This fine book by Simon Jones examines the history of reggae, especially its development in England, and how it has affected the youth. It is well written and informative, and has a particularly strong section on British reggae, giving good reasons why it developed differently from its Jamaican foundation. The entire second half of the book focuses more on the sociological aspects of the clash of cultures, which may or may not be your cup of tea. The following excerpt is about the changes made to the image and sound of The Wailers when they signed to Island records and how those changes helped them conquer the pop world. --Lem

In an attempt to anticipate trends in the rock market, Island had signed the Wailers in 1971, with a view to building a new and larger audience for reggae. Island evolved a specific promotional campaign to market the group as an alternative to the company's rock artists who by the early to mid-1970s had already begun to fade in popularity. The thinking behind this move was later confirmed by Blackwell who admitted that rock music had become "stale" and that Marley's music had "an energy and a fresh feel to it" (Gayle, 1975b, p. 13). When Blackwell paid an 8000 pound advance to the Wailers to record their first album, a previously unheard-of sum for a reggae group, he initiated a marketing campaign which went against all established principles of handling reggae. The decision was made to promote the band as a fixed, self-contained "group" of musicians within the rock tradition. The Wailers' music was depicted in terms of a "new", "progressive" innovation in Jamaican music which represented a break from the reggae of the late 1960s that had been so despised by rock fans. As Blackwell later explained:

"Reggae up until the Wailers' first album was perceived as rather quirky music in general...it wasn't a music that had any respect, and I felt that the best way to market the Wailers was to change it from being a singles music to being an album music, and the best way to do that was to market them as a group and make an album and release an album first...'cos in the way Jamaican music was marketed before there was never a group image and we were really at the height of group consciousness." (Interview with Chris Blackwell, Capital Radio, 1982)

As Blackwell points out, the reggae industry, both in Jamaica and Britain, had previously revolved around the production and marketing of singles rather than albums. Singles, on the whole, were cheaper to manufacture, had a quicker turnover and required lower levels of investment. By being more responsive to individual choice, they were generally better suited to the consumption habits of reggae's black audience. The vast majority of albums released within the reggae market, moreover, tended to be "various artists" or "greatest hits" compilations. The rock market, in contrast, was based on album sales by particular artists or groups which although requiring greater initial investment ultimately yielded much larger profits. The Wailers' transition from a studio, singles-based vocal group to an album-based touring band signaled an attempt to repackage reggae in a form tailored to the consumption patterns of the rock market. Since the late 1960s, that market had revolved around the sales of albums and cheap, stereo hi-fis (Frith, 1983, p. 143). Rock albums were designed for consumption by an attentive, stationary audience prepared to sit and listen for a considerable length of time. As Davis points out, the order of songs on such albums was pre-arranged in the production process:

"The European and American audiences that Blackwell wanted the Wailers to penetrate were accustomed to getting their music from albums on which ten or more tunes clicked together in a more sustained atmosphere. Bob Marley was asked to make the first reggae album, which Blackwell would then transform into a record that could appeal to the rock fans who were his principal customers."(Davis, 1983, p. 95)

Blackwell's decision to market reggae as an album music and to establish the Wailers as more profitable transnational artists heavily shaped the production and packaging of the Wailers' debut LP for Island Catch A Fire . The first important change in the production process was the scale of financial investment made in recording the album. As Blackwell explained:

"In Jamaica they were just making records on a very limited budget. And the records were made very much just for the Jamaican market. And they weren't in stereo. Their early records were great for what they are, but for getting to a wider market they needed more money spent on them."(quoted in Gayle, 1975b, p. 13)

Blackwell doubled the customary rates for Jamaican session musicians, enabling them to record for longer than the standard two and a half to three minutes (Williams, 1972c, p. 33). In accordance with Island's marketing plans, Catch A Fire was recorded in stereo. The latest technical facilities of the recording process were employed to "clean up" the music. The upgraded standards of sound reproduction were designed partly to broaden the music's commercial appeal by undermining the common accusation made by rock fans that reggae was a music of "inferior" quality. Although the backing tracks for the album were recorded in Jamaica, they were subsequently remixed and edited in London under the supervision of Blackwell (Clarke, 1980, p. 107). As part of this process, session musicians were brought in to overdub rock guitar, tabla, and synthesizer parts over the Wailers' music (Davis, 1983, p. 95). In addition, Blackwell accelerated the speed of the Wailers' basic rhythm tracks by one beat, thinking that a quicker tempo might enhance the music's appeal to rock fans (Davis, 1983, p. 95). Afro-American-influenced rhythms and back-up vocals were also employed to lend a "cosmopolitan" flavour to the music.

These transformations amounted to a distinct move away from Jamaican music's traditional emphasis on drums and bass towards a more "produced" sound, filled out by keyboards and guitars (Johnson, 1983). The addition and remixing of instruments became a permanent feature of Island's production of all the group's subsequent albums. Island attempted to repeat the production formula of these early recordings with other artists like the Heptones. Such strategies, however, met with mixed success. By adding rock guitar, emphasising the treble and percussion at the expense of the bass, and occasionally increasing the speed of the original rhythm tracks, they tended to alienate both pop and roots markets (Black Echoes, 13 February 1976, p. 6; 28 February 1976, p. 18).

Unlike most previous reggae albums Catch A Fire was retailed as a full-price LP, and was the first in a series of glossily packaged and well-produced stereo albums that could be promoted, reviewed and consumed in rock terms as complete "works of art". Island's innovatory marketing strategies were most clearly reflected in the elaborate packaging and design of their album sleeves. Catch A Fire's pop-art sleeve cover, designed in the form of a large cigarette-lighter, was a novel selling-point. The double sleeve of Burnin', the Wailers' second album, opened out to reveal assorted photographs of Rastas in various "dread" poses. The song lyrics on the Burnin' album were printed on the inner cover, making them accessible to white consumers in an unprecedented manner. These ploys seemed to confirm Island's intention to sell the Wailers' as "rebels" by stressing the uncompromising and overtly political aspects of their music.

By the time Natty Dread, the Wailers' third album, was released late in 1974, it was clear that the image of Marley in particular as a licentious, ganja-smoking "Rasta rebel" was to be a central feature of Island's marketing campaign. The album's sleeve carried an impressionistic and romanticised portrait of Marley which emphasised his locksed hair in a way designed to evoke a sense of eroticism and fantasy in the intended white rock-fan. With the album's release, the key icons of ganja, locks, and Rasta colours became firmly established as the symbols most effective in selling reggae to whites. In accordance with this strategy Catch A Fire was later re-packaged with the cigarette-lighter cover replaced by a full-sized photograph of Marley smoking a large "spliff" of marijuana.

The company's marketing strategies were further reflected in the occasional alteration of album titles. Hence the third album's original title, Knotty Dread, taken from the Wailers' Jamaican 45 release, was subsequently changed to the more ambiguous Natty Dread (Davis, 1983, p. 126). This alteration involved a subtle, but critical, shift in meaning. "Knotty" implied a sense of uncompromising Rasta militancy and race-consciousness symbolised by the extolling of locks, while the more innocuous "Natty" had connotations of "hip" style and being "fashionable" in white parlance.

Island's intention to promote the Wailers as a rock group was further confirmed when the company organised a concert tour of Britain in 1973. The band's itinerary took in a string of predominantly college and university-based rock venues and included national radio and TV appearances on Radio One's show, Top Gear, and on BBC 2's Old Grey Whistle Test. The staged spectacle of the live "gig" was one of the mainstays of rock culture both as a promotion medium for companies through which to stimulate record sales, and as an important channel of expression and consumption for artists and fans respectively (Frith, 1983). By the early 1970s the staging of rock concerts had become dependent on a vast technological infrastructure of sound equipment. By contrast, such live "spectacles" were rare in the context of the Jamaican music industry, largely based as it was around sound systems, studios and a handful of session musicians. The sophisticated hardware and instruments of rock technology, taken for granted by most English and American groups, were far beyond the incomes of most of Jamaica's ghetto artists. The economic realities of life in West Kingston militated against the formation of financially autonomous "bands", in favour of vocal groups and solo artists who relied on session musicians both inside and outside the studio. Although Jamaican groups had toured British night-clubs intermittently during the 1960s, the leap in the scale of exposure entailed by the Wailers' tour was a major new development in the marketing of reggae. Live promotion subsequently became one of the most important channels through which reggae was made available to a mass white audience.


Despite the media interest generated by the Wailers' British tour, and by their first two albums for Island, the 1972-3 campaign was something of a false start in terms of mass popular acceptance. Catch A Fire sold only a modest 14,000 copies in the first year of its release (Davis, 1983, p. 101). The group's eventual breakthrough came two years later, with their second British tour, undertaken in the wake of Natty Dread. That breakthrough was achieved under the new title of "Bob Marley and the Wailers" after the original group had disbanded. The change in title indicated both a reorganisation of the group's personnel and a marketing ploy by Island to push Marley as the band's frontman and "star". As Carl Gayle explained:

"It became obvious to Island pretty soon that Marley was the one to pin the genius tag on. Bob, with his rebel rasta image, was projected as the key figure to the exclusion of Tosh and Livingstone." (Gayle, 1975b, p. 13)

The intense media interest that surrounded the Wailers' 1975 tour of Britain, together with the escalating sales of Natty Dread, signaled Marley's commercial breakthrough to a mass white audience. The tour was the climax of a two-year promotional campaign by Island. The subsequent release of the single "No Woman No Cry", a love-song aimed directly at the pop charts, and the successful "live" album of the London Lyceum gig, marked the beginnings of Marley's entry into mainstream rock and pop culture (Gilroy, 1982; Davis, 1983). Eric Clapton's top ten hit with a cover version of Marley's "I Shot The Sheriff" in 1974 had bestowed a measure of credibility on reggae and paved the way for Marley's acceptance within the rock community. Island's decision to cast Marley in the role of solo star was canonised in the front pages of the rock press from which he was hailed as "reggae's first superstar" (Melody Maker, 26 July 1975).

The release of Marley's hugely successful fourth album Rastaman Vibration, for which the advance orders totaled 600,000, was the prelude to a whole string of concert tours, chart hits and top-selling albums in the late 1970s. As the whole machinery of the pop-music industry swung into action behind him, a flood of "Bob Marley" ephemera hit the market in the form of T-shirts, posters and scrapbooks. In response to this rapidly widening audience, Marley's music underwent something of a shift in emphasis away from the roots-oriented sound of earlier albums towards a more pronounced pop flavor. Albums such as Exodus, Kaya and Uprising included a greater proportion of love-songs and softer melodies designed to appeal to the widest audience possible (Johnson, 1977).

By the end of the decade Bob Marley had established himself as a top-selling, international recording artist. His success gave a financial boost to a mid-1970s music industry ailing under the impact of the recession and the stagnation of rock culture. In 1981, a London spokesman for Island estimated Bob Marley's world-wide album sales to be in excess of $190 million (Davis, 1983, p. 228). It was after his death, however, that the scale of Marley's commercial importance was revealed. The release of the album, Confrontation , marked the beginning of a posthumous marketing campaign designed to make fresh revenue from old catalogues and unreleased material. That campaign reached fruition in 1984 when the company attempted to remarket Marley as a "legend."

Launched on the anniversary of Marley's death the Legend campaign was aimed at a broad-based, record-buying public. The Legend album, a compilation of Marley's "greatest hits", was heavily promoted through television advertisements and video releases compiled from old film footage. (Companies like K-Tel had already proved television to be a highly lucrative medium for record marketing with their successful series of chart-hit compilation albums promoted almost exclusively through television advertising.) Island's campaign revolved around the attempt to present Marley as an all-round entertainer and a pop-hero of "legendary" proportions, a strategy reflected in the seemingly deliberate omission of the term "reggae" from the campaign and in the attempt to surround Marley's music in a posthumous aura of nostalgia. On the video film which accompanied the chart hit "One Love", for example, Marley appeared as a "cute" and "lovable" father-figure, while in full-page press advertisements it was proclaimed that "the legend lives on". Marley was promoted as a household name on the basis that "everyone should own at least one Bob Marley album". Such was the campaign's success that Island took the second biggest share of the UK market in 1984, Legend being one of the company's biggest-selling albums for ten years.