Chris Blackwell: Island Records, a Kilburn Basement and U2's $5 Million

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Chris Blackwell founded Island Records in Jamaica in 1959 with Graham Goodall and Leslie Kong, using seed money from an RKO executive and naming the label after Harry Belafonte's Island in the Sun. His first goal was pressing records for the island's sound systems. In 1962 he moved to London, where radio and press ignored Jamaican music, so he ran the label from a basement in Kilburn and carried records by hand to shops serving West Indian communities. Millie Small's My Boy Lollipop broke worldwide in 1964, and Blackwell used the windfall to shift from quick singles to album careers, signing the Spencer Davis Group, Cat Stevens, Free, Roxy Music and King Crimson alongside Bob Marley and Toots and the Maytals.

The same instinct that built Island strained it. After Marley's death in 1981, sublabels such as ZTT spent with little oversight while Blackwell poured money into films including Countryman, Kiss of the Spider Woman and Stop Making Sense. When U2's The Joshua Tree exploded in 1987, he had to tell the band he owed them about $5 million in royalties he had spent, and he settled by giving them an estimated 10 percent of Island. In July 1989 he sold the label to PolyGram for 180 million pounds, stayed nearly a decade as CEO of Island Entertainment, and said he never really had a job until then. He left in 1997, and PolyGram shut his film division soon after.

• Blackwell personally picked the backing musicians for Toots and the Maytals and co-produced Funky Kingston.
• In 1969 Island bought a deconsecrated 17th-century church in Notting Hill for its studio and offices.
• Island mixed Jamaican reggae with British progressive rock rather than building a single-genre identity.
• The U2 debt was settled with an estimated 10 percent stake in Island Records itself.
• After leaving PolyGram he ran Caribbean properties including Ian Fleming's Goldeneye estate and launched Palm Pictures.