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The Islander: My Life in Music and Beyond
In the vein of Sound Man and The Soundtrack of My Life , a lyrical, warmhearted, and inspirational memoir from the founder of 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.
Chris Blackwell, like the paradigm-shifting artists he came to support over his sixty-plus years in the music business, never took the conventional route. He grew up between Jamaica and London, crossing paths with Ian Fleming, Noel Coward, and Errol Flynn. After being expelled from an elite British school for rebellious behavior in 1954 at age seventeen, he moved back to Jamaica, and within five years, founded Island Records—the company that would make an indelible mark on music, shifting with the times, but always keeping its core identity intact.
The Islander is the story of Blackwell and his cohorts at Island Records, who time and again, identified, nurtured, and broke out musicians who had been overlooked by bigger record labels, including Steve Winwood, Nick Drake, John Martyn, and Cat Stevens. After an impromptu meeting with Bob Marley and his bandmates in 1972, Blackwell decided to fund and produce their groundbreaking album Catch a Fire . He’d go on to work with Marley over the rest of his career, remain his close friend, and continually champion Jamaican culture and reggae music.
In the ensuing years, Blackwell worked with U2, Grace Jones, the B-52s, Tom Waits, Robert Palmer, Tom Tom Club, and many other groundbreaking artists. 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.
Blackwell is a legendary as well as deeply humble raconteur, and reading The Islander is like spending a day with the most interesting man in the world.
Chris Blackwell, like the paradigm-shifting artists he came to support over his sixty-plus years in the music business, never took the conventional route. He grew up between Jamaica and London, crossing paths with Ian Fleming, Noel Coward, and Errol Flynn. After being expelled from an elite British school for rebellious behavior in 1954 at age seventeen, he moved back to Jamaica, and within five years, founded Island Records—the company that would make an indelible mark on music, shifting with the times, but always keeping its core identity intact.
The Islander is the story of Blackwell and his cohorts at Island Records, who time and again, identified, nurtured, and broke out musicians who had been overlooked by bigger record labels, including Steve Winwood, Nick Drake, John Martyn, and Cat Stevens. After an impromptu meeting with Bob Marley and his bandmates in 1972, Blackwell decided to fund and produce their groundbreaking album Catch a Fire . He’d go on to work with Marley over the rest of his career, remain his close friend, and continually champion Jamaican culture and reggae music.
In the ensuing years, Blackwell worked with U2, Grace Jones, the B-52s, Tom Waits, Robert Palmer, Tom Tom Club, and many other groundbreaking artists. 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.
Blackwell is a legendary as well as deeply humble raconteur, and reading The Islander is like spending a day with the most interesting man in the world.
352 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2022
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5111 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 113 reviews
April 15, 2023
Meetings with Remarkable Musicians
Review of the Simon and Schuster Audio audiobook (June 7, 2022) narrated by Bill Nighy and released simultaneously with the Gallery Books hardcover/ebook.
You don't really learn that much about Chris Blackwell in this book. It mostly consists of anecdotes about his first hearings or meetings with musicians whom he signed for Island Records which he first started in Jamaica in 1959. The draw is that many of these musicians went on to iconic careers, often leaving Island Records when signed to larger firms. Island itself became too cumbersome to maintain in the 1990s and Blackwell ended up selling it to Polygram. He went on to a career in film production and resort hotels (including the development and expansion of Ian Fleming's Jamaican house Goldeneye).
Original photograph by Natalie Delon of film director Dickie Jobson, lead actor Edwin ‘Countryman’ Lothan, and producer Chris Blackwell on the Jamaican set of the film ‘Countryman’ (1982). The image was cropped for ‘The Islander’ book cover. Image sourced from Repeating Islands.
What you learn about Blackwell personally is very little. There is amusing trivia that he mostly liked to wear Tshirts, shorts and flipflops and to travel with no luggage. A characteristic anecdote tells about a visitor to a recording studio who ignored him, thinking he was the janitor, heading over to someone who was better dressed. His wives and girlfriends are mostly mentioned only in passing, usually with a throwaway line like 'my wife at the time'.
There are also some great stories about growing up in Jamaica and his family friendships with Errol Flynn, Noel Coward and Ian Fleming, who all lived or vacationed there. Blackwell's mother was a mistress of Ian Fleming and was considered an inspiration for various 'Bond girls.' Blackwell himself worked as a location scout and dogs-body for the first James Bond film Dr. No (1962).
Chris Blackwell, Sean Connery and Ursula Andress on the set of "Dr. No." Image sourced from the Tatler article Wild Jamaica.
If you are fan of any of the music artists, you will likely enjoy this journey through their early years and their early recordings from the 1960s to the 1990s.
I listened to the audiobook edition which was given an excellent narration by actor Bill Nighy. It was available as an Audible Daily Deal on March 18, 2023.
Soundtrack
Work in Progress
Will add Wikipedia and/or YouTube links where available for:
1. The first Island album was by jazz pianist Lance Hayward: 'At the Half-Moon Hotel, Montego Bay' (1959) which you can hear at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Og4A...
2. The first big international hit was Millie Small's My Boy Lollipop (1964), which you can hear at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSM9N...
3. The discovery of Steve Winwood in the Spencer Davis Group, their hit 'Keep On Running' (1965)
4. Further Steve Winwood & Spencer Davis Group hit 'Gimme Some Lovin' (1966)
5. Traffic's Mr. Fantasy (1967). Listen to the full album here. Songs were written at Sheepcote Farm cottage in Aston Tirrold, Berkshire. Background here.
6. Stephen Stills & Graham Nash cover of Dear Mr. Fantasy (CS&N Boxset 1991). Stephen Stills had wanted Steve Winwood to join CS&N at one point.
7. Original version of Mockingbird (1963) by Inez & Charlie Foxx. After hearing the song in a record store, Blackwell flew from Jamaica to NYC in order to obtain UK distribution rights via Island. The song was later covered by Carly Simon & James Taylor.
8. John Martyn Solid Air (1973) dedicated to Nick Drake. From the same-titled album Solid Air.
9. Fairport Convention folk-rock breakthrough with the album Liege and Lief (1969). Select track Matty Groves. Followed by Sandy Denny solo, Richard & Linda Thompson etc.
10. Nick Drake's (1948-1974) albums were ignored in his lifetime. A posthumous breakthrough came with a Volkswagen Cabrio commercial in 1999 which featured his Pink Moon.
11. Cat Stevens & his first Island album Tea for the Tillerman (1970). Blackwell was going to pass on him until he heard the 3rd song of his audition Father and Son, after which he signed him immediately.
12. Met Bob Marley and the Wailers when they passed through London hoping for some funds to get them back home to Jamaica. Blackwell advanced them money for their 1st Island album Catch a Fire (1973) which you can hear starting with Track 1 'Concrete Jungle' here.
13. Free's breakthrough hit "All Right Now" from the album Fire and Water (1970) where it is the last track.
14. Roxy Music and Brian Eno
15. Grace Jones 'La Vie en Rose'
16. Marianne Faithful 'Broken English'
17. Tom Waits 'SwordfishTrombones'
18. U2 early albums? then with Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois "The Unforgettable Fire" "The Joshua Tree".
Trivia and Links
There is an interview with Chris Blackwell on the release of the book at The Guardian here by Jim Farber, June 6, 2022.
Chris Blackwell was recently announced as one of the recipients of Sweden’s 2023 Polar Prize, the music version of the Nobel Prize. The March 28, 2023 announcement video which is a mini-bio of Blackwell’s life can be seen here and the celebration ceremony will be broadcast live on YouTube on May 23, 2023 on the Polar Music Prize channel.
Review of the Simon and Schuster Audio audiobook (June 7, 2022) narrated by Bill Nighy and released simultaneously with the Gallery Books hardcover/ebook.
You don't really learn that much about Chris Blackwell in this book. It mostly consists of anecdotes about his first hearings or meetings with musicians whom he signed for Island Records which he first started in Jamaica in 1959. The draw is that many of these musicians went on to iconic careers, often leaving Island Records when signed to larger firms. Island itself became too cumbersome to maintain in the 1990s and Blackwell ended up selling it to Polygram. He went on to a career in film production and resort hotels (including the development and expansion of Ian Fleming's Jamaican house Goldeneye).
Original photograph by Natalie Delon of film director Dickie Jobson, lead actor Edwin ‘Countryman’ Lothan, and producer Chris Blackwell on the Jamaican set of the film ‘Countryman’ (1982). The image was cropped for ‘The Islander’ book cover. Image sourced from Repeating Islands.
What you learn about Blackwell personally is very little. There is amusing trivia that he mostly liked to wear Tshirts, shorts and flipflops and to travel with no luggage. A characteristic anecdote tells about a visitor to a recording studio who ignored him, thinking he was the janitor, heading over to someone who was better dressed. His wives and girlfriends are mostly mentioned only in passing, usually with a throwaway line like 'my wife at the time'.
There are also some great stories about growing up in Jamaica and his family friendships with Errol Flynn, Noel Coward and Ian Fleming, who all lived or vacationed there. Blackwell's mother was a mistress of Ian Fleming and was considered an inspiration for various 'Bond girls.' Blackwell himself worked as a location scout and dogs-body for the first James Bond film Dr. No (1962).
Chris Blackwell, Sean Connery and Ursula Andress on the set of "Dr. No." Image sourced from the Tatler article Wild Jamaica.
If you are fan of any of the music artists, you will likely enjoy this journey through their early years and their early recordings from the 1960s to the 1990s.
I listened to the audiobook edition which was given an excellent narration by actor Bill Nighy. It was available as an Audible Daily Deal on March 18, 2023.
Soundtrack
Work in Progress
Will add Wikipedia and/or YouTube links where available for:
1. The first Island album was by jazz pianist Lance Hayward: 'At the Half-Moon Hotel, Montego Bay' (1959) which you can hear at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Og4A...
2. The first big international hit was Millie Small's My Boy Lollipop (1964), which you can hear at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSM9N...
3. The discovery of Steve Winwood in the Spencer Davis Group, their hit 'Keep On Running' (1965)
4. Further Steve Winwood & Spencer Davis Group hit 'Gimme Some Lovin' (1966)
5. Traffic's Mr. Fantasy (1967). Listen to the full album here. Songs were written at Sheepcote Farm cottage in Aston Tirrold, Berkshire. Background here.
6. Stephen Stills & Graham Nash cover of Dear Mr. Fantasy (CS&N Boxset 1991). Stephen Stills had wanted Steve Winwood to join CS&N at one point.
7. Original version of Mockingbird (1963) by Inez & Charlie Foxx. After hearing the song in a record store, Blackwell flew from Jamaica to NYC in order to obtain UK distribution rights via Island. The song was later covered by Carly Simon & James Taylor.
8. John Martyn Solid Air (1973) dedicated to Nick Drake. From the same-titled album Solid Air.
9. Fairport Convention folk-rock breakthrough with the album Liege and Lief (1969). Select track Matty Groves. Followed by Sandy Denny solo, Richard & Linda Thompson etc.
10. Nick Drake's (1948-1974) albums were ignored in his lifetime. A posthumous breakthrough came with a Volkswagen Cabrio commercial in 1999 which featured his Pink Moon.
11. Cat Stevens & his first Island album Tea for the Tillerman (1970). Blackwell was going to pass on him until he heard the 3rd song of his audition Father and Son, after which he signed him immediately.
12. Met Bob Marley and the Wailers when they passed through London hoping for some funds to get them back home to Jamaica. Blackwell advanced them money for their 1st Island album Catch a Fire (1973) which you can hear starting with Track 1 'Concrete Jungle' here.
13. Free's breakthrough hit "All Right Now" from the album Fire and Water (1970) where it is the last track.
14. Roxy Music and Brian Eno
15. Grace Jones 'La Vie en Rose'
16. Marianne Faithful 'Broken English'
17. Tom Waits 'SwordfishTrombones'
18. U2 early albums? then with Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois "The Unforgettable Fire" "The Joshua Tree".
Trivia and Links
There is an interview with Chris Blackwell on the release of the book at The Guardian here by Jim Farber, June 6, 2022.
Chris Blackwell was recently announced as one of the recipients of Sweden’s 2023 Polar Prize, the music version of the Nobel Prize. The March 28, 2023 announcement video which is a mini-bio of Blackwell’s life can be seen here and the celebration ceremony will be broadcast live on YouTube on May 23, 2023 on the Polar Music Prize channel.
August 25, 2022
For me, Island Records during the 1960s/1970s couldn't go wrong. You had everything from Traffic to Sparks to Roxy Music, and then to Eno albums, as well as Grace Jones and forward. A lively memoir that only focuses on his work, with side attraction to the world of OO7 and Noel Coward/Errol Flynn. Chris Blackwell is the ultimate privileged insider and a remarkable record and label owner. Paul Morley did a great job in making this into a very readable book.
June 25, 2022
I was looking forward to reading this biography. He tells fascinating stories from his life that spans from the 1950's to now. Chris is the person behind so many bands\artist of renown, from wikipedia...
"After discovering The Spencer Davis Group, featuring Steve Winwood, Blackwell focused on the rock acts that Island had signed. Island became one of the most successful independent labels of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s with an eclectic range of artists, including Traffic, King Crimson, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Jethro Tull, Cat Stevens, John Cale, Free, Fairport Convention, Nico, Heads, Hands and Feet, John Martyn, Sparks, Spooky Tooth, Nick Drake, Roxy Music, Grace Jones, Ultravox, Eddie and the Hot Rods, Robert Palmer, Marianne Faithfull, The Buggles, Etta James, Melissa Etheridge, Julian Cope, The Cranberries, Womack and Womack, U2, and others."
At the heart of the book is the mystic faraway beating drum emanating from the mountain jungles of Jamaica of the indigenous inhabitants. These people saved his life and he was forever indebted.
"After discovering The Spencer Davis Group, featuring Steve Winwood, Blackwell focused on the rock acts that Island had signed. Island became one of the most successful independent labels of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s with an eclectic range of artists, including Traffic, King Crimson, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Jethro Tull, Cat Stevens, John Cale, Free, Fairport Convention, Nico, Heads, Hands and Feet, John Martyn, Sparks, Spooky Tooth, Nick Drake, Roxy Music, Grace Jones, Ultravox, Eddie and the Hot Rods, Robert Palmer, Marianne Faithfull, The Buggles, Etta James, Melissa Etheridge, Julian Cope, The Cranberries, Womack and Womack, U2, and others."
At the heart of the book is the mystic faraway beating drum emanating from the mountain jungles of Jamaica of the indigenous inhabitants. These people saved his life and he was forever indebted.
June 26, 2022
Aloof and delusional rich guy delivers a cliff notes version of his successes
July 14, 2022
A mostly enjoyable look at the career of Chris Blackwell, founder and longtime president of Island Records (he finally sold out in the late 80s; Island is now part of Universal Music Group, one of the Big Three). The story of Blackwell's rise from a runner delivering records to jukeboxes all over southeast Jamaica to eventually heading one of the most successful independent record companies in the business is nothing short of captivating. He did everything he could to stay true to his Jamaican roots while not being afraid to branch into all sorts of weird stuff. And then he signed U2.
I said it was "mostly enjoyable." At times it devolves into "Then this producer made this record, then that singer recorded that album, then this person left that label to go this label, and then . . ." It is easy for the eyes to glaze over at some of these points. I recommend resorting to YouTube to hear some of the obscure acts he's writing about. Also, I could have used a lot more than only one chapter on Bob Marley and the Wailers! That was probably the biggest shock of the book. The highlight of Blackwell's career (and a highlight of music, period) deserved more.
This is a book about the business. Blackwell almost never talks about his wives, his homes, or other elements of his personal life. But that's okay.
I said it was "mostly enjoyable." At times it devolves into "Then this producer made this record, then that singer recorded that album, then this person left that label to go this label, and then . . ." It is easy for the eyes to glaze over at some of these points. I recommend resorting to YouTube to hear some of the obscure acts he's writing about. Also, I could have used a lot more than only one chapter on Bob Marley and the Wailers! That was probably the biggest shock of the book. The highlight of Blackwell's career (and a highlight of music, period) deserved more.
This is a book about the business. Blackwell almost never talks about his wives, his homes, or other elements of his personal life. But that's okay.
July 1, 2023
Blackwell undoubtedly has led a very interesting life, but I’m afraid this book hasn’t, (for me), done it justice. My lasting memory is of reading lots of lists of artists, people and songs, not many of which actually meant anything to me.
If you are a real music buff then I’m sure you’ll enjoy this book more than I did.
If you are a real music buff then I’m sure you’ll enjoy this book more than I did.
December 14, 2022
Chris Blackwell's life has taken him on some interesting paths. Going from the son of a well-to-do British family living in Jamaica, his interest in new kinds of music led him from stocking juke boxes across the island, searching for the hottest singles, to the burgeoning sound system scene and finally into record production and label running with the creation of the now-legendary Island Records. His independent streak favored developing artists and new genres rather than searching for hits, yet produced many anyway. His successes included Millie Small with "My Boy Lollipop," The Spencer Davis Group, Traffic, Stevie Winwood, Spooky Tooth, Free, Fairport Convention, John Martyn, Bob Marley And The Wailers, Nick Drake, Cat Stevens, King Crimson, U2, The Buggles (Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes') "Video Killed The Radio Star" and a string of classic albums by Robert Palmer, Marianne Faithfull, John Cale, Brian Eno, The B-52's, Grace Jones and Tom Waits. Branching out into Independent film (Stephen Frears' The Hit, Jonathan Demme's Stop Making Sense, and Hector Babenco's Kiss Of The Spider Woman) and another studio at Compass Point in The Bahamas (where Tina Weymouth and Chris Franz of Talking Heads did their Tom Tom Club records and Dire Straits and The Rolling Stones also recorded). Eventually in the late 1980's he sold Island to Polygram and moved into the hospitality business with hotels and resorts in Miami and Jamaica. A varied and fascinating life. - BH.
February 10, 2023
All considered a very good read about a remarkable man. Reading this and Trevor Horn's autobiography, Adventures in Modern Recording: From ABC to ZZT, back to back was particularly interesting.
Yes, he comes off as a prat sometimes (so does Horn). Yes, the book oozes privilege and colonial plantation mentality; Blackwell himself freely admits this throughout. He is well aware of his position and has milked it dry, (largely) for the better.
If you love music as I do, especially 80s music and the "Island feel", you can't miss this.
3.5/5
Yes, he comes off as a prat sometimes (so does Horn). Yes, the book oozes privilege and colonial plantation mentality; Blackwell himself freely admits this throughout. He is well aware of his position and has milked it dry, (largely) for the better.
If you love music as I do, especially 80s music and the "Island feel", you can't miss this.
3.5/5
January 5, 2024
I really enjoyed this audiobook about Chris Blackwell’s life experiences. He has great stories to tell about the various musical acts he worked with after starting Island Records—he talks at length about Bob Marley, Nick Drake, U2, and many others. Blackwell has led a fascinating life—I highly recommend the audiobook as I thought it very well done.
October 10, 2022
Ummm....ultimately disappointing. As the book progressed I found myself beginning to like Mr Blackwell less and less. An interesting tale about how a privileged white youth grew up in Jamaica before being packed off to Harrow for a public school education. Well-connected, and handily his parents funded him with $10,000 to set up his record label. He seems to have been blessed with being in the right place at the right time and the Golden era of the Island Record label saw the business grow and grow whilst retaining the cachet of being the hip company to sign for. An astonishing range of talent signed for Island between 1965 and the late 70s....some get a mention in the book, some are curiously omitted (eg Jethro Tull, King Crimson, Emerson Lake & Palmer), and some get way too much coverage (Grace Jones). With hindsight the moment when things changed was the death of Bob Marley just when it seemed that Reggae was to dominate matters in the music world. Suddenly Punk arrived, and Chris Blackwell for once failed to see that things were about to change dramatically. He moved away towards other things : film production, hotels and resorts. So a successful businessman (with his own label rum!) but I was left feeling that this was not a person I could warm to.
August 3, 2022
One of the best music business related biographies that I've read. I was especially impressed by his first hand account of the development of Jamaican music and his involvement from the 50-70's. This led to his signing of Bob Marley & The Wailers. There's great anecdotes about his family /business associations with Ian Fleming, Sean Connery and Errol Flynn, key Island artists- John Martyn, Cat Stevens, Free,Grace Jones, Tom Tom Club et al He is one of the rare label heads to acknowledge the influence of non commercial music leading to production and cultural changes.
March 12, 2023
Memoir of arguably the biggest influences on music in the 70s and 80s, Island Record founder and producer Chris Blackwell. Born into colonial privilege in Jamaica, Blackwell grew up in the orbit of Ian Fleming, Sean Connery, Errol Flynn, not to mention the island's political elite. He rebelled against boarding school and the family rum business and got his start in the music business selling jukebox records around the island. Island Records/Blackwell went on to sign and publicize all sorts of great music. An abbreviated list: Spencer Davis Group, Traffic, Free, John Martyn, Nick Drake, Cat Stevens, Bob Marley, Toots and the Maytals, Robert Palmer, Tom Waits, Grace Jones, The B52's, U2, Melissa Etheridge, and on.
I didn't know anything about Blackwell, but I found the book engaging. It's an interesting compliment to other rock books describing the Swinging Sixties in London - one man's crusade to add Jamaican music to the mix. Blackwell's life was charmed and privileged, yes, but he did a lot with what he was given, and he had great timing. He took real risks, which he had the luxury to do, but I believed him when he said those risks were in the service of bringing out art that never would have otherwise seen the light of day. The world of music is so much richer due to Island Records.
I didn't know anything about Blackwell, but I found the book engaging. It's an interesting compliment to other rock books describing the Swinging Sixties in London - one man's crusade to add Jamaican music to the mix. Blackwell's life was charmed and privileged, yes, but he did a lot with what he was given, and he had great timing. He took real risks, which he had the luxury to do, but I believed him when he said those risks were in the service of bringing out art that never would have otherwise seen the light of day. The world of music is so much richer due to Island Records.
March 14, 2023
I thoroughly enjoyed this biography of the man who started and ran Island Records, most noted for the signing and promotion of Bob Marley. In addition to the reggae legend, there were scores of other artists who were under Blackwell’s wing including many of my favorites: Cat Stevens, Roxy Music, U2, Robert Palmer. Blackwell was born in Jamaica, a white, fairly privileged Englishman who thoroughly embraced the Jamaican vibe. He recognized that musically he was in the right place at the right time and his life, as well as so many of the artists he produced and managed, was all the better for it. I think the lives of music fans are too.
December 7, 2025
Chris Blackwell has obviously lived an exciting life, but you'd never know it from this very dull book. In reading it I was also reminded that I'm probably less interested in Island Records than I remembered; the initial rush of fantastic Jamaican artists was countered by at least as much stuff again that I either hated (U2, prog rock, the ZTT label) or entirely ambivalent about (Grace Jones).
One for the charity shop pile...
One for the charity shop pile...
August 9, 2022
If you like books about the business side of the music industry and happen also to love performers like U2, Bob Marley, Steve Winwood, Spooky Tooth, Cranberries, Robert Palmer, and many more on the Island Records label founded by the author, then you’ll likely love this memoir. I did!
November 21, 2023
The Islander by Chris Blackwell
BIBLIOGRAPHIC DETAILS
-PRINT: © June 7, 2022; 978-1982172695; Gallery Books; 352 pages.; unabridged (Hardbound Info from Amazon.com)
-DIGITAL: © June 7, 2022; 9781572245372; Gallery Books; 351 pages; unabridged (Digital version info from Amazon.com)
- *Audio: © June 7, 2022; Simon and Schuster Audio; 11 hours, 32 minutes; unabridged (Audio info from Audible version.)
-FILM: No
SERIES: No.
CHARACTERS:
Many
SUMMARY/ EVALUATION:
-SELECTED: Don learned that Bill Nighy had narrated an Edgar Allan Poe book (The Dupin Mysteries) which I couldn’t find on the library’s Libby app for audiobooks. If it wasn’t on Libby, then we’d need to use one of our Audible Credits for it, so Don got the inspiration that, just because Bill is a fantastic actor, doesn’t mean he’s a fantastic narrator, so perhaps we should listen to something else he’s narrated that Libby DOES have. This was one of the results from my Bill Nighy search. 😊
-ABOUT: The author is Chris Blackwell. He tells of his Jamaican roots, and relays his very interesting personal and professional history which involves his beginnings in the world of Jamaican music, establishing a record label, and some of the many artists that he signed on to his label (Bob Marley, Cat Stevens, Grace Jones, and U2, to name a few), and a couple, that for one reason or another, he didn’t (Spandau Ballet; Elton John). His descriptions are so compelling I wanted to pull up a video on each artist he spoke of, but there were so many that this would have slowed reading down to much.
I found that his glowing description of Tom Waits, whom I’ve never had a taste for, (combined with a friends recent accolades shared on Facebook) has convinced me to give ol’ Tom a second chance.
-OVERALL IMPRESSION: Fascinating. So many musicians and bands! Some familiar, if only by name; and some not. Chris’s descriptions of the people, the music, and the moods had me spellbound.
AUTHOR:
Chris Blackwell. Excerpt From Wikipedia:
“Christopher Percy Gordon Blackwell (born 22 June 1937)[1] is a Jamaican-British former record producer and the founder of Island Records,[2] which has been called "one of Britain's great independent labels".[3] According to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, to which Blackwell was inducted in 2001, he is "the single person most responsible for turning the world on to reggae music."[4] Variety describes him as "indisputably one of the greatest record executives in history".[5]
Having formed Island Records in Jamaica on 22 May 1959 when he was nearly 22, Blackwell was among the first to record the Jamaican popular music that eventually became known as ska.[2] Returning to Britain in 1962, he sold records from the back of his car to the Jamaican community.[3] His label became "a byword for uncompromised artistry and era-shaping acts".[6]
Backed by Stanley Borden from RKO, Blackwell's business and reach grew substantially, and he went on to forge the careers of Bob Marley, Grace Jones and U2 among many other diverse high-profile acts.[2] He has produced many seminal albums, including Marley's Catch A Fire and Uprising,[7] Free's Free and The B-52's' self-titled debut album in 1979.
Having sold Island in 1989, Blackwell embarked on ventures in "hotels, real estate, resorts, another record company, rum, and his Island Films released Kiss of the Spider Woman and Stop Making Sense, among others".[5] In 2022, he published a memoir, The Islander: My Life in Music and Beyond.[8][9].”
Excerpt from theguardian.com
“Born into the upper classes (think Crosse & Blackwell), Blackwell has an exotic background. His father was an Irish guards officer, his mother, Blanche, a Costa Rican-born Jamaican heiress and glamorous socialite, pursued, post her divorce, by Errol Flynn and Ian Fleming, both of them regular visitors to the Caribbean island where Blackwell grew up. As a boy, he was sickly and reclusive, conditions that sending him to English public schools did little to cure. He hated Harrow, where his hijinks brought a public caning and expulsion at 17. He found work at both ends of Jamaican society, becoming a gopher for governor Sir Hugh Foot, and the JA licensee of Wurlitzer jukeboxes, which involved criss-crossing the island to load the all-important local jukebox with sides from black America and, increasingly, from JA’s own booming music scene – “a job for which there no qualifications and I was good at it”.”
NARRATOR:
Bill Nighy: Excerpt from Wikipedia:
“William Francis Nighy (/naɪ/;[1] born 12 December 1949)[2] is an English actor. He started his career with the Everyman Theatre, Liverpool and made his London debut with the Royal National Theatre starting with The Illuminatus! in 1977. There he gained acclaim for his roles in David Hare's Pravda in 1985, Harold Pinter's Betrayal in 1991, Tom Stoppard's Arcadia in 1993, and Anton Chekov's The Seagull in 1994. He received a Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor nomination for his performance in Blue/Orange in 2001. He made his Broadway debut in Hare's The Vertical Hour in 2006, and returned in the 2015 revival of Hare's Skylight earning a Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play nomination.
Nighy's early film roles include the comedies Still Crazy (1998), Guest House Paradiso (1999) and Blow Dry (2001). He rose to international stardom with his role in Love Actually (2003), which earned him a BAFTA Award for Best Supporting Actor. He soon gained recognition portraying Davy Jones in the Pirates of the Caribbean film series (2006–2007), and Viktor in the Underworld film series (2003–2009). His other films include Shaun of the Dead (2004), The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005), The Constant Gardener (2005), Notes on a Scandal (2006), Hot Fuzz (2007), Valkyrie (2008), Wild Target (2010), Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1 (2010), The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2012), About Time (2013), Emma (2020), and Living (2022), the last of which earned him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor.
Nighy has gained acclaim for his roles in television, earning a British Academy Television Award for Best Actor for his performance in BBC One series State of Play (2003), and a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor for the BBC film Gideon's Daughter (2007). He's also known for his roles in HBO's The Girl in the Café (2006) and PBS's Page Eight (2012).”
***Bill Nighy is the perfect narrator for this book!!!!
GENRE: Non-fiction; Music; History
LOCATIONS: Jamaica; England; America; Bahamas
TIME FRAME: 1960’s – 2000’s
SUBJECTS:
Jamaica; Jamaicans; Ska; Reggae; Rock; R&B; Blues; Heavy Metal; Anarchists; Punk; Folk; Go-go; Song writing; Song improvising; Film; Entrepreneurs; Music management; mind altering substances
DEDICATION: “For all those who have traveled with me in my life: those who are here and those who are no longer here”
SAMPLE QUOTATION: Excerpt From 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.
I 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.”
RATING: 5 stars.
STARTED-FINISHED
11/3/2023-11/19/2023
BIBLIOGRAPHIC DETAILS
-PRINT: © June 7, 2022; 978-1982172695; Gallery Books; 352 pages.; unabridged (Hardbound Info from Amazon.com)
-DIGITAL: © June 7, 2022; 9781572245372; Gallery Books; 351 pages; unabridged (Digital version info from Amazon.com)
- *Audio: © June 7, 2022; Simon and Schuster Audio; 11 hours, 32 minutes; unabridged (Audio info from Audible version.)
-FILM: No
SERIES: No.
CHARACTERS:
Many
SUMMARY/ EVALUATION:
-SELECTED: Don learned that Bill Nighy had narrated an Edgar Allan Poe book (The Dupin Mysteries) which I couldn’t find on the library’s Libby app for audiobooks. If it wasn’t on Libby, then we’d need to use one of our Audible Credits for it, so Don got the inspiration that, just because Bill is a fantastic actor, doesn’t mean he’s a fantastic narrator, so perhaps we should listen to something else he’s narrated that Libby DOES have. This was one of the results from my Bill Nighy search. 😊
-ABOUT: The author is Chris Blackwell. He tells of his Jamaican roots, and relays his very interesting personal and professional history which involves his beginnings in the world of Jamaican music, establishing a record label, and some of the many artists that he signed on to his label (Bob Marley, Cat Stevens, Grace Jones, and U2, to name a few), and a couple, that for one reason or another, he didn’t (Spandau Ballet; Elton John). His descriptions are so compelling I wanted to pull up a video on each artist he spoke of, but there were so many that this would have slowed reading down to much.
I found that his glowing description of Tom Waits, whom I’ve never had a taste for, (combined with a friends recent accolades shared on Facebook) has convinced me to give ol’ Tom a second chance.
-OVERALL IMPRESSION: Fascinating. So many musicians and bands! Some familiar, if only by name; and some not. Chris’s descriptions of the people, the music, and the moods had me spellbound.
AUTHOR:
Chris Blackwell. Excerpt From Wikipedia:
“Christopher Percy Gordon Blackwell (born 22 June 1937)[1] is a Jamaican-British former record producer and the founder of Island Records,[2] which has been called "one of Britain's great independent labels".[3] According to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, to which Blackwell was inducted in 2001, he is "the single person most responsible for turning the world on to reggae music."[4] Variety describes him as "indisputably one of the greatest record executives in history".[5]
Having formed Island Records in Jamaica on 22 May 1959 when he was nearly 22, Blackwell was among the first to record the Jamaican popular music that eventually became known as ska.[2] Returning to Britain in 1962, he sold records from the back of his car to the Jamaican community.[3] His label became "a byword for uncompromised artistry and era-shaping acts".[6]
Backed by Stanley Borden from RKO, Blackwell's business and reach grew substantially, and he went on to forge the careers of Bob Marley, Grace Jones and U2 among many other diverse high-profile acts.[2] He has produced many seminal albums, including Marley's Catch A Fire and Uprising,[7] Free's Free and The B-52's' self-titled debut album in 1979.
Having sold Island in 1989, Blackwell embarked on ventures in "hotels, real estate, resorts, another record company, rum, and his Island Films released Kiss of the Spider Woman and Stop Making Sense, among others".[5] In 2022, he published a memoir, The Islander: My Life in Music and Beyond.[8][9].”
Excerpt from theguardian.com
“Born into the upper classes (think Crosse & Blackwell), Blackwell has an exotic background. His father was an Irish guards officer, his mother, Blanche, a Costa Rican-born Jamaican heiress and glamorous socialite, pursued, post her divorce, by Errol Flynn and Ian Fleming, both of them regular visitors to the Caribbean island where Blackwell grew up. As a boy, he was sickly and reclusive, conditions that sending him to English public schools did little to cure. He hated Harrow, where his hijinks brought a public caning and expulsion at 17. He found work at both ends of Jamaican society, becoming a gopher for governor Sir Hugh Foot, and the JA licensee of Wurlitzer jukeboxes, which involved criss-crossing the island to load the all-important local jukebox with sides from black America and, increasingly, from JA’s own booming music scene – “a job for which there no qualifications and I was good at it”.”
NARRATOR:
Bill Nighy: Excerpt from Wikipedia:
“William Francis Nighy (/naɪ/;[1] born 12 December 1949)[2] is an English actor. He started his career with the Everyman Theatre, Liverpool and made his London debut with the Royal National Theatre starting with The Illuminatus! in 1977. There he gained acclaim for his roles in David Hare's Pravda in 1985, Harold Pinter's Betrayal in 1991, Tom Stoppard's Arcadia in 1993, and Anton Chekov's The Seagull in 1994. He received a Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor nomination for his performance in Blue/Orange in 2001. He made his Broadway debut in Hare's The Vertical Hour in 2006, and returned in the 2015 revival of Hare's Skylight earning a Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play nomination.
Nighy's early film roles include the comedies Still Crazy (1998), Guest House Paradiso (1999) and Blow Dry (2001). He rose to international stardom with his role in Love Actually (2003), which earned him a BAFTA Award for Best Supporting Actor. He soon gained recognition portraying Davy Jones in the Pirates of the Caribbean film series (2006–2007), and Viktor in the Underworld film series (2003–2009). His other films include Shaun of the Dead (2004), The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005), The Constant Gardener (2005), Notes on a Scandal (2006), Hot Fuzz (2007), Valkyrie (2008), Wild Target (2010), Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1 (2010), The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2012), About Time (2013), Emma (2020), and Living (2022), the last of which earned him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor.
Nighy has gained acclaim for his roles in television, earning a British Academy Television Award for Best Actor for his performance in BBC One series State of Play (2003), and a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor for the BBC film Gideon's Daughter (2007). He's also known for his roles in HBO's The Girl in the Café (2006) and PBS's Page Eight (2012).”
***Bill Nighy is the perfect narrator for this book!!!!
GENRE: Non-fiction; Music; History
LOCATIONS: Jamaica; England; America; Bahamas
TIME FRAME: 1960’s – 2000’s
SUBJECTS:
Jamaica; Jamaicans; Ska; Reggae; Rock; R&B; Blues; Heavy Metal; Anarchists; Punk; Folk; Go-go; Song writing; Song improvising; Film; Entrepreneurs; Music management; mind altering substances
DEDICATION: “For all those who have traveled with me in my life: those who are here and those who are no longer here”
SAMPLE QUOTATION: Excerpt From 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.
I 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.”
RATING: 5 stars.
STARTED-FINISHED
11/3/2023-11/19/2023
June 17, 2022
Until I received a copy of this book who Chris Blackwell was. After I started reading it became apparent he was the mastermind behind the music acts, Bob Marley, U2, Cat Stevens, Grace Jones, Steve Win wood and many others, all groups I grew up listening to. Enjoyed learning who he was and learning of the many other fields he was involved in (rum, hotels and film).
September 18, 2022
Loved this book
December 4, 2022
It felt like a list of people he worked with.
June 17, 2023
I grew up loving many Island Records releases in the later half of the 1980s so this book was a fascinating account of one the eras most important “indies”. The sections on Nick Drake and Bob Marley were worth it alone: the rest was also very good.
March 9, 2024
Chris Blackwell shares a lot of fun stories from his vantage point atop Island Records in this well written but sometimes uneven memoir (it seems to have been co-written by several ghostwriters). A well-to-do white Jamaican, he played a pivotal role in the development of reggae, working closely with Jimmy Cliff and Bob Marley. That’s worth the price of the book alone, but Blackwell, based in London based, also helped develop such 60s and 70s acts as Traffic, Cat Stevens, Roxy Music, Robert Palmer, U2, Free, TomTom Club and Grace Jones. It is a great window into this world, and the record business, made especially appealing by Blackwell’s exuded humbleness. I was less interested in his later exploits as a film producer and hotel developer, but what is a man supposed to do with his money?
July 18, 2022
I read the review of this book on The Guardian's website and immediately ordered it through Audible, not so much because the review is standout but because I love so many artists Blackwell signed and worked with: Bob Marley, Nick Drake, Cat Stevens, Traffic, Tom Waits. The Guardian critiqued Blackwell's lack of writing his personal life, sticking strictly to the music business (I guess the "and Beyond" in the title refers to his ventures into film and real estate?); still, it was a really enjoyable listen, full of entertaining anecdotes, chance encounters, and insanely-cool experiences with some of the twentieth-century's greatest artists, many of whom he took a mere chance on signing. Blackwell seems like a relatively humble person - he speaks openly of his privilege but also of his efforts to promote Jamaican music and do his best to give back to the country of his birth. He also isn't afraid to admit when he makes a mistake, upsets an artist or agent or takes a gamble that doesn't pay off. The book runs chronologically but he often moves back in time to contextualize first meeting or hearing of an artist or to fill in the necessary gaps detailing place and circumstance, thus the book reads fairly smoothly and is easy to follow. On the surface it seems like Island Records is (was - Blackwell sold the company in the late '80s or early '90s, though they still carry some great artists) a pretty amazing company, in that Blackwell, even when he signed more high-profile acts, stuck with them through thick and thin and seemed to really promote the idea of creating albums, not hit singles. The best part of the book, however, is the stories. Blackwell's refusal to drop Nick Drake from Island's catalogue because he so believed that one day Drake would be discovered, only for Volkswagen to feature "Pink Moon" in a late-90's commercial, which catapulted the gentle singer to posthumous fame, is my personal favorite. I love reading postcolonial fiction, and Blackwell as postcolonial musical troubadour spreading Jamaica's reggae to the masses - conflicted over compromising Marley's spiritual/rebellious nature in the face of commercial pressure for his more peaceful songs - made for rich storytelling. For fans of behind-the-scenes takes on musical giants as well as for audiophiles, as there is so much about studio work and production also.
May 15, 2022
Overall enjoyed reading this. The book includes a few chapters on working with specific artists (Bob Marley, Cat Stevens, Grace Jones, U2 amongst a few others) which was interesting to read how Chris began to work with them and their styles when creating albums. There are some chapters at the beginning discussing the start of Island Records that were mainly paragraphs of many names only mentioned a couple times that was a little disorienting for me but other than that, I enjoyed this.
Review based on an ARC received in a Goodreads giveaway.
Review based on an ARC received in a Goodreads giveaway.
June 23, 2022
Enjoyed learning Balckwells life story and his journey as a pioneer in the music world ( especially resonant with me as a diehard U2 fan).
Dare I say I found the material a bit boring (?) at times , especially discussions around (now) obscure musicians / music industry veterans who most readers would likely not know.
Dare I say I found the material a bit boring (?) at times , especially discussions around (now) obscure musicians / music industry veterans who most readers would likely not know.
August 31, 2022
Poorly written.
The author doesn't ever come close to describing his insight into signing those incredible musicians of the 70's and 80's.
The author doesn't ever come close to describing his insight into signing those incredible musicians of the 70's and 80's.
January 22, 2025
Chris Blackwell is one of the last great record company men, one who loved the music and took chances on artists and gave them time to grow. He is right up there with Richard Branson, Ahmet Ertegun and Sam Phillips. He signed artists just because he believed the artist deserved an artist, even knowing the records wouldn't sell enough to break even. He did grow up with a privileged background in Jamaica where the family moved just after he was born in the UK. His Mother came from the family that started the first rum company in Jamaica and his Father was related to the family that started a food company in Ireland. Both parents were a bit removed down the line with any of the wealth, where his mother worked at the family estate. He starts the book by an adventure gone wrong with two of his friends by running out of petrol and landing their small boat on a very remote beach. Chris tries to walk to summon help failing to bring water with him. He and his friends wind up getting rescued by a couple of Rastafarians living on the beach. This encounter changed his life in more ways than one, as he'd been taught to fear the 'blacks' and the rastas were the worse of the bunch. Meanwhile the home life was kept entertaining by the visits of family friends Ian Fleming, Noel Coward and Errol Flynn among others. In fact his life's trajectory almost put him into a life of film after being offered a job on the film set of the first James Bond film being shot in Jamaica. However, his love of the music, especially what the blacks of Jamaica loved had him stay the course by scouring music in the US record shops to fill in the jukeboxes he serviced around the country as well as to the sound system men. The search of music led him to meeting the right people that would be of help later. When he set up Island records in Kingston, his first releases were jazz albums. He quickly moved to distributing the soul, blues and r&b records from small labels in the USA. When he set up offices in London, he quickly started signing UK bands, one of his first was the Spencer Davis group although his first big hit was with teenager Millie Small. Most of the Island releases in the 60's into the late 70's were released in the USA on other labels in a licensing deal: artists such as Fairport Convention, Nick Drake, Free, Traffic, John Martyn. He then found Bob Marley, Bunny Wailer and Peter Tosh in his office one day demanding payment for their records he was distributing in the UK. He had a lengthy meeting with them and convinced them he could do a lot more if he recorded them and released their music on Island proper. He kept his promise. His later signings were U2, Grace Jones and other big names, but the record industry was changing and he eventually sold the company to Polygram, which became Universal Music Group. I really enjoyed the first half of the book which was edging me to a 5 star rating. But later the story kept jumping time frames and lots of name dropping. In fact his 3 wives barely take up one full paragraph in total if the sentences were strung together. While he remained relaxed and casual, arriving at important meetings in shorts and thongs, sometimes even doing away with the later and being barefoot. But in the second half he does come across as a rich guy sliding through an entitled life. Overall though a fascinating look at an interesting life who achieved much more than he dreamed possible when he was young.
April 26, 2023
What an extraordinary life. Island Records’ founder Chris Blackwell’s autobiography focuses overwhelmingly on his long career in the music business and admirable respect for the artistic integrity of those signed to his label. But that is more than enough to make this a compelling read/listen (I listened to the Audible version read by the wonderful English actor, Bill Nighy.)
Blackwell begins and ends his long life story with Jamaica, the country in which he was born and which gave him such a distinctive worldview. He was the perennial outsider in a music business built around the New York-LA-London power axis. As such, he always retained a distinctive artistic-centred view of the music business, even as the head of a highly successful corporation.
What made Island special, he notes again and again, was its willingness to take a risk on musicians who were outside the mainstream, but had a unique voice or sound. From Millie Small, who gave Island its first mega hit in ‘My Boy Lollipop’, to the boy genius Stevie Winwood, Traffic, John Martin, Cat Stevens, Free, Grace Jones, Tom Waits, U2, and most of all, Bob Marley. A gambler by nature, Blackwell would often take a risk on complete unknowns and turn them into stars. His philosophy was not to ‘package’ and control acts, like so many impresarios, but to let them do their thing and see what happened. It’s why Island had such respect among musicians in the 70s.
Through it all, he remained a music fan - often championing fringe acts in reggae, funk, African sounds, jazz and obscure genres like go-go in the 80s.
But no one appears dearer to him than fellow Jamaican Bob Marley. It was their early 70s recordings together in the UK that brought reggae to a mass audience. Reading the book, I was struck by the fact that Marley only really enjoyed substantial sales after his death, when Blackwell allowed the rather more commercially hard-nosed Dave Robinson, co-founder of Stiff Records, to put together the compilation album called ‘Legend’ that filtered out Marley’s political side and concentrated on his softer love songs and blander material. This became one of the biggest selling albums of all time. Blackwell clearly is in two minds about that compromise today.
The Jamaican-born former model Grace Jones, whom he met in New York, is another of his favourites. He built the world-renowned Compass Studios in the Bahamas in the early 80s and this became where Jones recorded her excellent Warm Leatherette album and a couple of follow-ups with the super session band featuring the rhythm section of Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare.
If you’re a music fan who grew up in the 60s, 70s or 80s, this is a must-read book. Alongside his own musical career, Blackwell was present at so many great moments in the musical history of the lat 60 years and The Islander is full of wonderful anecdotes - from his hanging around with Miles Davis in New York in the late 1950s to the stories of swinging London in the mid-60s to encounters with Elton John (he passed on him as a signing) and the legendary Led Zeppelin manager Peter Grant. Just about everyone is name-checked here and he’s not doing it to impress readers. That was just his life - surely one of the most impressive in the rock era.
Blackwell begins and ends his long life story with Jamaica, the country in which he was born and which gave him such a distinctive worldview. He was the perennial outsider in a music business built around the New York-LA-London power axis. As such, he always retained a distinctive artistic-centred view of the music business, even as the head of a highly successful corporation.
What made Island special, he notes again and again, was its willingness to take a risk on musicians who were outside the mainstream, but had a unique voice or sound. From Millie Small, who gave Island its first mega hit in ‘My Boy Lollipop’, to the boy genius Stevie Winwood, Traffic, John Martin, Cat Stevens, Free, Grace Jones, Tom Waits, U2, and most of all, Bob Marley. A gambler by nature, Blackwell would often take a risk on complete unknowns and turn them into stars. His philosophy was not to ‘package’ and control acts, like so many impresarios, but to let them do their thing and see what happened. It’s why Island had such respect among musicians in the 70s.
Through it all, he remained a music fan - often championing fringe acts in reggae, funk, African sounds, jazz and obscure genres like go-go in the 80s.
But no one appears dearer to him than fellow Jamaican Bob Marley. It was their early 70s recordings together in the UK that brought reggae to a mass audience. Reading the book, I was struck by the fact that Marley only really enjoyed substantial sales after his death, when Blackwell allowed the rather more commercially hard-nosed Dave Robinson, co-founder of Stiff Records, to put together the compilation album called ‘Legend’ that filtered out Marley’s political side and concentrated on his softer love songs and blander material. This became one of the biggest selling albums of all time. Blackwell clearly is in two minds about that compromise today.
The Jamaican-born former model Grace Jones, whom he met in New York, is another of his favourites. He built the world-renowned Compass Studios in the Bahamas in the early 80s and this became where Jones recorded her excellent Warm Leatherette album and a couple of follow-ups with the super session band featuring the rhythm section of Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare.
If you’re a music fan who grew up in the 60s, 70s or 80s, this is a must-read book. Alongside his own musical career, Blackwell was present at so many great moments in the musical history of the lat 60 years and The Islander is full of wonderful anecdotes - from his hanging around with Miles Davis in New York in the late 1950s to the stories of swinging London in the mid-60s to encounters with Elton John (he passed on him as a signing) and the legendary Led Zeppelin manager Peter Grant. Just about everyone is name-checked here and he’s not doing it to impress readers. That was just his life - surely one of the most impressive in the rock era.
July 11, 2025
Although it’s subtitled ‘My Life in Music and Beyond’ the ‘Beyond’ gets barely a look in beyond a bit of a plug for Blackwell’s later business interests in hospitality and distilling rum; there’s not many autobiographies which you finish with no idea how many wives the subject has had or how many children. But, really, in this case that doesn’t matter. None of the potential readers are that interested in Blackwell’s personal life (from the odd comment, I suspect that the wives are not mentioned because they rarely lasted for long and probably left with substantial alimony and water tight NDAs); what we want to know about is the gossip.
What was it like to discover Bob Marley? Is Grace Jones as weird as she seems? How can you work with Bono without wanting to smack him? These are the questions we really want to answer and Blackwell, with Paul Morley, doesn’t disappoint. Really, for someone who grew up in the 1970s and ’80s, it’s the tale of the soundtrack to your growing up, as well as a memoir of someone who was there when the record industry was still figuring what sort of industry it was going to be.
Blackwell was brought up on Jamaica, the child of wealthy socialite parents whose friends included Noel Coward, Errol Flynn and Ian Fleming. It was a gilded childhood but Blackwell took the best of it, married it with the self assurance produced by a public school education, and set about flogging records, and then musicians to the public. He’s clearly a man who suffers boredom badly. The buccaneering days of the music industry was a perfect fit for Blackwell, and he takes the reader into that time, and the making – and unmaking – of those artists. One of the most moving chapters is devoted to Nick Drake. Blackwell’s commitment to the artists he believed in is commendable. And the artist he believed in above all others was Bob Marley. These chapters are the centre of the book and, clearly, the highlight of Blackwell’s life, marrying his great loves, Jamaica and music, into a single package: one of the very few 20th century artists who will still be listened to in a hundred years’ time.
What was it like to discover Bob Marley? Is Grace Jones as weird as she seems? How can you work with Bono without wanting to smack him? These are the questions we really want to answer and Blackwell, with Paul Morley, doesn’t disappoint. Really, for someone who grew up in the 1970s and ’80s, it’s the tale of the soundtrack to your growing up, as well as a memoir of someone who was there when the record industry was still figuring what sort of industry it was going to be.
Blackwell was brought up on Jamaica, the child of wealthy socialite parents whose friends included Noel Coward, Errol Flynn and Ian Fleming. It was a gilded childhood but Blackwell took the best of it, married it with the self assurance produced by a public school education, and set about flogging records, and then musicians to the public. He’s clearly a man who suffers boredom badly. The buccaneering days of the music industry was a perfect fit for Blackwell, and he takes the reader into that time, and the making – and unmaking – of those artists. One of the most moving chapters is devoted to Nick Drake. Blackwell’s commitment to the artists he believed in is commendable. And the artist he believed in above all others was Bob Marley. These chapters are the centre of the book and, clearly, the highlight of Blackwell’s life, marrying his great loves, Jamaica and music, into a single package: one of the very few 20th century artists who will still be listened to in a hundred years’ time.
June 11, 2022
Island Records mogul Chris Blackwell's music industry memoir has one of the worst opening lines ever: "I am a member of the lucky sperm club." Ooph! He means to come out and say up front that he's a man of privilege, a white Brit who grew up in colonized Jamaica. It is an important admission, one he makes just once more in this book, which thankfully doesn't discuss sperm again (it is ironic because his mother is referenced more than his father-- who divorced). This is a book about the music business, and as such, Blackwell has great stories to tell about his rise into the business--so much of it tied to his youth in Jamaica where he met Ian Fleming, Tyrone Power, and Noel Coward- all friends of mom--and the illustrious artists he worked with at Island Records. He found himself a niche as a big indie, a label for misfits, if you could call the label that supported Stevie Winwood, B-52s, Grace Jones, Roxy Music, U2, and most importantly, Bob Marley little. He describes his passion and instincts for various musicians he supported, some more known than others. (As a Roxy Music fan, I was disappointed they rated just a page, but they just weren't a band that he was so engaged with-- someone else must have signed them, there's not the backstory of Marley or Cat Stevens who get their own chapters.) It's an engaging read, al that music lore of the era before streaming (he goes back to his start in the jukebox trade). Blackwell does come across as a nice guy, but he doesn't really talk much about intimate relationships. Wives and girlfriends are mentioned only in passing, his kids are termed "the livestock" in a very brief mention. But he's also known for his privacy. He's a businessman, first and foremost, and one with some degree of integrity-- and glamor. A perfect beach read, preferably on an island.
September 1, 2024
When you pick up Chris Blackwell’s memoir, you enter a world inhabited by a diverse cast of surreal characters traversing a jet set map of locales, always anchored by Blackwell’s spiritual home in Jamaica. Sure, you’ll meet the usual suspects - Bob Marley, U2, Grace Jones. Prepare also for miracle worker madman producer Lee “Scratch” Perry, Jamaica wunderkind and Island’s first break Millie Small, and a Rastafarian wanderer named Countryman, as well as a roster of British folk and blues heroes via the sad tales of John Martyn, Nick Drake, and Free.
This is a book where you’re going to want to keep your Spotify open as you read, and prepare for a sonic dive into the Island catalogue and beyond. More than anything this book provides a window into the workings of a mind that produced one of the most important and widespread grooves of the past few generations. I was fascinated by how deep Jamaican music styling and philosophy (rhythm and bass first, always) has pervaded more commercial and popular music, and also by Blackwell’s approach of building artists over time rather than looking for early peaks.
The storytelling is rapturous but non linear. Blackwell and his co-writer Paul Morley prefer to see a thread through to its satisfying conclusion, then bounce you back to an earlier but contemporaneous thread that had been developing right alongside the other one.
While we get a solid glimpse into Blackwell’s mind at the intersection of business savvy and artistic curation + development, we don’t see a ton of his personal life save his interactions with the artists. That may be by design but in a life so interestingly lived, I’d love to see a follow up that more than skirts this topic.
Excellent inspired beach (or island) read that will leave you hungry to discover new music and old grooves, and maybe spark an entrepreneurial fire at the same time.
This is a book where you’re going to want to keep your Spotify open as you read, and prepare for a sonic dive into the Island catalogue and beyond. More than anything this book provides a window into the workings of a mind that produced one of the most important and widespread grooves of the past few generations. I was fascinated by how deep Jamaican music styling and philosophy (rhythm and bass first, always) has pervaded more commercial and popular music, and also by Blackwell’s approach of building artists over time rather than looking for early peaks.
The storytelling is rapturous but non linear. Blackwell and his co-writer Paul Morley prefer to see a thread through to its satisfying conclusion, then bounce you back to an earlier but contemporaneous thread that had been developing right alongside the other one.
While we get a solid glimpse into Blackwell’s mind at the intersection of business savvy and artistic curation + development, we don’t see a ton of his personal life save his interactions with the artists. That may be by design but in a life so interestingly lived, I’d love to see a follow up that more than skirts this topic.
Excellent inspired beach (or island) read that will leave you hungry to discover new music and old grooves, and maybe spark an entrepreneurial fire at the same time.
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