The Islander

My Life in Music and Beyond

Chris Blackwell, Paul Morley

• Editore: Gallery Books
• Anno: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781982172718
• Argomento: Media & Performing Arts
• Categoria: Music Biographies

In the vein of Sound Man and The Soundtrack of My Life, a lyrical memoir from the founder of one of the greatest music labels of all time, 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. Since its founding in 1959, Island Records has been home to legendary artists representing wildly divergent musical styles, yet who share the same maverick, outsider spirit of its founder, Chris Blackwell. Time and again, Blackwell and his Island cohorts identified and nurtured musicians overlooked by other labels, including Bob Marley, U2, Cat Stevens, Grace Jones, Roxy Music, Traffic, Nick Drake, Tom Waits, Robert Palmer, Free, the B-52's, John Martyn, and Jimmy Cliff.Like these artists, Blackwell never took the conventional route. After a privileged early childhood in Jamaica—crossing paths with Ian Fleming, Noël Coward, and Errol Flynn—he was expelled from the elite British school Harrow for rebellious behavior at age seventeen. Within five years, he had moved back to Jamaica, and founded Island.Intertwined with the story of Island is that of Bob Marley and the Wailers. After an impromptu meeting with the band in 1972, Blackwell produced the groundbreaking album Catch a Fire, formed a deep bond of mutual trust and friendship with Marley, and became known for helping to bring reggae music to the world stage. 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.This engaging memoir from one of the great raconteurs of the late 20th century makes for a giddy ride through some of that era's most cutting-edge, enduring music. As Bono says, Blackwell "is an adventurer, an entrepreneur, a buccaneer, a visionary, and a gentleman."

–CHAPTER ONE– SCHOOL VERSUS ERROL FLYNN

There’s no two ways about it: I am a member of the Lucky Sperm Club. I was born into wealth and position, albeit of a particularly mixed sort endemic to Jamaica. I am Jamaican, but I am also English, Irish, Portuguese, Spanish, Jewish, and Catholic. The island was and remains a nexus for trade, pleasure-seeking, and cultural collisions. There is no such thing as a “pure” Jamaican unless you are describing the island’s original inhabitants, the Taínos, the descendants of the indigenous Arawak peoples of South America who migrated northward and named their new home Xamayca, land of wood and water.

The Taínos were largely wiped out by the Spanish in the decades that followed Christopher Columbus’s “discovery” of Jamaica in 1494. “The land seems to touch the sky,” Columbus marveled as he took in the paradisiacal view, conveniently paying no heed to the people who had lived there peacefully for hundreds of years until the arrival of the Spanish. The Taínos loved games, music, and dancing for the sheer joy of it, and an island chief greeting Columbus was accompanied by a ceremonial band of musicians playing trumpets made from leaves, flutes carved out of wild cane, and manatee-skin drums fashioned out of the trunks of trumpet trees. They used drums for worship and wars; and for entertainment the flutes, trumpets, and a form of harp; and their music was a natural way for them to communicate with people landing amongst them out of nowhere speaking a different language.

My mother was born Blanche Adelaide Lindo. The Lindos were Sephardic Jews who rose to prominence as merchants in medieval Spain. When the Spanish Inquisition began, the Lindos fled, making and losing fortunes in Portugal, the Canary Islands, Venice, Amsterdam, London, Barbados, Costa Rica, and, finally and most prominently, Jamaica. By the time my mother was born, her father and his seven brothers were the banana kings of Costa Rica, where Blanche was born on December 9, 1912. They owned 25,000 acres of land and exported five million stems per year of their “green gold.”

When my mother was two, her father relocated the family to Jamaica, where the Lindo brothers developed 8,000 acres of land into sugarcane fields. This inspired them to buy the rum manufacturers Appleton Estate and J. Wray & Nephew, making the Lindos the world’s first family of rum. Wray & Nephew was run by my maternal grandfather, Percy Lindo, the youngest of the eight brothers. Percy is my middle name.

My father was born Joseph Middleton Blackwell in Windsor, England, on August 13, 1913. His father, born in County Mayo, Ireland, was a descendant of the founders of the Crosse & Blackwell food company, though too distant from them to reap the benefits of great wealth. Like the Lindos, the Blackwells reproduced in biblical abundance. My father was one of ten children, which goes some way towards explaining why the family fortune eluded him.

There’s no doubt, Dad had a formidable education. He attended Beaumont College, a Jesuit public school, and from there continued at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, the latter-day alma mater of princes William and Harry. After his training, he served as a major in the Irish Guards, the British Army regiment perhaps best known for the red tunics and tall bearskin hats they wear to the annual Trooping the Colour ceremony, in which various household regiments escort the king or queen in a procession down the Mall from Buckingham Palace.

Though he was addressed for the remainder of his life as “Major Blackwell,” my father was perhaps less-than-ideal officer material. In 1935, the year of King George V’s seventieth birthday, he slept in and missed the entire Trooping the Colour. Another time, after a heavy drinking session, he drove his car into the gates of Buckingham Palace, which, needless to say, did not go down well.

I think the reason I have never been much of a drinker is that, when I was eleven, my father grandly announced that I was now old enough to drink. He airily waved his hand at the bottles of spirits before us and asked me what I wanted. Since my father drank whiskey and soda, I asked for one of those. It was vile; drinking it actually caused me physical pain. He had successfully warned me off the temptation of drink, whether that was his intention or not.

My parents met at a fashionable members-only club in the West End of London in the early 1930s. Dad, known as Blackie, was a cunning rascal. Mum was stunning and athletic, at ease both flitting through high society and snorkeling amongst Jamaica’s coral reefs. She was a friend of Ian Fleming’s and an inspiration for two of his most memorable female foils to James Bond: the independent, provocative nature girl Honeychile Rider, who, as played by Ursula Andress in Dr. No, emerges from the sea clad only in a bikini and knife scabbard; and the acrobat-turned-burglar Pussy Galore, who, as played by Honor Blackman in Goldfinger, literally took a roll in the hay with Sean Connery.

By marrying outside the Jewish faith, my mother scandalously deviated from centuries of family tradition. The Irish on my father’s side were equally alarmed at him breaking away from Catholicism to marry a “Jamaican Jew.” Both were displaying their independence, their willful determination to do things their own way. Their union doubled up a considerable free-spiritedness that they passed on to me, their only child.

My parents moved from London to Jamaica in 1938, not much more than six months after my birth on June 22, 1937. That was a thing that was done in the colonial era—women from prominent families delivered their babies in the mother country and then returned to Jamaica. We set up house in a Lindo family estate in Kingston known as Terra Nova, a European-style mansion set imposingly on Waterloo Road, between the Blue Mountains and the harbor. It has since been converted into a hotel.

This was where I spent the first several years of my life, a sickly child suffering from bronchial asthma so extreme I spent days on end in bed and barely attended school. At eight I was still struggling to learn how to read and write. I seldom mixed with other children, more often conversing with elderly relatives. I don’t remember having birthday parties or attending them.

My father joined the Jamaican regiment of the Irish Guards, and my mother worked in the family firm. Theirs was a genteel colonial existence. Dad stood six foot four and seemed to stretch all the way to the sky. I walked alongside him to the barracks where he was stationed. He commuted home by horse and buggy. Dad loved horses and, with Mum, owned several. The English had introduced polo to the island, and I took pride in leading one of my father’s horses, Brown Bomber, into the paddock after a win.

The people I tended to spend the most time with were the Black staff who looked after Terra Nova. There were about fifteen members of staff attending to the estate’s house, stables, and gardens. There are no photos of me from that time with other children, but there are lots of pictures I took of the staff, arranged in rows, like in a school photo.

I was obviously in a vastly different position to them, the only child of the house, a right Little Lord Fauntleroy, really. I didn’t understand that they looked upon me as the young gentleman of the house and that it was their job to be nice to me. But I do believe I got to know them and even become friends with them. Our conversations were friendly and free of awkwardness. I learned a lot from them about life, and Jamaica.

Most of Jamaica’s Black people are the descendants of people from Africa who were enslaved by Spanish and English colonizers. After the English vanquished the island’s Spanish occupiers in the seventeenth century, the Spanish released whatever enslaved people of theirs hadn’t already run away. These Black freedmen found safe harbor in Jamaica’s mountainous interior, some of them partnering with the island’s last remaining Taínos. This population of ex-slaves and their progeny became known as Maroons, a name derived from the Spanish word cimarrón, meaning wild and undomesticated. When English rule brought with it a new wave of enslaved Africans, the Maroons took in their runaways too. On unforgivingly hilly land, they established their own farming systems, religious customs, and language. One of the more notable Maroon settlements, which still exists as a village in St. Elizabeth Parish, is called Me-no-Sen-You-no-Come, a sort of patois version of the phrase “out of sight, out of mind.”

The Maroons established one of Jamaica’s earliest indigenous genres, a heavy rhythmic drumming—a composite of West African influences—that reverberated through the hills at night, audible even to the white folks in the posher precincts of Kingston.

In 1838, all Black people in Jamaica had been emancipated from slavery. This, however, did not do much to improve their lot under British rule, where they lived as politically disenfranchised second-class citizens. One day, I witnessed something that shattered the illusion of the English as kind, genteel employers. My mother had been asked by her brothers Roy and Cecil to help manage the Lindo family’s banana plantation. I was sometimes taken out by horse and buggy to visit them. On this particular occasion, I saw a dead Black field worker casually slung over the shoulder of a foreman. The worker had been caught trying to steal some bananas for himself and then tried to make a getaway. He was shot as he ran—killed for the sake of a few bananas.

It was a terrible sight, an abrupt whip-crack of reality. To the Lindos, this seemed a normal form of punishment, a routine way of maintaining order. But I knew, even in my youthfulness, that this simply wasn’t right. The memory of that dead man never left me. My constant revisiting and processing of the image of his slumped body made me realize that I was not spiritually aligned with the people who controlled the island. There was a big chasm between the nineteenth-century world of the Lindos and the modern world that I was racing towards. My mind was changed by this awful incident, glimpsed through a crack in the otherwise carefully maintained façade of the colonial world.

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MEANWHILE, LIFE CARRIED on as though nothing had happened. My mother threw glittery parties for the cream of Anglo-Jamaican society. I grew accustomed to mixing amongst the guests, and Ian Fleming, Noël Coward, and Errol Flynn became unofficial mentors to me.

The Tasmanian-born Flynn was a criminally good-looking man and a flamboyant hedonist with a roving eye for both women and men. One of his favorite targets was my mother, and he was even more turned on when she resisted his considerable wooing charms and infamous, merry swagger. She had her ways of deflecting Flynn’s attention, including telling him that she had boils on her backside. That put him off for a short while, but inevitably he would try again. His avid pursuit of my mother may have explained why Fleming, with his own tender feelings for my mother, so disliked Flynn. (Coward was surprised to discover that he liked Flynn, having read his “bloodcurdling autobiography, with its unnecessary vulgarity.” Upon meeting Flynn, Coward wrote, “I found him to be most gracious and pleasant, one of the most charming individuals I’ve ever met. So it worked out fine.”)

Because Errol fancied my mother, he treated me generously and allowed me aboard his two-masted schooner, Zaca, a prized invitation for Jamaica’s elite. He even allowed me on the net at the front of the boat.

Errol happened upon Jamaica by accident after the war. His beloved Zaca was blown off course during a hurricane after a trip through the Panama Canal, forcing him to dock in Kingston. He loved what he saw, and, being Errol Flynn, immediately wanted more. He bought a local hotel, a 2,000-acre ranch, and a 64-acre island in Port Antonio’s harbor.

Flynn’s cinematic heyday was in the 1930s and ’40s. By the time I knew him, he was a diminished man, afflicted by addictions to alcohol, opium, and gambling, the last of which cost him much of his fortune. He was living on the Zaca, which he kept moored at Navy Island off Port Antonio. Still, Errol knew how to live large. He was the first person I ever saw water-ski, with a nonchalance that made it seem like he was just going for a stroll. When I was fifteen, I watched as he glided onto the Port Antonio beach dressed for cocktails, with a cigarette holder in his fist and a dachshund under his arm. It was the coolest thing I have ever seen. Some say the phrase “in like Flynn,” which was popular at the time, derived from the roguish way he approached seducing a woman. He ended up calling his memoirs My Wicked Wicked Ways but he toyed with calling them In Like Me.

Errol was cross with me just once, when I was around eighteen and tried to steal one of his girlfriends. He was notoriously unfaithful to his own wives, but this didn’t stop him from punching me in the face with all the force of a living legend who had played Robin Hood on the big screen. He loved a punch-up and had been known to get into bare-knuckled fistfights with the director John Huston, one of his drinking pals, just for the fun of it. It was the only time I have ever been hit in my life.

Errol was once beaten up by a posse of lesbians in Paris after some altercation, drove a Cadillac into a swimming pool while nonchalantly smoking a cigar, released a large alligator into Port Antonio’s main high street, and planned on building a New Orleans–style brothel in Kingston. By the time I got to hanging out with Grace Jones or Marianne Faithfull, who had their own extreme ways of living a daring life, I’d pretty much seen everything.

Flynn legitimately deserves credit for helping establish Jamaica’s tourism industry. His magnetism drew other movie stars to the island, amongst them Ginger Rogers, Katharine Hepburn, and Bette Davis, and he helped popularize river-rafting down Jamaica’s Rio Grande. He had noticed that the banana farmers ferried their cargo down to the steamships in Port Antonio Harbor on bamboo rafts. This gave him the idea to host moonlight floating parties that sometimes turned into races pitting him against such guests as Noël Coward and Coward’s longtime partner, Graham Payn.

More significantly, as far as I am concerned, Errol helped popularize indigenous Jamaican music. For his parties, he frequently hired a local band of Black musicians who called themselves the Navy Island Swamp Boys. It’s believed that it was Errol’s idea to change their name to the Jolly Boys, because they clearly were having irreverent fun, overlaying their music with salty, entendre-laden lyrics about Jamaican life. The Jolly Boys exist to this day, though their original members are long gone.

The Jolly Boys played a genre of music known as mento: a distinctively Jamaican hybrid of West African, European, and American folk influences. Mento was Jamaica’s original country music, played on acoustic instruments, with a lilting, mellow beat that anticipated reggae and Brazilian bossa nova. Its most recognizable song is Harry Belafonte’s “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song),” which is frequently mischaracterized as calypso, a similar-but-not-the-same Trinidadian idiom—not least because “Day-O” originally appeared on a 1956 album by Belafonte entitled Calypso. Ten years my senior, Belafonte was born in Harlem to Jamaican parents. Like me, he is a characteristically Jamaican mix of ancestries: part African, part Scottish, part Dutch, part Jewish, part Catholic. He too spent his early years on the island—we overlapped from 1938 to 1940—and had his worldview shaped by the social inequities he witnessed between Jamaica’s English rulers and its largely Black citizenry. The cheery call-and-response vocals of “Day-O” mask the fact that the song is about struggling workers pulling grueling shifts on the plantations.

Mento, as old-fashioned as it sounds now, pointed the way forward for Black Jamaican music. It was also where the tradition arose, in an echo of how freed slaves assumed the noble names of their former masters, of musicians taking up such European titles as Lord, Duke, Count, Prince, and King. The heyday of mento saw performance bills bearing the names of such artists as Count Lasher, Lord Flea, Lord Power, Lord Beginner, Lord Creator, and Lord Lebby.

Errol died in 1959 at the age of fifty, a victim of his appetites. The story is that he was buried with half a dozen bottles of his favorite whiskey. One way or another he taught me an awful lot, about how to be, and how not to be. And when it comes to wildness, I learned to let others be wild, and just watch from a safe distance.

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IAN FLEMING FIRST visited Jamaica during World War II, when he was an intelligence officer. Afterwards, desperate to escape the bleak, run-down austerity of postwar Britain, he purchased a strip of land on the lush north coast near the banana port of Oracabessa and built a modest three-room house. He named it Goldeneye, after a sabotage mission he had planned during the war.

Like Flynn, Fleming was a social animal, albeit far more restrained. He and Noël Coward presided over a circle of wealthy English who chose to spend their winters on the island. Goldeneye, and Jamaica itself, offered the illusion that Britain remained an imperial power rather than a fast-contracting empire. This was put into especially stark relief when Anthony Eden, the UK prime minister, spent three weeks at Goldeneye in 1956 as he recovered from the Suez Crisis, in which Britain was humiliated by Egypt. Eden’s wife, Clarissa Spencer-Churchill, a niece of Winston Churchill, found Jamaica beautiful, but she also characterized it as sinister: there were strange tom-toms beating throughout the night, she told friends back home, as if the island itself were alive.

Fleming wrote his first James Bond novel, Casino Royale, at Goldeneye in 1952, drawing upon his own wartime experiences in British intelligence. The book’s success prompted him to write thirteen more Bond novels, three of which—Dr. No, Live and Let Die, and The Man with the Golden Gun—featured Jamaican locations. The novels were written in six-week bursts every winter, every year until Fleming’s death in 1964. In that period, Jamaica underwent a tectonic shift, transitioning from a British colony to an independently ruled nation (albeit still a member of the Commonwealth) in 1962. As this was happening, Fleming’s carefully curated vision of Jamaica as a gentlemen’s playground exerted a powerful pull on the public imagination: a last flare of confident British imperialism before the white bureaucrats beat a hasty retreat back to London. Bond, too, would play a role in Jamaica’s tourism boom and rising international profile, all the more so after the surprise success of the very first Bond film, Dr. No, which I worked on as a production assistant and location scout.

Fleming and my mother met in 1956. My parents’ marri...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Prologue: Nearly the End…
• Chapter One: School versus Errol Flynn
• Chapter Two: The Fifties, Jamaica: Finding a Purpose
• Chapter Three: The Sixties, London: Making Contact
• Chapter Four: Hits, Misses, and the Human Host
• Chapter Five: Folk: New Allies and New Sounds
• Chapter Six: Meeting Cat Stevens
• Chapter Seven: Meeting Bob Marley
• Chapter Eight: Voices, Visionaries, and Videos
• Chapter Nine: The Seventies: St. Peter’s Square, Hammersmith
• Chapter Ten: The Eighties: Compass Point, the Bahamas
• Chapter Eleven: Timing: Grace Jones and the All Stars
• Chapter Twelve: Meeting U2
• Chapter Thirteen: The Nineties: Shifting Ground
• Chapter Fourteen: Moving On: For the Love of Jamaica
• Epilogue: Whatever Next…
• Photographs
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• Index
• Copyright