CHRIS BLACKWELL INTERVIEW: ISLAND RECORDS

Chris Blackwell interview: Island Records
British pop's greatest surviving mogul is in London to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of his brainchild, Island Records.

By Andrew Perry
Last Updated: 6:28PM BST 20 May 2009

Dickie Jobson, Countryman and Chris Blackwell in Jamaica, 1982 Photo: ISLAND TRADING ARCHIVE
As Chris Blackwell arrives at his London offices, six large cases of limes are stacked up in the hallway. For the past two decades, Blackwell has been based in his native Jamaica, where he runs several of the world's most beautiful elite hotels. In the thirty years before that, he masterminded Island Records, one of Britain's great independent labels, which gave the world Bob Marley and U2.

Island, and Blackwell himself, were always renowned for a laidback, nurturing style, which endured at the label, long after he sold up in 1989. Casually dressed in faded denims, Blackwell, now 72, is in town for his brainchild's fiftieth anniversary celebrations. Preceding a run of gigs showcasing some Island legends, there is to be a major party in London, which will acquire a fitting Caribbean flavour thanks to the hundred cases of Blackwell rum, shipped over especially – hence all the limes. British pop's greatest surviving mogul is in an unusually reflective mood.


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Just cause for jubilationAP: Although you're no longer involved on a practical level, does Island's 50th birthday mean a lot to you?

CB: I never look back. I don't even have a copy of most of the records we made, but it feels great, it really does. I've seen so many companies that I've really admired drop out of sight, like Stax, and Duke-Peacock, and King. A lot of them get sold to majors, and they tend to drop them off. Fortunately, they decided to keep Island and I hope they continue to do so. Part of the reason I'm keen to get involved now is that I'd love to see it stand the test of time.

AP: Why do you think it has, thus far?

CB: It's probably because two of our artists became so big. Bob Marley and U2, are probably in the Top 10 artists of all time, plus we had Cat Stevens, who actually sold the most records. Maybe it's because we've had a lot of varied music on Island, too.

AP: When you started out in the late 1950's, pop wasn't the kind of thing you'd be celebrating in fifty years' time. It was seen as ephemeral. Was it frowned upon as a career?

CB: It wasn't considered a serious business, more a quasi-outlawish business, sort of like the gambling business might be seen today, or a bookmakers. It was a similar world, full of characters, and semi-misfits, of which I was definitely one. It certainly wasn't a thing that people had serious careers with. It was right at the start of something, which is always exciting, because you're feeling your way.

AP: What kind of childhood did you have in Jamaica?

CB: When I was young, I didn't have a lot of contact with people, because I was sick a lot. Then I went to school in England [to Harrow]. I didn't do terribly well at school, so I came back at the age of 17. After that I did different things. I rented motor scooters. I had a little jazz club. I managed 63 jukeboxes in Jamaica, which meant I had to go all around the country to the jukeboxes, and change the records, and argue about the provision of threepeenny pieces with the owner of a bar in a little fishing village or up in hills. It was all great stuff to absorb – real life.

AP: You actually started the label in Jamaica, but, just before Independence in 1962, you went to London, where you pressed up ska hits from Jamaica to sell to England's new West Indian community.

CB: Yes, I made deals with my old competitors in Jamaica to release their records over here. I'd go down there every now and then, and listen to all their records, and pick the best ones. I always thought I had a good ear fot it. I was up against a label called Blue Beat, and the music became known as bluebeat, so it was a bit like trying to sell vacuum cleaners against Hoover.

AP: Legend has it that your financial backing derived from the family business, Crosse & Blackwell, purveyors of jarred foods and relishes. Is that true?

CB: I'm distantly related to Crosse & Blackwell, in that my father was the son of one of the ten or more children of the younger brother of the person, who started the company. Very little trickled down to him, and zero trickled down to me. I had an allowance of £2,000 a year from my mother, which was not bad at all. It allowed me to have an apartment, to get by and build on what little I was earning.

AP: And you would deliver your early 45s around the country in your Mini Clubman.

CB: It was a Mini Cooper, they didn't have the Mini Clubman yet. Boy, could that thing move fast. It was tiny, and I could whisk around the periphery of Central London, where all the Jamaicans lived. It was great fun. There was a guy, Nat Fox, who had a stall in Dalston market – he was a rough character. I remember inviting him in to play some new music in my office. I had two hi-fi systems, one for buying, one for selling. My buying system never sounded so great, but the selling system sounded fantastic. I played him these records on my selling system, and he bought the lot, then when he got them back to his stall, he didn't sell them quite as quick as he thought.

AP: Your first big hit was with 'My Boy Lollipop', which you recorded yourself in Britain with Millie Small.

CB: I didn't put it on Island because I knew it was going to be so big. Independent labels in those days couldn't handle hits, because you couldn't pay the pressing plant in time to supply the demand, so I licensed it to Fontana, which was part of Phillips. It was a big hit all around the world, and I really wanted to look after her, so I went everywhere with her, which took me into the mainstream of the record industry. I was lucky enough to see Stevie Winwood with the Spencer Davis Group, at a TV show in Birmingham. So then I started to spend more time in that area. This whole new music was emerging. It wasn't really pop, it was anti-pop. In pop, everybody dressed in uniforms. In rock, everybody would go onstage in clothes they'd been sleeping in for three days. It was much looser, and it fit with my jazz sensibility because it was musicianship, rather than a pretty face.

AP: You sold prog-rock by marketing it imaginatively via albums, which were often packaged in beautiful gatefold sleeves. As the new coffee-table book about Island's history, Keep On Running, really shows, your products were always lovingly designed. Was that your idea?

CB: I really believe that 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 somebody came out with a cover which was actually better than the record itself, so I'd have to send them back to remake the record. Melissa Etheridge was one. The sleeve for 'Catch A Fire', Bob Marley's first album, was fantastic – it was a Zippo lighter, which opened.

AP: You famously overdubbed white session musicians onto Catch A Fire, in order to make Marley more palatable to white rock audiences. Was Bob au fait with that?

CB: He trusted my instincts, which were that he should go after being a rock star, rather than a star on black American radio. His music was rough and raw and exciting, but all black American music at the time, other than James Brown, was very slick and smooth. Bob trusted me on that, he was as keen as I was. He was with me in the studio when we did all the overdubs. After that, it was just a matter of getting people to see him perform, and word of mouth did the rest.

AP: Through Marley's eyes, you must've been ineradicably connected to the old order, the British Empire, while he was a ghetto roughian, a revolutionary. How well did you work together?

CB: It was as good a working relationship as I've ever had with anyone. I respected him from Day One. He never told me anything which he didn't do, and vice versa. We never had any misunderstandings. But I never hung out with him. He was his own guy, he had his own life, it wasn't that kind of thing.

He was tough if he had to be, but he never gave off a tough air. He gave off a very shy and quiet image. He absolutely had an aura about him. I never saw him leading his band by toughness, I saw him leading them by example. If the bus was going on somewhere, he'd be the first person on the bus. Normally the star turns up at the end, cracks a few jokes and climbs on, but he'd be the first one there.

AP: In many ways, pop in the 1980s became the antithesis of the rootsy music, which Island had always represented. How did you find your niche, post-Marley?

CB: Bob died on 11 May 1981, and Cat Stevens retired on the 12th, when Bob's death was reported around the world, so that was a dark day for us. But we had got a name, so we were in the game, as it were, and U2 became the group that carried the flag for Island.

AP: You've said that U2 weren't initially exactly to your taste – what did you see in them?

CB: My roots were more in jazz, and musicianship. When I first saw them, they were nothing like as accomplished as they are now, but they absolutely had something where you just knew that they were going to be great. They also had somebody who was what I call a very serious adult, as their manager [Paul McGuinness]. You don't see a lot of adults in the record business, including myself. All the labels turned them down. The most spectacular was CBS, who said, "Well, if you fire the drummer, we'd probably sign them." But at that stage, the drummer [Larry Mullen] happened to be the leader of the band.

AP: Did you have as much imput with them, as you'd had with Bob?

CB: Very little. I had some input, and I was overridden. Even though I love Brian Eno, and his work, I didn't think he was the right producer for them at the time they first wanted to use him [for 1984's 'The Unforgettable Fire']. They'd got this cult status, but I felt it was the time where they just needed that hit record. I had Jimmy Iovine [Bruce Springsteen's producer] lined up to produce them, but they wanted to go with Eno. So I went to have a meeting with them in Ireland, and I was all ready to say, "Now come on, this is how it's going to be," but they really talked me out of it. They said, we want Brian Eno for his intelligence, which was a great way of explaining that they didn't want Jimmy Iovine.

AP: You must be relieved to be out of music, looking at all today's problems with digital piracy and so forth. Can you see a way forward?

CB: It will just go back to how it was in the '30s, '40s and early '50s: Count Basie would want to have a hit, because then he'd make $1,000 more a night in concert. The hit was really the advertising for personal appearances. Certainly in the forseeable future, that's basically how it's going to be. If someone writes a song which is successful, they'll still make money on it, it's just they might not sell twenty million records. Amy Winehouse sold eleven million records [on Island] – that's unbelievable, but ten years ago, it would've been 25 million.

AP: Which leaves the record companies where?

CB: It leaves the major record companies where they are now. They have the catalogue of the last 100 years of music. That's incredibly precious, and valuable. But I think new artists and new talent, and new characters like myself, will thrive in that kind of business. They can build up their own company, which is based on touring, so you bring the new act out with you. That's exactly how it was in the early days.

JAMAICAN MUSIC REPORT

http://jamaicasmusicreport.blogspot.com/

Reggaefilms.co.uk: Dickie Jobson passed away....

http://reggaefilms.blogspot.com/2008/12/dickie-jobson-passed-away.html#comment-form


Dickie Jobson passed away....
Just had some very sad news and heard that Dickie Jobson passed away yesterday on Christmas Eve. He will be remembered by everyone who knew his work, and most will remember him for his great film 'Countryman', he was also preparing to start shooting Countryman 2 in 2009.
"The Jamaica Film Academy had honoured Dickie Jobson at the February 2008 staging of the first Reggae Film Festival and screened his 1970s feature film “Countryman” in one of its rare Jamaican showings. Dickie Jobson was a friend and business associate of film makers Perry Henzell and Chris Blackwell, so it was no surprise when he ventured into film production with the romantic drama “Countryman” – one of the early efforts to continue the progressive move to indigenous feature film production established by “The Harder They Come”. The “Countryman” story of two American tourists cast away on the Hellshire beach where real-life fisherman Countryman lives, and the adventures that follow as police pursue them as suspected drug exporters, was typical of the 70’s era when Jamaica was viewed simply as a tropical paradise with an interesting culture. It’s famous scene when Countryman cooks a several course Jamaican meal on an outdoor fire and the delight the visitors express as they taste each new food surprise, has become a classic.
Like most other Jamaican films of that era, the acclaim for the director’s achievement has only come in modern times, and financial success may never materialize. Dickie Jobson was therefore delighted to be honoured at the Reggae Film Festival earlier this year and to enjoy the company of his film making friends, including his cousin, film maker Wayne Jobson.
As part of the Island Jamaica film and music team, Dickie was associated with every film project of that prolific organization, and assisted many overseas film production companies to interact with Jamaica. The name of Dickie Jobson and his beautiful film “Countryman” will be forever memorialized in the Hall of Fame of the Jamaican film industry. On behalf of the Jamaica Film Academy, and as a personal friend, please allow me to extend honours on his passing."
(Text taken from an article written by Barbara Blake Hannah 25th Dec.2009)
Posted by Reggae Films UK at 5:32 PM

15 comments:
Ronnie Barakat said...
Farewell my friend, I will always remember your contribution to helping to establishing the career of the musician of the last century the great Bob Marley.Ronnie Barakat.
December 26, 2008 12:01 AM
MFW said...
I saw Dicko at 2 parties last week we danced , hung out and I just cant believe that you are no longer here with us... We shall all miss your sense of fun, endurance, intelligence, and this Bud's for you my friend.The definite end of an era.Nuff LoveMaxine
December 26, 2008 3:32 PM
dennis said...
I nominate Dickie for our next National Hero.Dennis R.
December 26, 2008 4:08 PM
Del said...
I am so saddened at the passing of Dickie, he still had so much more to give. May his soul rest in peace and may his memories live on.Del Crooks - Jamaica
December 26, 2008 8:38 PM
The Brownery said...
A sad goodbye to a gentleman, a quiet genius, and a lovely generous man - from Dickie's friends at Studio Eight Productions. We believed in the Countryman Two project and we so looking forward to realising Dickie's dream.
December 26, 2008 9:35 PM
GAFFA said...
Richard; Ah kno Puff waan bless yuh up....All LOVE Bloods. The Spirit Lives.
December 27, 2008 7:04 AM
Anonymous said...
My Dickie "ElFego Backa" man ahead of his time, Video Real Estate, first TV add for a real estate development in Jamaica, Cardif Hall. So many ideas we could have built on. Spoke to me on Monday 22nd .......if I only knew... Great Guy, good friend to all P & L Bro.David Guilfoyle.
December 27, 2008 10:05 PM
Anonymous said...
thanks so much for not only one of the greatest Reggae films of all time, but one of the greatest soundtracks.
December 27, 2008 10:51 PM
Anonymous said...
It was a sad day when we lost Dickie Jobson, an elegant gentleman in the truest sense, modest and humble, and a raconteur with a rapier wit. He was a doting father, a loving son, brother, cousin and friend. Dickie was generous, kind and compassionate and will be missed by all who were fortunate enough to know him. My condolences to the Jobson family.
December 28, 2008 11:42 PM
simochau said...
Dickie u just called me from Kingston to Hong Kong on the Christmas Eve 10am Yan Yan was glad to hear u but now u left us behind gone with the winds u told me u want to come visit china & making Countrymon II together chinese audience would love to see the Fastestmon on Earth & Greatest Hero Jamaican Countrymon as Dickie Jobson rest in peace 1love yanyan hk
December 29, 2008 11:50 AM
Sanwad said...
yea man, the reggae world will miss him.
January 02, 2009 10:39 PM
Reggae Films UK said...
http://www.unitedreggae.com/articles/n254/123108/remembering-dickie-jobson
January 03, 2009 9:44 AM
Danny Ennevor said...
Dicko.. I could not believe the news when Jimmy called. We had not seen you for some time but you always kept in touch. Was just joking the other day how when you were standing beside me as my best man 47 years ago waiting for the wedding to begin you whispered "It's not to late Dans the car keys are in my pocket"! We'll miss you Dicko.. God Bless.
January 11, 2009 4:22 PM
Anonymous said...
A kind wonderful man meet Dickie whilst visiting countryman 2007 Will be greatly missed but memories always remain God Bless you my friend susanna
January 28, 2009 3:53 PM
Anonymous said...
See the article below for info on Dickie's life...http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article5592961.ece
February 17, 2009 11:24 AM

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