In a wide-ranging new memoir, the impresario who worked with Bob Marley, Roxy Music and U2, talks about his incredible life in the industry
Photograph: Island Outpost Images / David YellenPhotograph: Island Outpost Images / David YellenChris Blackwell, who built Island Records into one of most tasteful, artist-friendly and successful labels in music history, will quickly admit that, along the way, he made some grave mistakes.
The roots of that interest can be traced to the island of Jamaica, where he moved with his parents from London when he was a child. For our interview, Blackwell, now 84, spoke by phone from a place he purchased long ago – Goldeneye – the storied, Ocho Rios idyll once owned by Ian Fleming that now serves as a high-end hotel. A child of notable privilege, Blackwell grew up in at atmosphere both elevated and isolated.
Soon after he also opened up to a new kind of music. Blackwell’s father had helped him develop a deep love of classical music by blasting Wagner and Puccini at ear-piercing volume. Now, he found himself drawn to a very different style, emanating from the booming sound systems that amplified the ska records that had been produced by genre pioneers like Coxsone Dodd. At local live performances, Blackwell began picking out singers he liked, offering to record them with money funded by his family.
Blackwell let his most interesting artists develop organically, supporting them through albums that were not big sellers. The label issued four fascinating, but quirky, albums by Mott the Hoople that bombed and a clutch of daring efforts by one of Blackwell’s pet bands, Spooky Tooth, that failed to ignite. “They were great musicians,” he said of Spooky Tooth. “But they never had the right songs.”
One of the saddest sections of the book deals with Nick Drake, who died of an overdose of his anti-depression medicine at age 26. Though his three albums sold abysmally, Blackwell valued his work so highly that, when he sold the company in the late 90s, he put in a clause saying that Drake’s albums could never be deleted from the catalogue no matter how poorly they performed.
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