Interview

BLACKWELL: Nobody else in the world did. Bob Marley and The Wailers had a reputation for being total rebels and being sort of impossible to deal with. It was simply because, you know, they were being treated unfairly.

MAJD: So you gave Bob Marley the money, and then he went to Jamaica and recorded the songs that would become Catch a Fire [1973]. Then you went to Jamaica and heard it, is that correct?

BLACKWELL: I went about three months later. I went to where they had a little record store, because The Wailers had their own label, and they had been putting out their own records. Rita [Marley] was there . . .

MAJD: You’re going to see her in a few hours . . .

BLACKWELL: That’s right! And so I said, “I want to see the guys and hear what they’ve recorded. Have they recorded anything?” Because I was prepared for them to have done nothing. So they came around and picked me up and took me to the studio and played me some of the songs. The first one I heard was “Slave Driver,” and I remember it particularly because, firstly, I was excited that they had recorded anything. So I was really encouraged. It had this great kind of bass line. The second line of the song says “catch a fire,” and, you know, I remember thinking right there, Wow, if this record is good, then that’s the title of the album. After that, they played “Concrete Jungle,” which was the most complex reggae song I had ever heard. And then they played me another ballad-y song, and it was nice, but it wasn’t really what I was looking for, because I was looking for rebel, militant music, since the whole thing was coming off the momentum of The Harder They Come [1972], and I wanted that spirit to come alive. Initially I was figuring out that that was what to do with Jimmy Cliff, but Jimmy Cliff left about a week before I got there, and then Bob walked in, and he’s the real thing. So I said, “I think we should put that song on the record later,” and then, you know, when it was finished, I told them how great I thought it was. And then Bob came to England because I wanted to work on the record to make it more palatable for the rock audience.

MAJD: At that point you’d been dealing with that audience for a while.

BLACKWELL: Yes. And I knew we could pull them in, but reggae in England at that point was known as novelty music. Every year, there’d be two or three hits, like “Long Shot Kick De Bucket” [the 1969 song by The Pioneers], but they were like novelty tunes. At that time, reggae wasn’t considered serious music, whereas rock music had been considered serious for some time. Jimi Hendrix was a model, in a sense, because I felt like Bob could be that big. And so I worked on Catch a Fire. I moved things around. I had rock guitar, synthesizers, and expanded into solos, because reggae never had solos—although ska did—so I put that element back into the music. In fact, if you listen to the work that Bob did on Island, from Catch a Fire up until the last record he made [Uprising, 1980], the first one is much more polished than the last one. But I needed to polish it to bring in the rock audience and to get them accepted as a black rock group—that’s how I was positioning things.

MAJD: So the way you marketed Catch a Fire wasas a rock record?

BLACKWELL: Completely as a rock record. The idea of the cover came from the art director at Capitol Records in America, because I had made a deal for Island in 1970 with Capitol. It was that guy who came up with the idea of the lighter . . . Ah, what’s it called?

MAJD: The Zippo.

BLACKWELL: The Zippo.

MAJD: The sleeve opened like a Zippo lighter to reveal the album. It’s an iconic album cover. If you still have a copy of that, it goes for a lot of money . . . [The original version of the Catch a Fire sleeve only came with the first 20,000 pressings of the album. After it was discovered that producing more would be too expensive, alternate cover art was selected.]

BLACKWELL: No, I don’t have one. I wish I did.

MAJD: Amazingly, Catch a Fire wasn’t really a hit initially in terms of sales. But it certainly made a lot of noise.

BLACKWELL: Yeah, Catch a Fire only sold about 14,000 copies in its first year, but it got great reviews. It made noise, which was basically the main thing we wanted to do with it anyhow. I’ve always looked at it this way: I’m in the career business—I’m in the artists business, with the records being the milestones. So I’m not in the record business, per se.

MAJD: So you had this huge success with Bob. And, of course, you’ve also had success with some other Jamaican records . . .

BLACKWELL: Lots. Third World, Burning Spear, Toots and The Maytals, Steel Pulse . . .

MAJD: But none of them enjoyed quite the success or the acclaim that Bob Marley did. Was there any jealousy in the Jamaican music industry? Was it difficult for you, as a Jamaican, going back and forth between England, America, and Jamaica?

BLACKWELL: Well, it’s hard, from a developed-world point of view, to see it from the Jamaican point of view. Because from the Jamaican point of view, I was the one who made it all happen.

MAJD: You’re the white Jamaican who stepped in with all the contacts and the experience . . .

BLACKWELL: Right. And that still existed, as much as I would try to say to people, “I can help, but it all starts from you. I’m not writing the songs . . .” So, for a while, I stopped signing Jamaican artists, because if somebody signed with Island, they’d feel like, “Well, that’s it. Now our record is going to be a huge hit automatically.” And, of course, the worst thing is to disappoint people . . .

MAJD: Especially in a small community like Jamaica.

BLACKWELL: Yes. But the Jamaican people needed to see how the world embraced Bob Marley. In Jamaica, a lot of the powers-that-be are not all that comfortable with Bob Marley being the image of Jamaica and being the reason that people even really know where Jamaica is. They don’t feel too good about it. As far as they’re concerned, he’s this guy from the street.

MAJD: And then you moved on . . . And in 1980 you signed U2. Of course, that was big.

BLACKWELL: I’ll tell you what happened. First of all, after Bob, somebody who I felt could have been a big star was Jacob Miller. Bob basically became a rock star in Jamaican music, and Jacob, I felt, could have done the same. He was a big guy, but an incredible personality. Incredible. I mean, I have a picture of Bob and Jacob and myself standing in front of a plane, and you look at it, and you would say that Jacob is the biggest star there without any question. He just had that presence. But then he was killed in a car crash, and things ended before they began. And then the other people who I thought were the epitome of what I believed in were Black Uhuru—what an incredible name . . . Their music sounded like Black Uhuru, they looked like Black Uhuru, they even won a Grammy. But they said, “What is Grammy? Wha’ dat?” And then they broke up. So, after all that, I thought, “Just forget about it.” But I had spent no time on U2. I just saw them, I liked them a lot, I believed in them, and I signed them to the company. But I did not have any influence on them at all. I had nothing to do with their recordings, their graphics, their touring. They did everything themselves. What I did for U2 was to give them the platform of Island Records, because I said to the company, “These guys are in charge.” That’s why when we were working on their Pop [1997] record in the late ’90s [which was one of U2’s less successful albums, both critically and commercially], there was no model for anybody to say to them, “Hold on. This is a mess . . .” Because nothing like that ever happened with them before. Now, of course, they are huge, but they’d always been in charge of their own careers . . . But I think, honestly, after Bob passed away, I lost a lot of interest. There was something so exciting about Bob Marley, because you knew it wasn’t just about the charts. It was literally about changing the world again. And so it was incredibly exciting to play a part in that, and see that happening, and to help guide it. But after Bob, things sort of shifted for me. I was spending more time at Compass Point Studios, and working with Grace [Jones], which was fun. And then, you know, video started to emerge in the early ’80s . . .

MAJD: When, of course, you had a surprise hit with Robert Palmer and “Addicted to Love.” I remember you telling me that Island was an independent label and that you owned it and there were ups and downs financially, but you said that you put all of Island Records’ money behind the video for that song.

BLACKWELL: The person I picked to direct that video was Terry Donovan, who was the greatest fashion photographer for women, and, you know, he’d make women look unbelievable. He just had it. And Robert, who was a very good-looking guy, somehow only photographed really well if there was a woman in the picture. I don’t know what it was, but suddenly he sort of came to life. So I rang Terry Donovan and asked him if he’d do a video. He said, “Well, I don’t do too much video.” And I said, “I’ll send over the song.” So I sent over the song, and he rang me back and said, “I like the song, and I’ve got an idea for it. I’ve got these girls, and they’re going to be, like, the band, and he’s going to sing in front of them.” And I thought the idea sounded really corny. I thought, Oh, my God, this could be a disaster. But I had a lot of confidence in Terry, so I said okay. Robert went and did it and when he came back—because I was living in Nassau then, as was Robert—I said, “How did it go?” And he said, “I think it went really well.” I said “Really? It didn’t look corny?” And he said, “No, they looked great.” So, boom, flash-forward a couple of weeks, and a tape arrives. I call Robert and say, “The tape has arrived. Let’s go and watch it.” We turned it on, and we’re watching and we’re like, “Fuck, this is unbelievable.” So I rang the company and said, “Whatever we’ve got, let’s roll the dice.”

MAJD: [laughs] It was a gamble. But it was one of those bets that paid off in a big way.

BLACKWELL: Big time. And that’s when I thought, You know, the future of everything is going to be a merging of music and film, because the videomakers of today are going to be the filmmakers of tomorrow, so we should really be in the film business as well as the music business—sort of merge them together. That was my thinking.

MAJD: In 1989 you wound up selling Island to Polygram Records. What led up to that?

BLACKWELL: I sold Island because it had gotten too corporate. It was just too many people . . .

MAJD: Our staff at that point was, I think, 120 people in America alone . . .

BLACKWELL: Right. And that wasn’t my thing. When you get big, you can’t keep the same kind of label identity, because you have to have lots of different people doing things. And when you have lots of people doing things, naturally they have their own tastes. At that point, I was 52—and the music business is really about younger people—so I decided I was going to move back to Jamaica as a sort of base, and focus on the hotel business.

MAJD: Do you follow the contemporary music scene in Jamaica at all now?

BLACKWELL: I don’t. Now and then I hear a record that I think is really great . . . Most of them are sort of mash-up-type records, which are incredibly creative, but it’s almost impossible to administer the copyrights for them. But a lot of those records do just go off somewhere you don’t expect and have that sort of excitement to them.

MAJD: Do you miss the music business at all?

BLACKWELL: Well, there isn’t really a music business right now. If I were in my twenties, I think this would be an exciting time. Somebody right now could build another Island Records. The music business is at the point where it needs to be reinvented again. When I started, Decca and EMI had 95 percent of the business, Philips had 4 percent, and the final 1 percent was split among all the little independents. We’re in a situation sort of like that again now, except back when I was starting, the cost of entry was high, because there was no way to get around distribution. But I feel proud that Island broke down a lot of those barriers—and broke the system, really. The majors are still clinging on desperately by their fingernails. The people who own the big labels today do not know the music business, and the people who are running them don’t know it, either. Ninety percent of them should be fired. But these labels have incredible catalogues, and that’s what keeps them all-powerful. They own all this great music. So they should just consolidate and manage their catalogues digitally and then provide a platform for new music to be heard—because that’s all a record company really ever was anyhow.

MAJD: If you still owned Island Records, is there anything that you would want to do to celebrate its 50th anniversary?

BLACKWELL: Well, what I would love to do would be to have a free concert in Kingston. I’d love to do a big show in Jamaica that everybody could come to . . .

MAJD: Like a big thank-you to the island where it all started.

BLACKWELL: It could only really happen there. And it would be great, of course, if U2 could be involved . . . So we’ll see. But some of the old acts are still around and are as good as ever. Toots, you wouldn’t believe it—the energy is the same, the voice is the same. Jimmy Cliff too.

MAJD: Cat Stevens still has a great voice.

BLACKWELL: He might be doing something for Island’s 50th in London.

MAJD: Oh, he might?

BLACKWELL: Yeah. And he might be doing it as Cat Stevens.

MAJD: I guess the Yusuf Islam thing didn’t work out. [laughs]

BLACKWELL: No. When he played me his record two or three years ago, I thought about how good it was, and that it could do something. So I asked him under what name he wanted to release it, and he said Yusuf Islam. I told him that I didn’t think there was any chance to sell the record under that name. And he said, “What name do you think I could use?” And I said, “Well, Cat Stevens.” [Majd laughs] My logic for it was that his real name was Steven Georgiou, and he used Cat Stevens as his stage name, so if he changed from his previous real name to his new real name, why not keep his stage name? So that was the argument.

MAJD: At the time it didn’t work.

BLACKWELL: No, it didn’t fly. He said it would look like he was turning his back—

MAJD: On Islam . . . which he hasn’t, obviously.

BLACKWELL: No, he absolutely hasn’t.

MAJD: And you have to give him credit for that.

BLACKWELL: But I think he’s moved away from being very fundamental. He’s fantastic, though. Cat Stevens is truly one of the greats. It’s amazing in the sensethat the three biggest acts we had were Cat Stevens, Bob Marley, and U2—all very religious.

MAJD: Well, I hope that concert comes together.

BLACKWELL: I hope it does, too. It would draw a lot of people to Jamaica.

MAJD: It’s interesting because you’re promoting Jamaica now, and not musicians, but you’ve always liked to be in the background. You’ve never wanted to be onstage with anyone. There are even very few photographs of you with any of the artists whose careers you’ve helped launch.

BLACKWELL: Because I never liked the whole thing about pictures with the artists. I mean, you look back at an Elvis Presley record, and you don’t see any producer credits, because the audience is not supposed to know about the producer credit. They’re not supposed to think about that. The whole thing is supposed to be the act. It’s all about the act.

Hooman Majd is a New York–based writer and contributing editor at Interview. His book The Ayatollah Begs to Differ was published by Doubleday in the fall of 2008.