The Islander: My Life In Music And Beyond

Titre : The Islander: My Life In Music And Beyond

Auteur : Chris Blackwell (with Paul Morley)

Date de publication : 7 Juin 2022 (US) / 9 Juin 2022 (UK) 

Editeur : Gallery Books (US) / Nine Eight Books (UK) 

Type : Essai

Chris Blackwell in Jamaica on the set of Dr. No (1962) and with Bono from U2 (1995)

In The vein of Sound Man and The Soundtrack Of My Life, a lyrical, warmhearted and inspirational memoir from the founder of Island Records about his astonishing life and career helping to bring reggae music to the world stage and working with Bob Marley, U2, Grace Jones, Cat Stevens and many other icons.

Chris Blackwell, like the paradigm-shifting artists he came to support over his sixty-plus years in the music business, never took the conventional route. He grew up between Jamaica and London, crossing paths with Ian Fleming, Noel Coward, and Errol Flynn. After being expelled from an elite British school for rebellious behavior in 1954 at age seventeen, he moved back to Jamaica, and within five years, founded Island Records—the company that would make an indelible mark on music, shifting with the times, but always keeping its core identity intact.

Chris Blackwell (right) with Junior Marvin, Bob Marley and Jacob Miller (1980)

The Islander is the story of Blackwell and his cohorts at Island Records, who time and again, identified, nurtured, and broke out musicians who had been overlooked by bigger record labels, including Steve Winwood, Nick Drake, John Martyn, and Cat Stevens. After an impromptu meeting with Bob Marley and his bandmates in 1972, Blackwell decided to fund and produce their groundbreaking album Catch A Fire. He’d go on to work with Marley over the rest of his career, remain his close friend, and continually champion Jamaican culture and reggae music.

Chris Blackwell with Robert Palmer (1980s)

In the ensuing years, Blackwell worked with U2, Grace Jones, the B-52s, Tom Waits, Robert Palmer, Tom Tom Club, and many other groundbreaking artists. He also opened the first Jamaican boutique hotel, on the property of Ian Fleming’s former home, Goldeneye, where all the James Bond books were written.

Blackwell is a legendary as well as deeply humble raconteur, and reading The Islander is like spending a day with the most interesting man in the world.

Chris Blackwell is the founder of Island Records, a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and is credited with being responsible for turning the world on to reggae music. Blackwell spent his childhood in Jamaica and founded Island Records at the age of twenty-two. He went on to forge the careers of Bob Marley, Cat Stevens, Grace Jones, and U2, among many other high-profile acts, and produced records including Marley’s Catch A Fire and Uprising. Blackwell currently runs Island Outpost, a group of elite resorts in Jamaica and Florida, which includes Goldeneye—the former home of author Ian Fleming.

Paul Morley is a writer, broadcaster, and cultural critic who has covered music, art, and entertainment since the 1970s. A founding member of the electronic collective Art of Noise and a member of staff at the Royal Academy of Music, he is the author of a number of books about music including the bestselling The Age Of Bowie and A Sound Mind: How I Fell In Love With Classical Music And Decided To Rewrite Its Entire History. He collaborated with music icon Grace Jones on her memoir, I'll Never Write My Memoirs and his two most recent books are biographies of Bob Dylan, You Lose Youself, You Reappear, and Tony Wilson of factory Records, From Manchester With Love.

Pour lire le chapitre consacré à Robert Palmer, cliquer ici

"As you're about to find out through the pages in this book, Chris Blackwell - who looms large in U2's life, and was our lifeline into the music world - is an adventurer, an entrepreneur, a buccaneer, a visionary and a gentleman. I'm proud to know him." Bono

"C.B. had his way of throwing me in the deep end knowing that I would thrive on being challenged. As you'll read in 'The Islander', he knows how to get the very best out of people - he's a mover and a shaker and a mischief-maker." Grace Jones 

"I read Chris Blackwell's autobiography in one sitting, unable to tear myself away. From 'My Bob Lollipop' and Bob Marley, via Swinging London and punk, all the way to Talking Heads and U2, I felt like I was reading the inside story of the music of my life." Salman Rushdie

Chris Blackwell at his recording studio (1966)

PROLOGUE: NEARLY THE END

I was eighteen years old when a Rastaman saved my life.

I have sometimes embroidered the first part of this story to make me look a little less stupid and give the narrative a dramatic boost. I’ve said that I was out to sea in a tiny sailboat, all by myself. That I got caught in a violent storm. That I thought I wasn’t going to make it. That the mast was struck by lightning and the boat had split and I was holding on to a charred piece of the splintered hull and eventually was thrown up against some rocks along a barren stretch of isolated coast, whereupon I was knocked unconscious.

The truth is a little more prosaic. I wasn’t on my own. It wasn’t a sailboat. I was out in a motorboat with a male friend from England who was in the Jamaican Regiment (whose name I cannot recall) and a female companion who I do remember, Lorraine. It was 1955. I was a directionless Anglo-Irish-Jamaican boarding-school flameout who, for kicks, decided to take a boat ride on the Caribbean with his mates. We set off from Kingston Harbour, passing the sleepy fishing village of Port Royal, a remnant of the colonial city of the same name that provided the setting for Captain Blood, the lavish, jolly 1935 swashbuckler that made a film star of Errol Flynn.

Three hundred years before our little voyage, the English navy had invaded Jamaica and claimed it from the island’s previous coloniser, Spain. Under British rule, Port Royal became the largest English-speaking city in the New World outside of Boston: a privateer’s paradise, home to pirates, beggars, prostitutes and sundry other gold-chasing chancers of loose morals. But its infamy was brief: in 1692, as if by divine retribution, Port Royal was finished off by a tsunami, exacerbating a demise already begun by fires, earthquakes and hurricanes.

I am ashamed to say I hadn’t filled up my boat’s tank with enough petrol and we soon ran out of fuel. We pulled up on an unfamiliar stretch of shore a long way past Hellshire Beach, just south-west of Port Royal. This didn’t initially strike me as a problem. It was about five in the afternoon, not yet dark, and civilisation was surely only a matter of minutes away. After all, this very area had once been the commercial centre of the world, even if we were now a fair way from Kingston or Montego Bay.

I directed my English friend to head inland on foot, assuming he would soon come across a road. I stayed behind with Lorraine. For an hour or two, we bided our time blithely, thinking it wouldn’t be long before he found help. But then events took a turn that requires no exaggeration to make dramatic.

My friend suddenly reappeared, his face pained, his body covered in scratches and streaks of blood. He hadn’t found anything but dense jungle. ‘There’s no way out,’ he said. The tide was coming in and we were huddled upon a small, shrinking sliver of beach. It was now past seven. I made an executive decision: we would lie down on the driest area of sand and, in the morning, I would walk along the coast to find help.

We slept under the stars as best we could. We didn’t have much fresh water to drink and we were hemmed in between the sea and what turned out to be not a proper coastline but a treacherous mangrove swamp. In the right light and conditions, the mangroves are beautiful, a dense tangle of flora providing shelter for hundreds of animal species. But to us, they were more menacing than anything else. The bird and insect sounds that normally seemed a gentle, dreamy part of the coastal ambience now seemed to be warnings of impending doom.

In the morning, I set out. At low tide, when the ground was cracked and dry, it was easy to walk among the roots. But soon the crusty surface gave way to thick mud. The mangroves became a combination of labyrinth and quicksand, exceedingly difficult for me to navigate.

I somehow managed to walk for hours, looking for any kind of clearing, shouting for help. I had foolishly set off without taking any of the water we had – a cocksure white boy who, to this point, had never thought of Jamaica as anything but a delightful Eden. The sea was always a liberation, never a trap. Even during this walk, the water was a lovely teal colour under the green canopy of the mangroves. But there was no safe harbour to swim to.

A deep thirst started to kick in. At one point, I reached a small section of beach that seemed to be moving. I thought I was delirious, hallucinating under the hot midday sun. Eventually I realised the moving beach was actually thousands of crabs, a writhing mass of them crammed together between the sea and the mangrove forest. As I moved closer, they got excited, darting around my feet as swiftly as lizards. I had no defences; if they chose to come after me as hungry predators, I was a definite goner. What an exit: death by crab.

By late in the afternoon, I was still walking, still searching, losing hope. My thirst had advanced from serious to desperate and I was scarily weak. But then: in a small clearing, I spied a tiny, lopsided wooden hut, held together with bits of string. It was the first sign of life I had seen for hours. We might be saved after all! Adrenalised, I walked towards the hut and looked through a little window, really just a crude cut-out hole.

To my terror, I laid eyes on the first Rastafari I had ever seen in my life.

Chris Blackwell with American record producer and musician Jimmy Miller (1968)

He was a bearded and inscrutable man. His hair was long, stiff and matted, as though made of bark. He looked like he was somewhere between being as old as time and as young as me. He was wearing the kind of basic shirt and trousers that didn’t seem to have ever been bought in a shop. Maybe he’d made them himself or found them at the side of the road. Badly dehydrated, utterly lost and near collapse, I now stood face-to-face with one of the ‘black heart men’ that white Anglo-Jamaican parents warned their kids about.

I had heard a little about the so-called cult of Rastafarianism. The Rastas were eccentrics who swore allegiance to the emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie, whom they believed to be the messiah incarnate. They traced their origins to the 1930s, when a black Jamaican preacher named Leonard Howell became the first person to call himself a Rastafari. Howell grew out his beard after seeing a photograph of Haile Selassie on the cover of Time, bearded and handsome in a brocaded uniform and sash. Haile Selassie’s civilian name was Tafari Makonnen. Ras was a noble honorific. Ras + Tafari = Rastafari.

If you grew up in white Jamaican society in the 1940s and ’50s, as I did, you were conditioned to regard these men more as a violent gang than as a new religious order or social movement. The colonial government viewed the Rastas as a threat and there were folkloric horror stories of them capturing, burning and sacrificing children. They spoke in a mangled, cryptic dialect that signalled a headstrong disregard for English rule. They wore their hair in knotted plaits called dreadlocks, which made them look intimidating.

I never quite bought into this propaganda, as no Rastafari had ever caused harm to me or anyone I knew. The Rastas deliberately kept their distance, absenting themselves from a white society that held them in ill regard. They populated the working-class areas of Montego Bay known as Railway Lane and Barnett Lane, roamed the black-sand beaches of Jamaica’s south coast and set up communities in the bush up in the hills, far from my stomping grounds in upper-class Kingston.

But, because I had never so much as laid eyes upon a Rasta, they still existed in my head as bogeymen. In my confused, parched state, on the verge of passing out, I looked at the man before me and thought, This might be the end.

Instead, he beckoned me towards him, motioning me into his rickety beach hut. Defaulting to my ingrained English-style politeness, I absurdly asked the man, ‘Do you, by any chance, have some water?’ Immediately I noted an ethereal gentleness about him. Moving with a dancer’s grace, he brought me a little gourd filled with water. Whatever fear I had felt moments earlier instantly dissipated. Still wobbly and faint, I asked the man if I could lie down. He carefully cleared a spot for me in the corner of the hut. Within seconds, I was asleep.

Two or three hours later, I awoke to find five more Rastas in the hut along with my host; the six of them sat around softly reading to each other from the Bible. For a split second, my fear returned – Oh God, there’s more of them! – but the first thing they did upon seeing that I was awake was offer me some ital food: ital being the Rasta term, derived from vital, for their plant-based diet, which, per their philosophy, imbued people with energy and good health while not bringing death to God’s creatures.

Once again, I was overcome by the incredible, almost mystic gentleness that surrounded me. These were good men of faith. They were not burning children or plotting a violent revolution. Without hesitation, they had taken in and looked after a frail, helpless white boy who had stumbled across them and collapsed in their midst.

As I ate, they carried on reading to each other from the Bible, discussing among themselves what they were reading. Thoughtful debate and exchange seemed an important part of their lives. Once I had regained my strength, they took me by boat back to Port Royal. While I was sleeping, they had found my boat and my friends. When I got to the port, my friends were there, having also been rescued by these kind, enigmatic outsiders who exuded mysterious, uplifting warmth and generosity.

It had been an incredible, life-changing experience. It would be another seventeen years before I began working with Rastafarianism’s most celebrated advocate and ambassador, Bob Marley. Reggae didn’t yet exist. Nor, for that matter, did its precursor, ska. But a seed was planted that day. I had begun to understand the important contribution that Rastafarians were making to the culture and future of Jamaica as the nation moved towards independence from British rule. But never would I have imagined at that point that, in a matter of decades, these peaceful men with dreads would form a central part of Jamaica’s international identity.

Chris Blackwell with engineer Steven Stanley at Compass Point Studios (1981)

Voir aussi : 

• The Island Book Of Posters - Tim Clark and Neil Storey (1991)
• Chris Blackwell's Tribute to Robert Palmer - Chris Blackwell (2003)
• Keep On Running: The Story Of Island Records - Chris Salewicz (2010)
• Chris Blackwell: L'Ile Aux Trésors - Les Echos (2014)
• Compass Point All Stars: Quand Le Meilleur Groupe Du Monde Se Trouvait Aux Bahamas - Télérama (2020)
• When Nassau, Bahamas, Was The Center Of The Music World - Caribbean Journal (2023)
• Island Records: Dénicheur Visionnaire De Talents Reggae - The Good Life (2023)
• The Island Book Of Records: Volume 1 - Neil Storey (2023)
• James Norton To Play Chris Blackwell in Forthcoming Bob Marley Biopic (2023)