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Posts tagged ‘Chris Blackwell’

Jan 8

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Island Records: The Greatcoat Years

No record label has ever had its history subjected to the sort of minutely detailed scrutiny on show in the first two volumes of Neil Storey’s The Island Book of Records, the second of which was published just before Christmas. The initial volume examined the label’s earliest years, 1959-68, from the family background of its founder, Chris Blackwell, to the breakthrough into the new rock mainstream with the debuts of Traffic, Jethro Tull and Fairport Convention. The new one deals with just two years, 1969 and 1970. Their successors will, I gather, each focus on a single year**.

The format is that of an LP-size hardback of considerable heft (432 pages of high-grade paper in case of the new one), an oral history with testimony from participants and interested bystanders lavishly illustrated with photos, sleeve artwork, press cuttings, documents, ads and other ephemera. What 1969-70 means is loads of background (and foreground) material beginning with Steve Winwood’s involvement in Blind Faith and ending with King Crimson’s third album, Lizard. Among those featuring heavily are Spooky Tooth, Free and Mott the Hoople, three classic early Island rock bands whose largely student and mostly male following tended to sport ex-army greatcoats, along with plimsolls, loon pants and cheesecloth shirts.

You get their stories in jigsaw form, pieced together with great diligence in mostly bite-sized chunks of testimony. A good example is the treatment of Nick Drake’s Five Leaves Left: the producer Joe Boyd, the engineer John Wood, the bass player Danny Thompson, the guitarist Richard Thompson and the arranger Robert Kirby help describe its making, while Blackwell and his Island colleagues David Betteridge, Tim Clark, Bob Bell and Barry Partlow and the record shop owners John Clare and Eugene Manzi try to explain why it didn’t sell. (When Boyd sold his Witchseason production company to Blackwell in the ’70, it was with the stipulation in the contract that Drake’s three albums should never be deleted.) Others providing testimony include Gabrielle Drake, Nick’s sister, and Victoria Ormsby-Gore, a well connected friend.

There’s too much stuff here for me to begin to do it justice, but the riches include the triumph of King Crimson’s first album, helped by the fact that their two managers, David Enthoven and John Gaydon, were, like Blackwell, Old Harrovians; the debut album by Quintessence, a quintessentially Island band (i.e. Notting Hill hippies) that it turns out nobody in the company really seemed to like; the Fotheringay debacle, which derailed Sandy Denny’s career; the emergence of two ex-Alan Bown Set singers, Jess Roden and Robert Palmer, respectively with Bronco and Vinegar Joe; and the huge success of Cat Stevens, reinvented as a singer-songwriter with Tea for the Tillerman, and of Emerson, Lake & Palmer.

Alongside epochal releases like Traffic’s John Barleycorn Must Die and Fairport’s Unhalfbricking and Liege & Lief, the book features such bit-part players as Dr Strangely Strange (“a poor man’s Incredible String Band”), Blodwyn Pig and McDonald & Giles (respectively offshoots of Jethro Tull and King Crimson), and White Noise’s somewhat prophetic An Electric Storm, which seemed to typify Island’s propensity, in the early days, for backing weird stuff. Nothing is neglected, including the hugely popular and influential compilations, particularly what might be called the greatcoat anthologies: You Can All Join In, Nice Enough to Eat and Bumpers.

The two years covered by this volume pivot around the move from offices on Oxford Street to a former Congregational church on Basing Street in Notting Hill, converted around the time of the First World War into a factory making dressmakers’ showroom busts and wax figures for Madame Tussaud’s. Blackwell bought it and, with the aid of the acoustic engineer Michael Glickman and the studio technician Dick Swettenham, set about converting into a headquarters that incorporated not just offices for the label’s staff but two studios, No 1 on the ground floor, capable of accommodating 80 musicians, and the more intimate No 2 in the basement. This was where a bunch of talented young engineers set to work with Helios 16-track desks and Studer two-inch tape machines, and we hear from some of those hitherto best known as names the bottom of the list of album credits: Brian Humphries, Phill Brown, Richard Digby-Smith (“Diga”) and Phil Ault.

This was a turning point. Basing Street became a creative hub, a 24-hour hang-out, the office business conducted at round tables seating executives and secretaries in a non-hierarchical environment. Guy Stevens, the former DJ at the Scene Club in Ham Yard, for whom Blackwell had created the Sue label, was a maverick A&R presence, introducing Ian Hunter to a bunch of guys from Hereford and giving them the name Mott the Hoople. Lucky Gordon was the resident chef.

I visited Basing Street quite a lot during those early years, sometimes interviewing various people and other times just hanging out, occasionally in the studios. The buzz was terrific. It was, I suppose, a perfect example of hip capitalism in action. Nothing so perfect lasts for ever, but in this volume of his epic and invaluable series — expensive but, to those with an interest, worth every penny — Neil Storey catches it in glorious ascent.

* The Island Book of Records Vol 2: 1969-70, edited by Neil Storey, is published by Manchester University Press / Hidden Masters (£85)

** Not quite right. Apparently Vol 3 (out in the spring of ’26, all being well) will deal with 1971-72. Vol 4 is 1973-76, Vol 5 is probably 1977-79, and Vol 6 could be 1980-83. Neil Storey says he has always thought of the series as consisting of 10 to 12 volumes, so we’ll see.

Mar 1

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The Ballad of Bob and Rita

On the way to the cinema to see One Love last night, my thoughts went back to 1967, and buying the Wailers’ “Put It On” on an Island 45 at the West Indian record shop on Union Street in Nottingham, near the bus station. And to 1972, and spending hours at Harry J’s studio in Kingston, listening to them recording tracks for Catch A Fire, sharing Chris Blackwell’s pleasure as he realised what a good decision he’d made when he advanced them — in a move so unusual in the Jamaican record industry as to be unique — enough money to make an album. Who could have imagined then that Bob Marley, having first become a global symbol, would eventually turn into an industry, the generator of posthumous books, exhibitions, a musical and now a feature film?

So I was going to the film slightly reluctantly, in a mood of mild pessimism, even cynicism. How sensible, after all, is it to expect Hollywood to treat something you know a bit and care quite a lot about with sensitivity and respect? An hour and a half later I emerged in a very different frame of mind.

Reinaldo Marcus Green’s film concentrates on one short period of Marley’s life, from his shooting by political gunmen two days before a planned Peace Concert in December 1976 through the 18 months in London during which he recorded Exodus before returning home for the One Love concert, in which he stood between the prime minister, Michael Manley, and the leader of the opposition, Edward Seaga, and made them join hands.

It isn’t a biopic, although there are flashbacks to Marley’s early years: to the departure of his father, to his introduction to the cult of Rastafari, to the day the producer Clement Dodd invited the nascent Wailers into the studio. The earliest of these are framed, very effectively, as dreamlike childhood memories. But the bulk of the film concentrates on the narrow span of time in which he rose to his fullest artistic height (Exodus is his What’s Going On or Innervisions) while first surviving the would-be assassins’ bullets and then receiving the diagnosis of the cancer that would kill him in 1981, aged 36.

No praise is too high for Kingsley Ben-Adir, the British actor playing Marley. Ben-Adir, who portrayed Malcolm X in the brilliant One Night in Miami a few years ago, doesn’t look much like Marley, and his speaking voice is deeper, but he finds the physical litheness, the fleeting expressions and the inflections of speech, and the distinctive air of watchfulness, that evoke the man very clearly and accurately.

He’s well matched by Lashana Lynch as Rita Marley, Bob’s wife, the mother of three of his 11 children, and a member (with Judy Mowatt and Marcia Griffiths) of the I-Threes, his backing singers. Lynch does the long-suffering thing with a light touch and a range of nuance to match that of Ben-Adir. The family’s involvement in the production might call the accuracy of the depiction of their relationship into question, but the two actors make you believe in it for an hour and a half, at least, giving the film its emotional core.

The dramatis personae includes many of the characters who made contributions to Bob’s life, from Mortimer Planno, the Rasta philosopher, through Joe Higgs, his musical mentor, and Gilly the cook to Neville Garrick, the brilliant graphic designer, who died last year. And, of course, the musicians, who populate the scenes in rehearsals and recording studios that bring the songs from Exodus fully to life. It helps to have Aston Barrett Jr, one of Family Man’s sons, playing bass, but the actor-musicians playing Tyrone Downie, Carlton Barrett, Seeco Patterson, Junior Marvin and the rest are completely convincing, as is the depiction of the atmosphere within Island’s London studios.

The film is unfair, I think, on Chris Blackwell, who is played by James Norton — a reasonable match in visual terms, but coming across as far smoother and more superficial and ingratiating than the real thing. Blackwell’s concentration on Marley’s career eventually brought him the enmity of Bunny Livingston and Peter Tosh, but his vision and commitment created the opportunity for Jamaican music, spearheaded by the Wailers, to establish itself as a creative contributor to the music of the world.

But, you know, this is a story about black creativity and culture, told for once by black people, and if it’s the white people — record executives, promotion people and journalists — who look like the outsiders, then that’s more than fine. The use throughout of unsubtitled Jamaican patois is a way of making people like me aware that we’re being invited to enter another world.

And, of course, you come out of the cinema with the music in your ears, brilliantly rendered: the war cries and lamentations and songs of seduction and redemption, all still gloriously full of that defiant sweetness.

Oct 27

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Our Island Story

To those who found Chris Blackwell’s 2022 autobiography, The Islander, long on charm but, shall we say, short on detail, The Island Book of Records Vol 1 1959-68 will be the answer to their prayers. Here is the story of the UK’s most charismatic independent label during its formative years, in which the foundations were laid for the company that would later become the home of King Crimson and ELP, the Wailers and Bob Marley, Roxy Music, Bryan Ferry and Brian Eno, Sandy Denny, Sparks, John Martyn, U2 and Grace Jones before Blackwell sold it to Polygram in 1989.

Comprehensively compiled and meticulously edited by Neil Storey, who worked in the label’s press office (and was more recently responsible for the Hidden Masters archive box sets devoted to Chris Wood and Jess Roden), the book’s large square format — handsomely designed by Jayne Gould — enables LP covers to be reproduced at their original size. The scale also allows the enormous amount of information to breathe amid the mass of photographs, press cuttings, record labels and other paraphernalia and ephemera, plus masses of oral history from figures both famous and unknown to the general public but significant to the way the label was run, all deployed to inform and entertain.

After Storey’s discursive and amusing introduction, it begins by describing Blackwell’s origins in Jamaica and the UK, including a Daily Mirror clipping from 1933 showing a picture of his mother on her way to Buckingham Palace be presented as a debutante to King George V and Queen Mary, and his own Harrow School house photo from 1954. Island’s first release, the cocktail pianist Lance Haywood’s At the Half Moon Hotel, Montego Bay, from 1959, is accompanied by quotes from Blackwell, the guitarist Ernest Ranglin, the drummer Clarence “Tootsie” Bear, and the daughter of the hotel’s director, who invited Blackwell — then a water-ski instructor — to listen to the trio performing in the lounge, an encounter on which history hinged.

That’s the degree of depth the reader can expect, whether the subject is Jackie Edwards, Millie Small, Traffic, Jimmy Cliff, Spooky Tooth and the nascent Fairport Convention or the American artists — Ike & Tina Turner, James Brown, Inez & Charlie Foxx, J. B. Lenoir, Billy Preston, Jimmy McGriff, the pre-Spector Righteous Brothers and Huey “Piano” Smith — released on the Sue label by Guy Stevens, the DJ at the Scene club in Ham Yard whose vision was recognised and given free rein by Blackwell, to the lasting benefit of me and many other ’60s teenagers.

The more obscure bands — Wynder K. Frog, Art, Nirvana, the Spontaneous Music Ensemble — are covered in full, as are the projects undertaken to pay the bills while providing a laugh along the way: That Affair (about the Christine Keeler scandal), Music to Strip By (with a lace G-string stuck on to the cover), For Adults Only (comedy) and Big Theo (Johnson)’s Bawdy British Ballads. The company’s first gold disc was apparently secured by Why Was He Born So Beautiful by the Jock Strapp Ensemble, the first of several volumes of rugby songs, at least one of which was recorded at Sound Techniques by the engineer John Wood, who would later record Nick Drake and the other Witchseason artists at the same Chelsea studio.

The making of all these is illuminated by the people who were there, not just the artists but those who were playing important roles in the background, whether by working in the Basing Street office — where everyone sat at round tables, erasing a sense of explicit hierarchy — or by going around the country selling the records, or simply by being Blackwell’s friends. How they all made it up as they went along, and how the founder encouraged and allowed it to happen, is an object lesson in human and cultural dynamics.

“I’m not a collector,” Blackwell says. “I was always looking forward.” Island maintained no real-time archive during his era (which, of course, made Storey’s task of research more demanding and almost certainly more entertaining). When I worked in A&R there, in the mid-’70s, someone told me one morning that the Richmond branch of the Blackwell-owned One Stop Records was closing that evening and that the basement contained a cache of the company’s old 45s. They were going to be chucked out and did I want to do something about them? Collectors had better close their eyes at the next bit: I drove straight down there, found boxes and boxes of mint Sue and white-label Island singles from the ’60s, sorted out two of each — one for the company, one for my office — and sent the rest to be melted down. I have no idea what happened to the ones I saved after I left in 1976. Everyone was looking forward, which is the right way to run a record company.

* The Island Book of Records Vol 1 1959-68, edited by Neil Storey, is published by Manchester University Press (£85).

Sep 15

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A memory of Toots Hibbert

It was Chris Blackwell’s idea to get Toots Hibbert to record “Tumbling Dice”. He must have had in mind the way Otis Redding had made such a success of turning “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” into a soul stomper. And, as people always said, if Toots resembled anyone in the way he delivered a song, it was Otis.

This was September 1972, and Blackwell was in Jamaica to work on a few projects, including the sessions for the Wailers’ forthcoming album for his Island label. Bob Marley, Peter Tosh and Bunny Livingston were at Harry J’s studio, on Roosevelt Avenue in Half Way Tree, recording a song called “Slave Driver”, which included the lines: “Slave driver, the tables have turned / Catch a fire, and you will get burned.” A couple of miles across Kingston, just off Spanish Town Road in a featureless area near the docks, lay Dynamic Sounds, where the studio had been booked for an afternoon session with the Maytals, whose Blackwell-produced album Funky Kingston, released in the UK six months earlier, had already stirred interest outside the established market for West Indian music.

Dynamic Sounds was also where, at the start of the year, Paul Simon had recorded “Mother and Child Reunion” with a local rhythm section including the lead guitarist Hux Brown, the bass guitarist Jackie Jackson and the drummer Winston Grennan, drawing the rock world’s attention to reggae. Those three musicians were reassembled for this Maytals session, augmented by Radcliffe Bryan on rhythm guitar, Winston Riley on organ and Gladstone “Gladdy” Anderson on piano. As they arrived, I noted Jackie Jackson’s choice of conveyance: a brand new Vauxhall Viva GT covered with tiger-skin vinyl.

Together they were variously known as Gladdy’s All Stars, the Harry J All Stars, Beverley’s All Stars, the Aggrovators and, eventually, the Upsetters. They were a crack band, and on a hot afternoon in Kingston, sitting in a circle, the drums separated only by low sound-baffles, they locked into a groove without a moment’s hesitation. The only problem was that no one — not Toots or his fellow Maytals, Jerry Mathias and Raleigh Gordon, not Blackwell, not even me — knew the words to “Tumbling Dice”, and in those days there was no Google where someone had deciphered Mick Jagger’s faux-southern drawl and decided that he was singing “Honey, got no money / I’m all at sixes and sevens and nines / Say now, baby, I’m the rank outsider / You can be my partner in crime.”

Toots’s solution was to ignore that little difficulty and simply steam ahead, making up words — mostly nonsense syllables — as he went along. If Otis could make sense of “fa-fa-fa-fa” and “got-ta-got-ta”, so could he. And that’s more or less what he’d done with Richard Berry’s “Louie Louie”, one of the singles taken from Funky Kingston. A few takes of “Tumbling Dice” were committed to tape, but as far as I can discover nothing ever saw the light of day.

For me, it was just a treat to see those musicians — the equivalent of the house bands at Stax in Memphis or Cosimo Matassa’s studio in New Orleans — in their own environment. Particularly Hux Brown, whose stuttering single-note commentary was such a distinctive feature of so many records, including “Mother and Child Reunion”, and Gladdy Anderson, a legend of Jamaican music.

And, of course, Toots, whose death at the age of 77 was announced last week. I’m sorry I didn’t get to hear him recording one of his great original compositions, like “Six and Seven Books of Moses” or “54-46 Was My Number”, but at least I got a chance to spend a few hours watching a force of nature at work.

* The photograph of Toots and his fellow Maytals is from one of the reissues of Funky Kingston. Maybe someone can tell me who took it.

Jul 14

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Catch A Fire redux

Catch A FireLondon felt like an oven as I made my way to the South Bank to watch Gary Crosby’s augmented Jazz Jamaica celebrate the 40th anniversary of Catch A Fire last night. It reminded me of the evening of September 20, 1972, when I landed at Palisadoes Airport in Kingston, Jamaica and experienced Caribbean heat for the first time, about to discover the way it transports you into a different reality.

Chris Blackwell, the founder of Island Records, whom I had not met before, picked me up at the terminal in a Mini Moke, which also contained the American photographer Lynn Goldsmith. We drove along the Palisadoes, the long spit of land than encloses Kingston Harbour, to Port Royal, the old pirate headquarters — or what was left of it by the earthquakes of 1692 and 1907. It was quiet, and it was hot, and we got out of the Moke by the seafront, where goats were settling down for the night and men were selling fish from glass-fronted wooden cases. Blackwell bought us each a piece of fried snapper and a can of cold Red Stripe from a bar made out of corrugated iron sheets. It seemed like heaven

The following day we went to Dynamic Sound studios, where Toots and the Maytals were trying to record “Tumbling Dice”, a task only marginally impeded by the fact that Toots didn’t know the words and was making them up as he went along. This gave me the chance to witness one of the great rhythm sections at work: Hucks Brown (guitar), Gladstone Anderson (piano), Winston Wright (organ), Jackie Jackson (bass) and Winston Grennan (drums), each of them doing exactly what you hoped he’d do. Particularly Hucks Brown, playing those unique little stuttering, flickering single-string fills that had distinguished Paul Simon’s “Mother and Child Reunion” a few months earlier.

I was shown around Trenchtown the next morning by Joe Higgs, the singer who had mentored the young Wailers, teaching them how to sing harmony. Joe was an older man, a calm, charming, deep-voiced Rasta. He gave me a copy of his new 45, “Let Us Do Something”, and took me to Bob’s Tuff Gong record shack at 127 King Street, one block across from Orange Street, where I bought copies of the Wailers’ “Trenchtown Rock” and their latest release, “Satisfy My Soul Jah Jah”. That afternoon Blackwell and I went to Half Way Tree, where he had an appointment at the Aquarius record store with Herman Chin Loy, a young producer, who played us some pretty wild acetates on which he wanted to make a deal; they may have been the ones that surfaced the following year on the first of his Aquarian Dub LPs.

That evening we met up with Harry Johnson — the famous Harry J — who removed a Smith & Wesson from the glove compartment of his Oldsmobile and placed it in a shoulder holster concealed by his lightweight jacket before ushering took us to his studio on Roosevelt Avenue. I remember it as a bungalow surrounded by lawn and trees. Inside, amid a thick fug of ganja, were Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, Bunny Livingstone, Aston Barrett and Carlton Barrett, laying down the track of “Slave Driver”, whose lyric would provide the title for Catch A Fire.

I knew about the Wailers. Back in 1966 I’d bought two of their early singles, “Put It On” and “He Who Feels It Knows It”, on the old Island white label. I loved the songs, the rhythms and, most of all, the harmonies. But this was a quite different sort of experience: thanks to the Barrett brothers (my second great rhythm section in two days), the music had a dark churn of a kind I’d never heard before, somehow lazy and energised at the same time. The vocals were equally stunning: Marley’s lead was mesmerising, the harmony work piercingly gorgeous.

Blackwell had done something unprecedented in the annals of Jamaican music. At a time when musicians sold the rights to their singles for 25 Jamaican dollars, he had advanced the Wailers several thousand pounds in order to make an album, bringing the economics of production and promotion developed in rock music to the world of reggae. And this was his first exposure to the result of what most people in the Jamaican music business saw as an outrageous and hopeless gamble. But Blackwell was always a talented gambler, and almost as soon as he walked through the studio door he knew that this one had come off.

The quickest and simplest way of explaining the effect of all this on me is to say that when I got home, a couple of days later, I sat down to write a piece suggesting that in Bob Marley, Jamaica had a musician whose effect might one day be comparable to that of Marvin Gaye, Sly Stone and Curtis Mayfield. Not wrong there. Catch A Fire came out six months later, in its strikingly ingenious (and expensive) Zippo cover, beginning the process that, within three years, turned Marley into an international superstar and cultural symbol and made reggae into an wordwide lingua franca.

That’s a long way of getting round to talking about last night’s gig at the Festival Hall, but it might help to explain why I found it so moving when the 21-member Jazz Jamaica All Stars, the 12-piece Urban Soul string ensemble, the 240-person Voicelab choir, the conductor Kevin Robinson, the choirmaster Mark De Lisser and the singer-guitarist Brinsley Forde launched into “No More Trouble”. In that moment, in that song’s combination of baleful cadences and stare-down optimism, the summoning of musical and spiritual powers was at its most intense: spine-tingling at the start, overwhelming by the finish.

They played the album all the way through, Jason Yarde’s arrangements making use of all the available resources: the strings on Tosh’s “Stop That Train”, an acapella coda for the three female backing singers (Zara MacFarlane, Keisha Downie and Rasiyah) on “Baby, Baby We’ve Got a Date”, the best guitar solo I’ve heard this year from Robin Banerjee on “Concrete Jungle”, a fine Latin piano solo from Ben Burrell on “Midnight Ravers”, a rousing violin duel between Stephen Hussey and Miles Brett on “Stir It Up”, the tenor saxophone of Denys Baptiste and the trumpet of Yazz Ahmed swapping phrases on another Tosh song, “400 Years”. And the other great solo of the night, by the tenorist Patrick Clahar, on “No More Trouble”.

They finished with three songs from Marley’s later repertoire: “One Love”, “Redemption Song” — sung by Brinsley Forde with just the strings for company — and “Lively Up Yourself”. Brinsley deserves the highest praise for a performance in which he evoked the spirit of the great man without exaggeration and without pushing himself forward, becoming just another member of a unique and hugely life-affirming organism. Quite a night.