Clew bay westport4/30/2023 ![]() It is a stunningly beautiful house where you can look right across the water and see Croagh Patrick. ![]() “They had a home in Clew Bay near Westport. “My grandfather was Irish and my father grew up loving Ireland,” he reveals. Blackwell has a long association with Ireland, through his family as well as U2. Other Irish acts on the books at Island Records at some point include The Cranberries and My Bloody Valentine. I felt that these guys really had a drive and this guy was going to get them there, so I wanted to sign them.” He could build the band without getting in the way and dressed in a suit when very few in the music industry did. Secondly, they had a proper businessperson in Paul McGuinness. “Firstly, the passion and the drive the band had, led by Bono, was infectious. “I was very impressed with U2 at the outset for two reasons,” he says. I just loved the people and I still do.”Ĭhris Blackwell Chris Blackwell at Compass Point (Bahamas) Studio with engineer Steven Stanley (far right)īlackwell notes in fascinating chapters entitled Meeting Bob Marley and Meeting U2 that he was immediately taken aback by the strong personalities of both artists. I played games and chopped wood with them, walked through the forests and hills. It was all on 78s in those days, which you had to take off after three minutes. “My father used to play classical music like Wagner and Puccini. “I took to music from a very early age,” Blackwell says. Later, he became obsessed with their music and culture and helped put them on the world stage. He never held the same prejudices as many in mainstream white Jamaican society did towards Rastas. ![]() From very early on, I just wanted to try and do something which could help in some manner or other.”Įarly on in The Islander, Blackwell describes how a group of Rastafarians saved his life after being stranded at sea. I was inspired by how they got through their lives, which was not easy. ![]() During those eight years or so of my life, I became immersed with Jamaican people and I fell in love with them. I had little or no contact with the outside world in general. I was sick as a child, so I spent most of my time with Jamaicans. “I love Jamaica and I love the people of Jamaica,” he says. Digging back into the past and unearthing these stories became a lot of fun.”Ĭhris Blackwell Perry Henzell, Toots Hibbert, Chris Blackwell and Jimmy Cliffīlackwell considers putting Jamaican culture and music on the map to be among his finest achievements. Not a moment of it was painful or laborious in any way. I’d never really thought about doing a book before. He wrote a book with Grace Jones called I’ll Never Write My Memoirs, so I felt that he would be great to work with on this. “I worked with Paul Morley at Island Records about 20 years ago. “There wasn’t any specific single reason for writing this,” Blackwell reveals on the phone from London. He considers himself to be a member of “the Lucky Sperm Club”, born into a family who inherited the Crosse & Blackwell food brand empire. The Islander tells the engrossing tale about how a “directionless Anglo-Irish-Jamaican boarding-school flameout” would establish one of the most important record labels in musical history. As he approaches his 85th birthday, Chris Blackwell is publishing a very colourful memoir called The Islander: My Life in Music and Beyond, written with prolific author Paul Morley, who penned last year’s superb biography From Manchester with Love: The Life and Opinions of Tony Wilson. Island Records would eventually occupy an illustrious and lucrative space between an independent and a major label, signing Bob Marley, Grace Jones, Cat Stevens, U2, Roxy Music and Tom Waits, to mention just a tiny few. Prior to running the label, he flogged records from the boot of his car all over London and stocked Jamaican jukeboxes with the latest up-and-coming sounds. Blackwell founded Island Records in Jamaica in 1959. Compared to larger-than-life music moguls such as Malcolm McLaren, Tony Wilson or Alan McGee, Chris Blackwell is a much more low-key individual.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |