When Jimmy Cliff died, reggae and the music world in general lost one of its most accomplished opportunists. The less sympathetic might have called him a chancer, but from the very beginnings there was little he wouldn’t try if he thought it would advance either himself or the music. Over the years I got to know him, both from interviews and sometimes just hanging out, so many of his anecdotes ended with the words: “Well I wasn’t going to say no, was I?” I wasn’t fully joking when I told him it should be his catchphrase.
But that was Jimmy Cliff, a charismatic combination of charm, bravery, humour and an ability to see beyond what was put in front of him. Throughout his career he frequently shifted away from standard reggae industry practice, often expanding the music’s horizons and options.
This was true at the start of his career when he saw an opportunity to establish himself as a singer outside the cutthroat world of the Kingston sound systems where artists made records to be played in dances rather than for sale. The 17-year-old talked Leslie Kong, a Chinese Jamaican who owned an ice-cream-parlour-cum-record-shop-cum-cosmetics-boutique called Beverley’s into starting his own label: “I wrote a song called Dearest Beverley and sang it to him in the shop the next day. He loved my voice … so he asked me how he could get into making records. I knew all the musicians and the studios, I knew the business. So I could help him.” Under Kong and Cliff’s guidance, Beverley’s became a very successful and influential label.
A few years later he took the chance to move to London, immersed himself in the pop music of the day, absorbing new song structures and ideas to apply to the Jamaican music that was already evolving from ska to rocksteady to reggae. He always maintained this helped him develop as a songwriter and allowed him to take Jamaican music into a much more international situation without losing touch with what it was or should be.
In the late 1960s such broad-mindedness gave music critics something of a problem. With the Trojan Explosion of perky strings-backed reggae hitting the charts and the first stirrings of roots and culture yet to reach the mainstream, the music was largely dismissed as essentially worthless (BBC Radio 1 was a significant offender). Cliff, however, was releasing thoughtful, well-rounded songs that acknowledged the musical environment outside Kingston, in LP format – this was years before Jamaican music came to terms with albums as anything more than collections of singles. His albums Jimmy Cliff and Another Cycle (1969 and 1971, the latter recorded in the US) contained the likes of Sitting in Limbo, Vietnam, Many Rivers to Cross and Wonderful World, Beautiful People, and confused the hell out of reviewers – this was reggae, Jim, but not as we know it.
It was work of this calibre that attracted The Harder They Come’s director/writer Perry Henzell to approach him to do the music for the film. When Cliff’s evolved and varied reggae was put into context with Henzell’s vivid visuals they made perfect sense; suddenly, assessments of many of the same songs were being rowed back, and Jimmy Cliff was now at the heart of one of the world’s bestselling soundtrack albums. He was always very proud of his part in introducing the world to Jamaica “as it really was” through this, as well as the music he made well into the 21st century which, always looking outwards, maintained his international acclaim.
His time in London in the 1960s also offered another example of Cliff’s resourcefulness. About to be evicted from his bedsit after his landlady found out she had “a coloured” living under one of her roofs, she saw him in the audience on Top of the Pops – they were recruited from London discos where he was very much on the scene – dancing next to Nina Simone as she performed. “I told her she couldn’t evict me because I was famous – and she agreed! So much for racism when it comes up against celebrity.”
It was also in London that he met Henzell. What transpired, and the way Cliff laughed through the recollection, goes a long way to summing up who he was and how he approached life:
“He asked me if I could write music for films. I said: ‘Yeah man, of course I can!’ It was like being back in Kong’s ice-cream shop – you’ve got to know your opportunities! Then six months later Chris Blackwell gave me the script and told me Perry wanted me for the lead part. I’d never acted before, but I took it, read it and liked it, I could identify with both sides of it, I knew Rhygin [the real-life model for Ivan in the movie], I understood that aspect of Jamaican life, and I’d been in the music business since I was 14. It didn’t seem like anything I couldn’t do.
“And besides, I wasn’t going to tell them no, was I?”
