CHRIS BLACKWELL
Chris Blackwell (born 22 June 1937) is an English businessman and former record producer, and the founder of Island Records, which has been called “one of Britain’s great independent labels”. 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”. Forming Island Records in Jamaica on 22 May 1959, not quite aged 22, Blackwell was amongst the first to record the Jamaican popular music that eventually became known as ska. 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 amongst many other diverse high-profile acts. He has produced many seminal albums, including Marley’s Catch A Fire and Uprising, and The B-52’s’ self-titled debut album in 1979. (More from Wikipedia)
Looters, Flashpoint – My copy of this 1990 CD has a sticker on it with a list of the dates in their U.S. tour, so it might have been a promotional album of some kind. Allmusic gives this album 4 stars and says this about their incongruous beginnings and fan base: “Formed in San Francisco in 1982 at the peak of the city’s hardcore punk movement, Looters were embraced by the local punk rock scene even though the style of music the multi-racial, multi-ethnic band played couldn’t have had its roots further from Gilmore Street. The Dead Kennedys’ Jello Biafra was an early fan of the band, however, which led to the release of a self-titled EP on his Alternative Tentacles label. As legend would have it, Island Records head honcho Chris Blackwell heard the disc playing in a record store during a trip to the Bay area and subsequently signed the band to Island.” This is their debut album on Island but actually their second album (Jericho Down came out in 1984). The album has a host of influences and is rife with a compelling world-music vibe. The opening track, “War Drums” naturally is drum-based but also has fine harmony vocals. But the killer track for me is “Manzanar”, with its recurring call of “how far . . . is Manzanar”. From Wikipedia: “Manzanar is the site of one of ten American concentration camps, where more than 120,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated during World War II from March 1942 to November 1945.”
(December 2015)
