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69
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
45/100Critics
93/100Scholars
Author:
Chris Blackwell, Paul Morley
Publisher:
Gallery Books
Date:
June 7, 2022
Chris Blackwell, like the paradigm-shifting artists he came to support over his 60-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 17, he moved back to Jamaica, and within 5 years, founded Island Recordsâthe 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.
What The Reviewers Say
Blackwell (working with journalist Paul Morley) has written a highly entertaining, rapid-fire, hard-to-put-down memoir. The record producer/label founder/hotelier/film producer takes us on a rip-roaring ride through the 60s, 70s, and 80s, the most exciting years in popular music.
It is Marley—with whom Mr. Blackwell felt a great personal affinity—who is at the emotional center of The Islander. Due to the book’s occasionally unchronological structure, the singer’s death from cancer in 1981 keeps coming up, as though it haunts Mr. Blackwell daily.
Readers will know they’re in for a rollicking, fun, and vertigo-inducing wild ride of a memoir when by page seven, the author at age eighteen is getting punched out by Errol Flynn for attempting to steal one of his girlfriends.
Blackwell is a natural storyteller.
