BLUE MOUNTAIN GOLD

From £100 to £400, the TOP 75 COLLECTABLE SKA & REGGAE ALBUMS of the 60s Compiled by Ian Shirley

”My aim is to see a blue beat disc in the charts,” a young Chris Blackwell told a New Musical Express journalist in February 1964, “even if it was only at No. 50.” At that time, Blackwell was running a small label called Island which sold 7” singles to the West Indian community and hip white boys in England. The label was only two years old and, during these early days, Blackwell personally delivered boxes of 7” singles by the likes of Wilfred Jackie Edward, Laurel Aitken and The Vikings to the specialist shops and barbers who stocked his records in the back of a Mini Cooper.

Blackwell used money from records sold either to press up more copies of his best-selling discs or fund new releases licensed from producers in his native Jamaica. It was a hand-to-mouth operation, especially with his major competitor Melodisc also releasing under its Blue Beat imprint regular 7” singles recorded in Jamaica (and sometimes even in the UK) by exotic-sounding artists like Prince Buster and Roland Alphonso. Ironically, two months later, there was a blue beat record in the charts and it reached a position 48 places higher than 50. Better still, it was one of Blackwell’s, as he had produced Millie Small’s My Boy Lollipop – “make my heart go giddyap” – and had cannily …

by Ian Shirley
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