Ghostwriters, like football referees, are often said to have done their best work when no-one has noticed them. The lack of attention directed towards Island Records boss Chris Blackwell’s high profile co-writer on the initial publication of his cosmopolitan and wildly informative memoir suggests this was a job well done.

The name Paul Morley—scourge of authentocrat rock journalism before that term was even coined, and former Blackwell employee as the wilful imagineer of the Zang Tuum Tumb label which gave the world Frankie Goes To Hollywood—has not always been associated with an aversion to the spotlight. But in adding this sympathetic yet far from uncritical realisation of Blackwell’s star-studded entrepreneurial odyssey to the rip-snorting memoir he wrote for Grace Jones (2015’s counter-intuitively but in fact accurately titled I’ll Never Write My Memoirs, whose co-author’s old school ‘as told to…’ credit was presumably designed to underline the improbability of the book’s subject ever picking up a pen herself), Morley has stealthily pulled off one of the biggest coups of his considerable career.

Grace Jones had herself been the subject of one of Blackwell’s most inspired A&R interventions, and her triumphant recontextualisation from New York disco diva to jewel in the crown of the Compass Point sound is richly detailed across these two books from opposing but entirely complimentary perspectives. Their combined effect has the swagger and crunch of a great Sly & Robbie stereo mix. But The Islander’s greatest achievement is to use Blackwell’s patrician, cultured, and sometimes rather pleased-with-itself voice to do justice to a greater range of colonial and post-colonial complexities than even the most optimistic of readers might have anticipated from the man Lee Perry once dubbed a ‘vampire’.

One of Blackwell’s first jobs was working as an uncredited location scout on the set of Dr No. Like many of his big breaks, this one came about through family connections (Blackwell’s mother was a Sephardic rum heiress and high society beauty whose list of entanglements encompassed both Bond-creator Ian Fleming and the famously not shy and retiring Errol Flynn, as well as a presumably more platonic friendship with Noel Coward) but the ease of his passage between the different strata of Jamaican society does not blind him to the stark realities of imperialism. Quite the reverse. He shrewdly identifies the apparent contradiction between his homeland’s new-found independence and Fleming’s ‘carefully curated vision of Jamaica as a gentleman’s playground’ as the starting point of the Jamaican tourist industry: ”Look at what you once had’, it [Dr No] seemed to say to its British viewers, ‘but, through tourism, this island can still be yours’’.

Blackwell made the first of many significant contributions to Jamaica’s tourist patrimony by facilitating the Bond film crew’s access to the secluded private sands from whose crystal clear waters a scantily-clad Ursula Andress would lithely emerge. Like Bond’s other celebrated female sparring partner, Pussy Galore, Andress’ character was largely based on Blackwell’s mother, and while he does not linger on the Freudian undercurrents of this formative transaction, the parameters of his Epicurean philosophy are clearly drawn in the sand: life’s a beach and then you die.

In the course of an unsuccessful stint at Harrow, Blackwell had acquired enough of the veneer of self-assurance notoriously inculcated by the English public school system to stand him in good stead in the shark-infested waters of the music industry. ‘This accent has served its purpose,’ he admits, ‘impressing or intimidating people, depending on their own social insecurities’. The shaky foundations of his own sangfroid are acknowledged with a winning smile: ‘My advice to play it again had worked!’ He congratulates himself sardonically, in the midst of supervising his first recording session with the blind Bermudan jazz pianist, Lance Hayward, ‘I was now a record producer’.

A textbook inside outsider, Blackwell could speak with the voice of the establishment even while marvelling at the way ‘the British would cling to often delusional feelings of superiority and authority as their power shrank’. His later decision to employ the son of former Jamaican governor Sir Hugh Foot as Bob Marley’s minder showed a clear-eyed appreciation of how a man whose accent placed him ‘on the wrong side of history’ might best adapt to changing circumstances. ‘It wasn’t lost on the Wailers that they were giving orders to the son of a former governor of colonial-era Jamaica’, Blackwell notes drily. ‘Bob told me the group appreciated the irony’.

For me, The Islander‘s most vivid and enjoyable passages are concentrated in the book’s first quarter. What better mentor could a teenage boy have wished for than Errol Flynn? ‘When I was 15’, Blackwell recalls wistfully, ‘I watched as he glided onto the Port Antonio beach dressed for cocktails, with a cigarette holder in his fist and a daschund under his arm’. There’s a riveting account of Blackwell’s tough music business apprenticeship running Jamaica’s Wurlitzer jukebox concession, and US record-buying trips to America to feed the voracious vinyl appetites of sound system pioneers Duke Reid and Coxsone Dodd segue easily into an educational friendship with Miles Davis.

Blackwell ‘had learned from dealing with sound system royalty how to pick up the rhythm and fall in with the mood’, and arriving in Britain in the early sixties he finds a domestic record business lagging far behind his Jamaican motherland’s in sophistication and cut-throat creativity. He puts his Kingston street-knowledge to good use selling ska and reggae singles direct to London’s hard-pressed and home-sick Caribbean communities out of the back of his green Mini Cooper, timing his journeys from Soho to Harlesden by how many times he can listen to James Brown’s ‘Night Train’ on his portable Dansette.

‘Nothing says the 60s to me more’, Blackwell insists, plausibly, ‘than driving through an increasingly run down North London in my Mini with the windows open shouting ‘Oh Yeah’ over the saxophone of JC Davis and the drums that Brown himself played while his drummer was on a break’. This kind of momentum is hard to sustain, and The Islander does duly get rather held up in Traffic. But the drowsier mood of the book’s mid-pages folk-rock backwaters is in keeping with the music, and Blackwell saves some big punches for later rounds with a brutally honest dissection of his mixed feelings about Island’s ‘non-militant, neutral’ packaging of Bob Marley’s legacy.

The Islander opens with a classic defining moment, wherein the eighteen year old Blackwell finds himself at the mercy of the elements when a high tide traps him in a mangrove swamp, only to be rescued by exactly the kind of gentle, nature-loving Rastafarians rich Jamaican white boys’ parents used to warn them about. This is up there with Jim Morrison’s ‘Indians scattered on dawn’s highway bleeding’ in the ranks of rock history’s most convenient origin stories, and Morley takes a calculated risk in leaving a question mark against the reliability of his narrator in Blackwell’s candid admission that he had often ’embroidered’ this saga of redemptive otherness.

It’s a gamble that pays huge dividends, giving The Islander an edge of ambivalence that sustains it through both the airline magazine prose of Blackwell’s late career deviation into real estate, and his rather damning admission that the thing that sold him on the first Roxy Music album was the cover art. Remember him rather as the young man captivated by a copy of The Wailers’ ‘Judge Not’ which he came across in a box of imported singles in London in 1963. By the magic of the misprint, the song was attributed not to Bob Marley but rather to ‘Robert Morley’, the portly actor for whom Led Zeppelin manager Peter Grant once worked as a stunt double.

There’s a cash prize for the first reader to fully unpack that cultural conundrum. ‘You can hear young black Jamaica’s hope and optimism’, Blackwell enthuses of the record itself, ‘the kind of spirit and power the British had… tried to suppress for centuries’.