A LIFE CONNECTING MUSIC, FILM, HOTELS, RUM, AND TWO SHORES.
— By Hal Peat
Putting together the pieces of Chris Blackwell’s life so far is not a straightforward affair, but it is never less than fascinating. What remains remarkable about it and becomes clear from the earliest moments of this life and career is just how the different elements that have shaped these still play an ongoing role. To hear Blackwell himself tell it, there was no master plan at the outset of his ventures into music, film, then the hotel business. Looking back at how he did pursue different career paths that diverged successfully into one another certainly suggests a visionary sort of talent that underlies his journey throughout.
Returning to Jamaica in 1955 at the age of 17, Blackwell took tentative steps into different interests — he rented motor scooters, operated a small jazz club, managed juke boxes around the island.
From the beginning of both personal and career choices, there is an often interconnected pattern to Chris Blackwell’s trajectory. The complexity is present even in his family background — with a mother from a prominent family of the old Jamaica, and a father who was Anglo-Irish and an officer in the Jamaica Regiment. This and the very earliest years of his life help explain some of what followed later. Born in England, Blackwell spent his first ten years of life growing up in Jamaica. His mother’s family had a home near Oracabessa called Bolt House, and Blackwell spent summers swimming in the coastal waters there. Returning to England for his education at the elite Harrow School for boys, he found himself already caught between two shores — by his own account, he did not fit in well into this rigid educational system.
Returning to Jamaica in 1955 at the age of 17, Blackwell took tentative steps into different interests — he rented motor scooters, operated a small jazz club, managed juke boxes around the island. It was a time of absorbing on the ground, but also a period when he found his initial footing in the world of music. Tuned in to the rawness of the music that was coming from the island street and city, he again returned to London – this time, to sell records. As he recalls this period nowadays: “It started off basically just as wanting to make records for the people of Jamaica, and try and sell them in England to Jamaicans in England. I wasn’t selling them to anybody other than Jamaicans initially.” Back in London again, he found his way toward expanding that market: “It started to sort of seep into the west end of London because of a Jamaican club called “The Roaring Twenties” which was a big club, and so people used to go there to hear the music. Then the only place where you could get the records were in the areas around London where Jamaicans tend to live. So when a record store in the West End in Soho ordered the first records that was a big breakthrough, and I thought this is incredible, we’re actually selling some records into the general sort of market.”
The widening success in bringing the Jamaican sound into the mainstream market led him to take another leap – producing singles intended for distribution to that broader audience. “I brought over this young lady from Jamaica called Millie Small and made a record with her that became a big hit, “My Boy Lollipop”. So that sort of spread it,” he recalls. He also points to subsequent Island Records releases and hits such as “Madness” that helped propel the growing acceptance of Jamaican reggae music. While the Island Records roster of star performers would eventually encompass names from both North America and Europe by the Eighties such as U2, Roxy Music, Steve Winwood, Robert Palmer, Melissa Etheridge, and the Cranberries, it is fair to say it was that early production and promotion of Jamaican talent that put Island Records on the map of global music – and first and foremost among these of course remains Bob Marley. After meeting Marley in London in 1972, Blackwell formed a unique working partnership with Bob Marley & The Wailers that saw the group emerge as the iconic face of reggae for a world-wide audience.
Miami Beach became the ideal location for Blackwell to try his hand at what he envisioned as the small hotel experience.
Ways ahead into film and hotel innovation
Even while Island Records was experiencing phenomenal success under Blackwell’s guidance and instinct for new talent in the seventies, he had already established links with what would eventually become separate yet connected business enterprises. The earliest encounter with the world of film had actually begun when Bond author Ian Fleming – whom Blackwell knew through his mother – had recommended him as a production assistant for the Jamaica location filming of “Dr. No” back in 1961. After Fleming’s death in 1964, his island home at GoldenEye in Oracabessa – which Blackwell was well acquainted with – remained a part of the Fleming family estate until 1976 when Blackwell finally bought it himself. He began renting out Fleming’s main villa, and the strong appeal of the property and location to private guests who visited gave him the idea of its potential for wider development.
With the appeal for reggae at a high, Blackwell sensed the potential of its carryover into the film medium. He acted as uncredited executive producer in 1972 when his friend Perry Henzell directed and produced the period classic “The Harder They Come”, a gripping story about an aspiring reggae singer that starred Jimmy Cliff. “I think it is internationally recognized as one of the top 200 films, it really brings you in and gives you enough of the complexity from which world music came, and it was very, very important in widening the whole understanding of Jamaican music, and really stands out head and shoulders above the rest,” Blackwell reflects. He continued throughout the Nineties to produce more films that mirrored other aspects of contemporary island life: “Then I did one called “Countryman”, with Dickie Jobson, which had some great pieces in it – probably had about 25 minutes in it which were really great. Then we made another one called “Third World Cop”, which was a regular sort of cop movie except set in Jamaica. And then we did one called “The Lunatic”, which was based on a book by Anthony Winkler, it did not come out as well as the book – the book is hilariously funny, but the film did not capture that.”
Surveying the challenges of producing meaningful film about the region, Blackwell notes: “There is such a dearth in a way of visual material coming from Jamaica other than of course from the videos, which have gotten better and better over the last few years – you know, the more fun videos. But for some time, I was really hoping that one could build a kind of film industry here where you could get the visual representation to what is our global interest in Jamaican music. But it’s just really difficult to…especially nowadays, where there’s so much material being thrown out, either on television or on video, and there’s so much there that you have to compete with that you really need to have something pretty special in order for it to stand out at all and in so doing, recover its investment and perhaps make some money. “So, we haven’t done as much as I would like. I would say that at one time, my dream was to have a film come out once a year, but the thing is that, the films themselves that people want internationally are ones which are featuring the same kinds of characters as make the records. When you go to find the writers in Jamaica, they’re more from an academic and arts area, and they’re not necessarily in touch with the street and the feel of the streets, and that’s what people elsewhere love about Jamaica.”
That type of challenge in producing on the Jamaican scene did not prevent him from being involved through Island Pictures and Island Alive, his North American film divisions, in bringing such stellar mainstream films of the mid-eighties as “The Trip to Bountiful” and “Kiss of the Spider Woman” to appreciative film audiences world-wide. This increased focus on cinema versus music during this decade may well be traced back to the early and untimely death of Bob Marley in 1981. Although Blackwell continued in production for some time longer, the early sense of engineering musical breakthroughs had also disappeared with Marley. Then, as the decade drew to a close, Blackwell heard from his friend Ron Wood of the Rolling Stones about what was then unfolding in Miami – a rediscovery of the city’s original Deco era hotel architecture along the beach. Together with an entirely new cultural and social scene that was renewing interest in the city, Miami became the ideal location for Blackwell to try his hand at what he envisioned as for the smaller hotel experience. Having sold his interest in Island Records in 1989, he now invested millions into acquiring, renovating and updating such landmark South Beach properties as the Marlin, The Tides Hotel and the Molinar directly behind it, followed by the Netherland Hotel, the Kent and Palmer House in 1991. This collection of small to mid-size hotels formed the initial Island Outpost property group – and the imaginative and authentic design used in each contributed greatly to the overall remake of South Beach in the early Nineties as a trendsetting international mecca.
Going forward again from the beginning
In fact, that decade in Miami proved to be a new chapter experientially for Blackwell in terms of operating the Island Outpost group. The concept of a collection of intimate hotels, each with their own well-developed identity and even a fascinating past history, that could also enhance and contribute to an existing community, evolved for him during this period. By the time the twenty-first century arrived, Miami had also become too much of a mass market scene – large-scale property development and corporate encroachment along with the mass market it brought along took away the early appeal. It was time to move on again, and Blackwell found the ideal next location for his Island Outpost on the island where everything had really begun for him. The landscape and locations provided by Jamaica have proven a far more adventurous undertaking for Island Outpost in its present day profile: Blackwell acquired such diverse properties as Strawberry Hill – a former greathouse high in the Blue Mountains above Kingston; The Caves in Negril, cliffside accommodations on the western coast, and the crown jewel of his collection – GoldenEye Hotel & Resort, in Oracabessa just east of Ocho Rios.
Each location has something of what Blackwell himself refers to as an “emotional investment” – deriving its inspiration and identity from its immediate surroundings, and even incorporating some ingredients of Blackwell’s past. Jake’s, a small hideaway of luxury bungalows on the isolated stretches of the south coast, and Geejam, a tiny hotel and recording studio near Port Antonio for instance once operated under the Island Outpost brand, has a state-of-the art recording studio where top-flight international performers retreat to nowadays to work on a new number while also relaxing in paradise. Also present at the Geejam bar and bars located at the other Island Outpost properties is the recently developed Blackwell Rum, an elite small label of Jamaica rum that can be served up for guests with other ingredients or mixers, or just be enjoyed on the rocks the way Chris Blackwell prefers it himself. This luminous dark rum with its deep amber glow draws on flavours of coconut and honeyed tropical fruits along with hints of citrus. For Blackwell, it is also a reconnection to a family legacy in rum production dating back to the seventeenth century on the island.
It is at GoldenEye, however, that Blackwell’s enduring connection to the Jamaican natural and human landscape remains most prominent nowadays. Having first expanded on Ian Fleming’s original villa by adding just five more guest villas as Island Outpost reinvented itself in Jamaica, he more recently completed a more extensive addition of luxuriant beach and lagoon cottages and suites, plus new dining and activity options. Looking back on what was absent in Jamaica and that he wanted to bring into the experience of visiting it, he explains it this way: “I think the main thing is to try and create in Jamaica something which I guess existed right at the beginning of Negril, when it was a lot of little places and not just a few big places, and there were little restaurants, little bars, little people selling stuff on the street and that kind of vibe. That was the beginning of Negril, and it was really great and it was unique, you know, because the community in general was sharing in the bounty which was brought down to the visitors to the island, rather than staying in an all-inclusive hotel where the people tend not to go out and go to restaurants and bars, perhaps they pretty much stay in the place, and therefore little or no money gets into the community, and just salaries and wages are paid to the workers in the hotel. So what I’m really keen to do at Oracabessa – because it’s a very nice little town which was also quite an important town 50 years ago when bananas used to be shipped from here. What I wanted to try and do is sort of incorporate and involve the people of Oracabessa in what we’re doing – let them know what we’re doing, what our plans are, and so they are kind of involved a little bit, so we don’t just design stuff without talking to them, showing what our plans are, so that the local people can feel that they’re being respected as the people that live there.”
Blackwell Rum represents the same passion Blackwell has for Reggae. His black gold liquid infuses the warmth and sensuality for which Jamaica and its music is known for.
It is a long-term commitment which Chris Blackwell envisions at this point, insofar as how he sees Island Outpost and in particular, GoldenEye moving ahead into the future: “My dream for it in say 15 or 20 years – because it is going to take that long – is that you will have a very vibrant little town where people will come because it’s also very pretty and stay at GoldenEye and other hotels that exist around this town,” he concludes. “Of course, we now also since 2011 have this international airport, which is eight minutes away from Oracabessa, and which allows you to fly directly into and out of Jamaica from the U.S. or anywhere you want. So that is really my plan – it’s quite an ambitious one, but it’s something where I think if you go slow instead of the faster pace and don’t have too many peaks and valleys then it will really grow and become strong, and not be suddenly a kind of gold rush thing where you have every hustler around running to the place. It’s not that exciting initially – it’s something that just grows steadily and the people of the area will benefit. And obviously I believe it’s the right kind of plan for Jamaica – and indeed, a lot of the Caribbean islands. I think once it’s done and people see it working, it will be adopted in the future across the board much more than anything that’s happened before that.”