50 & A BOOK

Erin Hansen, Contributor

Chris Blackwell, founder of the eclectic Island Records, recently celebrated the company's 50th anniversary with the release of a glossy-paged book of archival Island photographs and images memorialising its journey.

"I never expected Island Records to grow into the international phenomenon it became," said Blackwell, who relished the retrospective.

Released this month through Universe Publishing, The Story of Island Records: Keep on Running, edited by Suzette Newman and Chris Salewicz, gives a brief preface by Blackwell and a series of short, comprehensive essays about the record company's cross-cultural, genre-jumping anthology.

The iconic company began with the simple, stripped-down recording of a local jazz pianist named Lance Hayward in 1959, and quickly expanded into an international recording house empire.

"When I was starting out," Blackwell reminisced, "all I wanted to do was to get that one album released."

Not long after that first recording, Blackwell threw in the towel at his Montego Bay water-skiing job and set up a small office on South Odeon Avenue in Kingston.

Within two years, Island Records had taken business overseas to the United Kingdom, where Blackwell sold pre-released 45s from Jamaican sound systems, such as Clement 'Sir Coxson' Dodd's Downbeat, to local Jamaican immigrants and began exporting the authentic sounds of Jamaican music beginning with ska singer, Millie Small.

Business grew rapidly in the 1960s and '70s as Island expanded its sound to record a wide range of artistes. From Jimmy Cliff to Steve Winwood, to Cat Stevens and Lee 'Scratch' Perry, Island sought to immortalise the album artiste and stifle the fleeting three-minute single through artistic branding.

An artistic testament

The Story of Island Records is an artistic testament to Blackwell's struggle and eventual success in developing branding for artistes both musically and visually.

In reference to Island's substantial archive of album-cover art, Blackwell said, "I was always very interested in artwork. If you felt that the artwork was intriguing then there must be something going on inside."

Island's expansion into film in the early '70s and '80s with Jamaican films like The Harder They Come and Countryman proved Blackwell's interest in stimulating the sounds of Island recording artistes - such as Bob Marley, Steel Pulse and Jimmy Cliff - by fusing them with the movie screen.

By the '80s, Island had solidified its reputation as a visual pioneer with album covers for Grace Jones, Roxy Music and the B-52s that were provocative and intriguing to both record collectors and the general public. The visual extremity of the Island artiste had reached new heights and continued to stretch its limbs into the new millennium.

"Artwork was very important to Island's life," Blackwell emphasised, "You can see in this book how Island's artwork developed and transformed itself, always seeming a reflection of the larger world."

The Story of Island Records is now available through www.rizzoliusa.com. (tk).