“I was born into one of Jamaica’s most prominent families; we owned the Wray and Nephew rum business. I was the eldest so I would have been the person that inherited the business, but when my grandfather passed away my two uncles took it over and fought over it. I got sent to school in England; by the time I came back the rum business was gone.

I enjoyed school very much but I do not think the school enjoyed me. The exact words my housemaster said to my mother was “Christopher might be happier elsewhere...” When I was 15 I used to leave school at night and go down into town and buy liquor and cigarettes. I ran a little shop out of my room at school. I have always been interested in doing things, hustling. I have never been a spectator.

The producers offered me a job in England and I wasn’t sure what to do, so I went to see a very well known fortune-teller in Jamaica, who read my future with some tea leaves. I did not tell her anything other than I had a choice to make. What I gleaned from what she said was that I should pursue my music business rather than go to England.

Back then recording a song didn’t cost that much. All it cost was renting a van to drive the band into town and renting a studio for a day. The album was recorded in a day because everything was in mono so you mixed while you were recording. You balanced the sound and then just went with whatever was the best performance. The maximum we did was two or three takes, especially with a jazz act. I do not think any jazz records were made with more than two or three takes at the most.

The Jamaican music business was two different extremes, one was the sound systems, which had all the hard driving American R&B music and jazz stuff like Louis Jordan. Other than that was what was played on the radio, very middle of the road music. Those were manufactured by a couple of different pressing plants who would also write and manufacture them. The people who owned these pressing plants would record calypsos for the tourist market but they did not record anything from the Jamaican roots market because no Jamaican radio would play them on radio.

Being white didn’t matter. I had a natural affinity with people because I had been doing it for some time, and I knew everybody, I knew my way around and people knew me.

I left the island when it became independent. When a country becomes independent there’s an amplified sense of their own identity and, in view of my complexion, my image was suddenly more associated with yesterday than tomorrow as far as Jamaica was concerned at that time. Plus also, and most importantly, my records started to sell more in England so I thought I would go there and start releasing my competitor’s songs. I went to see all of them and pretty much all of them gave me the rights to release their records in England. I would take the record and give them a ten percent royalty, which was a top of the line royalty at that time.

It wasn’t an attempt to enter the pop market; I just went to fulfil the demand for pure Jamaican music. There was no sight of Island becoming what it became, I just went over initially to supply what I knew was in demand in England.

When I started it was just me and after a little bit I got an assistant. Then I brought over Jackie Edwards, one of my first acts in Jamaica, and he helped me a bit and I did some recordings with him. Then I employed somebody called David Betteridge who had been working at an independent distributor who I asked to distribute for me, but he turned me down because he was distributing the Bluebeat label which was releasing Jamaican music in England to such a degree that the music in England was actually called Bluebeat music. So he was not really interested in a little outside label. But I liked him very much, I liked the way he turned me down, you know what I mean, and I told him maybe one day I would come back. Eventually he joined me and he distributed to the North of London and I distributed to South of London. It was very much hands on, going around dealing with the shops, going to the pressing plant and picking up the records. What changed everything was when I brought Millie over and produced a record with her, which became a huge hit. That was My Boy Lollipop. It changed everything.

I could have probably retired if it was a whole record, but it was just a single. It opened up my world; suddenly I was in the pop business. I didn’t put Millie’s record on Island, I licensed it to Fontana because after I had finished the record I knew it was a big hit, much bigger than Island could handle, so I licensed it to Fontana. Fontana belonged to Philips Records which morphed into PolyGram and then ultimately Universal.

It’s hard to say but without “My Boy Lollipop”, Island Records may not have become what it did. Before that record I was never even vaguely interested in the pop business, I wasn’t a wannabe who wanted to be in it. I was making a little living, nothing great, but I was more than happy doing just what I was doing. If you are working with what you love then you are one of the one percent of the people in the world – that is pretty lucky. I wasn’t really seeking to be in the pop business, but when I was made the record I knew that it was going to be huge.

After that song I decided to diversify the roster. It was a very exciting time, a lot of music was emerging out of England of English bands playing R&B music or attempting to play R&B music; The Stones, The Beatles, everybody was playing that type of music. It was only a little bit later they started to write their own songs and develop their own sounds, but initially everybody was listening to that music.

I never really liked pop music per se, it was much more about great musicianship. I was very fortunate again when somebody introduced me to Steve Winwood. He was the absolute master of that genre and was such a key person in Island moving from purely Jamaican music into this emerging area of music which became rock. It started with Steve Winwood, the Spencer Davis Group, but during that time I was still working with Jamaican music, it was a little later when there started to be more acts – we were signing groups like Art which became Spookie Troops. All of these type of groups were sort of R&B’ish or emulating or influenced by black music so it was not so much a stretch for me.

During that time I also picked up an American label, an American R&B label which I put through in England under Sue records, which became a very hot label in England – they had Ike and Tina Turner, Jimmy McGriff, The Soul Sisters, all this kind of music I bought in and started that label.

I didn’t consciously choose my acts because of a change in popular culture. If I had interest in anything it was purely because of who I saw and if I liked their music. If they influenced people I had no agenda in that regard, I don’t think I have that kind of ability. I was just able to identify a lot of talent and happened to be in London at that time with an independent label. My background was one where I was more than comfortable with dealing with musicians. It was a bit of a revolution in a sense because Island had that and all the majors were really stuffy so people really wanted to be on Island because I was somebody who understood musicians, liked musicians, wanted to be around musicians and was happy working with them. I think that is one of the reasons that Island went so well, people wanted to be there and there were not so many viable options at that time.

I learned the music business over time, bit by bit, from producing a record, mastering a record, pressing it, taking it around and selling it – it is the most basic way up. During that time I would deal with a lot of different record labels and I started to pick up on things. I decided to push the envelope with the deals because the majors hated giving out power and they had a lot of power. When I started Island Records in England, EMI had ninety five percent of the business and Phillips had another four percent and the little independents had one percent.

I think the moment I realised that my little independent had become something else was when people started asking me to buy the label. It was in 1969 and they offered me what I thought was an astronomical amount of money – I only remember it because The Dorchester Hotel had just sold for the same amount of money and I could not believe that they would value my little label to the same amount as The Dorchester Hotel! But I did not want to sell because I loved what I was doing and because I have always had quirky tastes – and quirky tastes do not work in a corporation, quirky tastes can only work when you are in charge of your own business really. I was often very short of cash and nearly went under but I still loved doing what I was doing. I felt that I was not employable as a human being, so I followed what I believed in – I would never have been able to sign Bob Marley if I worked for somebody. I would not have been allowed.

It was the same with Grace Jones. I pursued her after seeing a photograph of her – not after hearing her. After seeing this photograph I thought that I needed to find out who she was because people said she was a singer, so then I looked her up. She had just finished a record for a little label in Brooklyn – it was her version of La vie en rose by Edith Piaf and I thought that it was just incredible. It was not difficult for me to sign Grace at all, firstly I was Jamaican and she was Jamaican, secondly by that period in time, which was about 1976 or 75, Island was well known and I was somewhat known, so she was jumping from her little unknown Brooklyn label to someone who already artists on a label, people like Robert Palmer.

When we came to record Grace at Compass Point, I had a genius engineer and so I did not feel I needed to be in control. I would go into the studio and sort of conduct and enthuse the different musicians while we recorded live. We recorded her singing and all the band playing and then we would go and listen to it and then if we needed to add something to it I would take them all in again to play together because I wanted to catch that feel you get when live music is being played and somebody can bounce off something they’ve heard as they play. When something is overdubbed you do not get that same feel, you never get anything you do not expect. Personally I feel music should be more recorded live, it should be more of a live feel, I think that is when it is most exciting and that is when magic happens.

There were times I didn’t work in the studio for a long time and then there was a long time that I did work in the studio. It depended a lot on whether it was an artist or something I felt like I could really produce or whether it was somebody who was already produced or already had a production company or whatever. In that case my role was more in marketing or sales. I didn’t produce most of the Island records – I never produced Cat Stevens, Robert Palmer, or U2. I produced some of the early Jamaican records, Millie, the Spencer Davis Group, some of the Traffic records.

Bob’s success did not happen over night, though. I remember when he had just finished Catch A Fire, I thought it would sell over a million copies, which eventually it did, but in the first six months it sold about 6000 copies. That was pretty good for a reggae album but I thought Bob was somebody that was going to go all the way so I was disappointed. Reggae never really had any credibility as music, there could be reggae hits but they would always be novelty records. Whether it would be “Judge Dread” or “Longshot Kick the Bucket”, they were all great records, but they were novelty records, they were not artist records and I have always been in the artist business rather than in the record business so I have always wanted to built artists and I felt the way to do that with Bob was portray him and the band as a black rock act.

I knew Bob for ten years, from 1971 to 1981 when he died. Well, I think it was 71 but it might have been 72. I cannot remember. Sometimes I get my own information from something I read in the paper!

I never felt pressure to find the next big thing. That kind of pressure is what you have when your company has shares on Wall Street and you have to make this much money otherwise your shares go down and you get fired. That pressure lives in major label, but in an independent you have hard times but it is not that sort of pressure you describe, you just need to find a way to get by until the next record came out. It is much more hand to mouth.

When Bob died it was the beginning of the end for me and the label. I was very involved in orchestrating it all, he was a Jamaican artist and I am from Jamaica. It meant so much more than just the music industry. It had nothing to do with charts or sales figures; it was something so much bigger and because it was so exciting and rewarding I could not really get myself ramped up after he died.

I decided to sell Island when I did not love what I was doing as much anymore – it got be too big. I like a gang approach rather than a corporate approach, that structure just didn’t work for me, I didn’t like it at all. The trigger in my head was one day in America someone came up to me and said that they wanted to be the senior vice president instead of vice president. I just thought ‘what the fuck is that all about?’ It was not the same fun or the same feel. You cannot replace the feel of a small independent – it is just so exciting because everybody is involved from the receptionist to the guy running the company, everybody is involved and everybody’s opinion is valued. I would get into trouble in America because I would ask the receptionist for her opinion. The receptionist’s opinion is more important to me than the vice president because he doesn’t buy records, they are given to him – he does not live the general life whereas the receptionist does. So I would always be equally interested, I don’t say more necessarily, but definitely equally interested in the receptionist’s opinion as much as the opinion of the vice president, because I felt they were closer to the market we were trying to reach. I have just always been like that. I’m a bit of a misfit. I have always been sort of an outsider.

I always put money back into records. I never took any money out of Island records, of course I was making a living but I never took any chunks of money or anything like that. I was always resigning and marketing new artists and new recordings. Sometimes I got a bit ahead of myself and almost ran out of cash and then I just had to duck and dive and figure out a way to get through.

I do not think the days of making a label profitable are gone at all. It depends on what your motivation is. For me the most important thing is to do what you love. It is difficult if you cannot pay your rent and cannot feed yourself, but once you can feed yourself and pay rent and you do what you want to do I feel that you are in the one percent of the people of the world who are truly happy. It does not matter how much money you make, it matters that you are excited about getting up in the morning and are excited about doing what you are doing. I never started Island Records because I wanted to make a lot of money, it was something I felt I could do and I loved doing. So if anybody has a similar sort of approach and a reason to go into the music business now is an incredible time, but you need to have patience. You can do it in your own time and with your own funds – but it takes time. I was very patient; most of the artists we signed on Island had at least three albums. I would never sign somebody and then drop them right away if it did not happen, that is how the major record system works now – they have to work like that because they have to make a profit on a regular basis. If you are an independent and you want to work with somebody the road might be long but if you are enjoying what you are doing then it is worth the effort. It is always fun attacking, but descending is not much fun.

It is a funny thing the record business, you have to remember that it is the artist that makes it. Once Island got known and respected then artists would want to come and sign with the company. Certainly when one looks back I am proud this point, but at the time when you were doing it, it was just what you were doing that day and nothing more. But looking back I am definitely very proud of Island records, even some of the artists who were not big at the time have built a name and have hardcore fans to this day – whether it is John Martyn, who just passed away, or Nick Drake, people who at the time did not sell a lot but are still recognised as being important. At the time I was just doing what I was doing that day. The time Bob and the Wailers came to see me in London I felt excited about it because I felt like I knew what to do and the direction to go, but it was just a good day and it was exciting, but that meeting probably took an hour and a half and then you just went back to what you were doing that day, working around a round table with everyone else. I have spent all my life working and when I look back I am definitely proud of it but it is only until very recently I have started to recognise that it was something special.

I love Jamaica. I really love Jamaica. My soul is here, but I also love England. There was nowhere in the world that was as exciting in the 60s and I was very fortunate to be there at that time. But I must say that most of my life has been random luck; I happened to be in England at the time when the music scene exploded and I happened to be there with a little label that was kind of cool and different. It was a great time!

My life has come full circle. I think I am the same. In fact my favourite thing today is doing jet skiing, which is the modern version of water skiing, so yeah I’m still the same!”

INTERVIEW © TIM NOAKES 2009