How a great reggae album is born

Arguably the most influential ever recorded, we look at the making of Catch a Fire.

It was, Chris Blackwell said, the "most enhanced" of all the records he made with Bob Marley and the Wailers. It was also arguably the most significant reggae album ever. Not only did it expose the Wailers to an international audience and introduce people around the world to a music that had been confined largely to a Caribbean fan base; it also cemented a relationship that would help make Blackwell's Island Records one of the world's most successful and respected labels.

In 2009, Blackwell was named by Music Week magazine as the most influential figure in UK music for the previous half-century - and it's entirely possible that would not have happened without an album called Catch a Fire.

The album's story started on an autumn day in London in 1972, when three homesick and down-at-heel young Jamaican musicians strutted into the Soho offices of Island Records. Broke they may have been, but they were still supremely confident in their own abilities.

Bob Marley, Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer - the core members of the original Wailers - were in England to do some recording, but they had been left stranded when their manager suddenly dashed to New York on pressing business. They weren't working, they hated the cold and damp of England and they were eager to get back to Jamaica, where they were established hit-makers. They had managed to get an appointment with Blackwell, who also had Jamaican roots but was from a very different background. They were Rastafarians living in the Trench Town ghetto; he was a British-born, Harrow-educated member of one of Jamaica's most prominent families.

"They were nobodies, but they were like big stars, their attitude and the vibe they gave off," Blackwell would say in a documentary years later. He was impressed, and decided to give the three enough money to return to Jamaica and make an album - £4,000 (Dh22,256). They flew home and set about recording Catch a Fire. With the aid of an all-star cast of Jamaican studio musicians, it was completed in three epic sessions at Kingston's Dynamic Sounds studio in October of 1972. The vocals were all recorded in one day, with Marley singing lead on seven tracks (Concrete Jungle, Slave Driver, No More Trouble, Kinky Reggae, Stir it Up, Midnight Ravers and Rock it Baby) and Tosh on two (400 Years and Stop That Train). Bunny Wailer contributed harmony vocals, as well as percussion on all the tracks and bass on Rock it Baby.

Before long, Marley was on a plane back to London to help with the overdubs and remixing at Island's Basing Street Studios in Notting Hill. Blackwell loved what he heard, but he also decided that the original arrangements - with thundering Jamaican basslines and palpable ghetto vibes - were just too heavy for an international audience.

He enlisted the services of two accomplished American studio musicians, the guitarist Wayne Perkins and the keyboard player John "Rabbit" Bundrick. The wailing guitar on Concrete Jungle, the first track on the album and the first notes of reggae heard by tens of thousands of people worldwide, were played by a Texan, who, by his own admission, had at first been thoroughly baffled by the music.

"Compared with anything else I'd ever heard in my life, this was back to front," said Perkins. With the keyboard input of Bundrick - another Texan - the remixing of Catch a Fire was soon complete, and Marley, ever the pragmatist when it came to getting his message to as wide an audience as possible, was not at all averse to having two white Americans embellish the rootsy, Jamaican sounds he had presented them with.

The end product was dramatically different from the original - in addition to the contributions of Perkins and Bundrick, the high end was brought forward, with the bass lines of Aston "Family Man" Barrett, Robbie Shakespeare, Wailer and Ian "Munty" Lewis shaded down. "This record had the most overdubs on it," said Blackwell. "This record was the most, I don't say softened, I more say enhanced, to try to reach a rock market. Bob always seemed to have a very clear idea of what he wanted from the recordings. I would basically mix them and put them together in an arrangement and compile the albums in terms of their running order. Somebody said to him one time I was his producer and he said no I was his translator, and I liked that. I was very happy with that. I think that was probably what I was doing."

Marley would make only one more album - Burnin' - with Tosh and Wailer before the three went their separate ways, but by then, with Catch a Fire having been released in early 1973 to critical raves, he was on a path that would carry him to international superstardom.

And years later, Blackwell would admit: "Frankly, on hearing Catch a Fire now, I prefer it in the raw version, it sounds to me much better than what we actually did with it."

As usual, Blackwell wasn't just talk. In 2001, Island released both versions in a two-CD package.

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