown. – the latter because Blackwell had closed a deal with Sue Records of New York, a soul cult label.
Quick to find his feet in the British music business, Blackwell signed the group Spencer Davis and his requested singer, Steve Winwood, who graduated from hard R&B hits like Gimme Some Loving to form Traffic, whose debut album, Mr. Fantasia, instantly turned them into beloved hippies. The record was the first of the Pink Island label, “the farthest color from ska and reggae.”
Island Records’ progress was empires, enabled in part by Blackwell’s cunning way of owning property: offices, studios, hiding places. Blackwell devotes long and fascinating chapters to Cat Stevens and tortured inmate Nick Drake, and of course to Bob Marley. People thought Blackwell was crazy about funding a Wailers album, a Trenchtown hardcore trio became a deep rasta, but in 1973 Catch a fire it turned out to be a triumph that transformed reggae, though it divided the Wailers. Purists punished Blackwell for “marketing” the group, but the ambitious and infinitely charismatic Marley always had a date with worldwide destiny and fame. He and Blackwell fit together perfectly. Both attracted CIA files. Marley’s disappearance left Blackwell deflated, although he recovered after meeting Grace Jones, “a Jamaican who came from all over, who had absorbed hippies, LSD, New York, Paris … It was an orgy of hybrids ”. Putting Jones in the dominant rhythmic duo of reggae, Sly and Robbie, made perfect sense.
