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“There was no plan—it was just one thing, and then something else turned up,” Chris Blackwell is telling me. “It all happened by chance. I mean… I was teaching waterskiing at Half Moon Hotel [along the north shore of Jamaica]—I had my own boat, and I got the concession from the hotel, and I was enjoying myself a lot.”
Isn’t that always how legendary careers start—with someone chasing their own shambolic unicorn to wherever it might lead? I’m sitting at a battered wooden picnic table overlooking Low Cay Beach at GoldenEye, the legendary Jamaican property built by James Bond creator Ian Fleming and owned briefly by Bob Marley—who then pronounced the place “too posh” and sold it to Blackwell in 1977. (Blackwell’s mother, Blanche, a close friend of Fleming, was the inspiration for the Bond characters Pussy Galore and Honey Ryder, as Blackwell notes in his introduction to Assouline’s sumptuous coffee table book Jamaica Vibes.)
For a man who had no plan, he’s done alright for himself: After working as a location scout and production consultant on the first Bond film, Dr. No (he also appears briefly in the film in an uncredited role as “henchman jumping off dock into water”), Blackwell founded Island Records in 1959 when he was 22 and—aside from being among the first to record a ska single—was instrumental in forging the careers of everyone from Grace Jones and Roxy Music to U2, Marianne Faithfull, and Nick Drake. After selling Island in 1989, he moved into real estate, helping to conjure the stylish scene that would become known as South Beach in Miami before turning back to his native Jamaica. (In addition to GoldenEye, Blackwell owns Strawberry Hill, a large estate nestled in the country’s Blue Mountains, and The Caves near Negril.)
Still, it’s Blackwell’s elevation of Bob Marley that led the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to call him “the single person most responsible for turning the world on to reggae music” when he was inducted in 2001. It’s a story best told in Blackwell’s 2022 memoir, The Islander: My Life In Music and Beyond, but the broad outlines are this: Blackwell gave Marley and his band some money so they could record an album, left them to their own devices to put together what they wished, and then helped produce and market them in a way nobody had ever thought of before.
“Bob’s songs had so many meaningful elements in them,” says Blackwell—portrayed by James Norton in the new biopic Bob Marley: One Love—“and in order to get that, I felt that we needed to produce his records differently. Peter [Tosh] and Bunny [Wailer, both from Marley’s band, the Wailers] were upset about this, understandably—they’d been together, and here I was picking up something a bit different. But Bob and I talked, and I told him that while reggae was reggae, in order to widen its audience, we needed to bring some other instruments and some other elements into it, so that people weren’t listening to just reggae—they were listening to a new music of which reggae was a part. And he saw that, and he got that.”
If Marley’s legendary catalog has, for a half-century, served as a blue-chip introduction to this new music, so has GoldenEye become the obligatory first stop for a well-heeled clientele visiting Jamaica: Lucien Freud and Truman Capote were prominent among scores of famous visitors to Ian Fleming’s villa. More recent visitors to Blackwell’s expansion of the resort—it now includes 45 accommodations spread out over 52 acres, ranging from expansive five-bedroom villas to simple beachside huts, along with a luxe-boho array of bars, restaurants, pools, and hang-out spaces—have included Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell, Jay-Z, and Bono.
Easily overlooked, if you’re having a casual walk, swim, or snorkel around the property: Blackwell’s own modest lagoon-adjacent hut. “I’ve lived there since 1995, and I just love it,” he says. “It’s primal—it’s the earliest type of building, really. Everybody told me, ‘You can’t be building fancy beach houses and villas and then build a bunch of huts.’ But I wanted people here to mix—do you know what I mean? That’s the most important thing. If you create an environment where people can come, and if they want, meet people and become friends, that’s the best thing you can get. It’s like living life, in a way.”
My own days at GoldenEye were spent snorkeling in the emerald-clear waters just outside the resort’s sheltered cove, swimming (with the occasional very friendly barracuda) laps in the lagoon around Santa Maria Island, as well as reading and lazing about on a lounge chair near the Bamboo Bar after paddleboarding off Button Beach. I ended up taking my lunches with some newfound friends (a French documentarian, a noted West African keyboardist and producer, and a Kingston, Jamaica-based Rastafarian among them) at Bizot Bar, where we dined on ackee, saltfish, jerk chicken, burgers, and whatever the fresh catch of the day happened to be. After a nap, I even squeezed in the odd private yoga session. (There’s a gorgeous spa here as well, but as my entire collective experience at GoldenEye seemed to me like a spa for the soul, I skipped the various massages, wraps, scrubs, and facials.)
Late in the afternoon on my final day in Jamaica, I was driven a mile or so down the road to Gibraltor Beach, where—under the tutelage of Mel Tennant, a.k.a. the Turtle Man, in a project sponsored by the GoldenEye Foundation—a small handful of guests and I learned how to help just-hatched sea turtles find their way from beneath the sand across the beach and into Oracabessa Bay as the sun set. Back at the resort, we feasted on an enormous buffet spread out on a great lawn underneath the stars and adjacent to a roaring bonfire while a local musician serenaded us with the kind of blissful tunes that could only emerge from a place, a time, and a setting exactly like this.
On my last morning at GoldenEye, over breakfast back at Bizot, I asked Blackwell more about—well, you know, the thing that everybody wants to ask him about: What it was like working with Bob Marley? What I didn’t expect him to tell me was how it almost caused him to be murdered.
If you’ve seen One Love or know a bit about Marley’s life, you know that in late 1976, he was scheduled to perform at a concert to combat the rising political violence then gripping Jamaica. “I’d already told Bob before the concert—because he rang me and asked me about it—I’d said: ‘You have to find out who’s putting on the concert—if it’s the prime minister and his political party, or the opposition and their political party. Who’s supporting it?’ It was coming up to election time, and I knew it could be warfare. Then, a couple of days away from it actually happening, I went down to Lee Perry’s studio [the infamous Black Ark Studios of Lee “Scratch” Perry, where sounds that redefined and expanded generations of music and recording, were created] in the evening to pick up some tracks, and he was recording something, which he was singing to. And I said, ‘That sounds really good, Scratch—how long will it take to mix it?’ He said, ‘About an hour and a half.’ Well, two-plus hours later I took it with me and brought it in the car, and the driver took me to 56 Hope Road, where Bob was living, and where a big meeting was taking place between the band and Bob, and outside it was all locked up—that’s when the guys had gone in and shot up Bob and some others.” (All told, seven men were found to have raided Marley’s home, shooting Marley, his wife Rita, and two others; all survived.)
“I would have been there,” Blackwell is telling me now, still dumbfounded more than four decades later. “If Lee Perry would have been on time, I would have been there—and I’d be an easy target.”
Marley and Rita (who sang backup in her husband’s band) were adamant about the show going on as planned. Two evenings later—with Rita still wearing the gown from the hospital she’d just checked herself out of and Marley rolling up his sleeve to show the crowd his injured arm (“Bang bang, I’m okay,” was all he said about it to the crowd)—the concert went off without a hitch, galvanizing a nation.
A few years later, though, Marley collapsed while out for a run in Manhattan’s Central Park while in the U.S. for some tour dates; when he was examined by doctors the next day, he was informed that he had a terminal brain tumor.
“I had an apartment in New York at Essex House, and Bob rang me and said he’d like to come over and see me,” Blackwell says. “I’d heard he’d collapsed in Central Park, but I didn’t know his condition. But we chatted for a bit, and he told me that he was only going to live for six months. And then he said, ‘Let’s take a picture.’ I’d told Bob years earlier that we’d never have a picture of just the two of us taken together. I felt like a photograph of Bob and me—you know, the bigwig record label guy—might get in the way of some of the ideas that he was trying to get across in his music. But Bob, for the first time, insisted: “Let’s take a picture.” So we went and sat near the window and had a picture taken—the only picture that exists of just me and Bob.”
Finally, I ask Blackwell whether he could have ever imagined—at a time when he was working with Marley, struggling to break him out of a niche that was still being marketed and sold as a Black thing, or a Jamaican thing—whether he could have ever imagined a world in which people of all ages, all over the planet know his work and his songs and his life.
Blackwell became very still and very quiet; he looked out over the waves on Oracabessa Bay for a long while, and then his eyes welled up with tears, and he answered, in almost a whisper.
“I’m just happy we got on so well.”
