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Twenty albums on from The Harder They Come reggae legend Jimmy Cliff's still going strong.

Fantastic Plastic People by Jimmy Cliff

With over twenty albums to date, Jimmy Cliff - whose latest release, Fantastic Plastic People, is produced by Dave Stewart - has always been one of the brightest stars of Jamaica’s thriving musical culture, and was among the first to bring reggae to a worldwide audience.

Born in St James, Jamaica, Cliff moved to Kingston as a teenager and had his first hits, Hurricane Hattie and Dearest Beverly, with Lesley Kong in 1963, after impressing the producer with an impromptu a cappella performance in Kong’s ice-cream parlour. Their working partnership continued until Kong’s death and produced some of the best known tunes of the ska era, including Miss Jamaica and King of Kings.

It was at the recording sessions for Miss Jamaica that Cliff met the young Bob Marley, whom Cliff helped record his first single, Judge Not. Over the course of the next decades the two went on to help create modern reggae music, as Cliff points out: “Today’s reggae music has gone through many formulations. Originally known as ska, it has evolved to ‘rock steady’ to modern reggae, in its different forms”.

After his initial success in Jamaica, Cliff was invited to join the island’s delegation for the New York World’s Fair in 1965, along with Byron Lee and the Dragonaires. While the trip didn’t precipitate the explosion of interest in ska that its organisers had hoped, it did result in the tour film This is Ska, which brought Jimmy Cliff to the attention of the head of Island Records, Chris Blackwell. Convinced that the Jamaican music scene deserved worldwide attention, Blackwell encouraged Cliff to leave Kingston. His first big success outside of Jamaica was winning the International Song Festival in Brazil with Waterfall, a song taken from his 1968 debut album Hard Road to Travel.

Desmond Dekker

1969 was the year that Cliff’s early promise was confirmed with the international success of Wonderful World, Beautiful People. Along with Jamaican artists such as Max Romeo and Desmond Dekker, Cliff had enormous success in Britain, where Wonderful World… reached number six in October. In the USA too, Cliff found an enthusiastic audience and critical acclaim. His second single, the anti-war Vietnam, was described by Bob Dylan as the best protest song he’d ever heard; praise indeed from the best ever protest singer. The 1970 album Wonderful World built on those successes, and his cover of Cat Stevens Wild World saw him back in the UK top ten in August of that year, sharing chart space with Desmond Dekker’s version of Cliff’s own You Can Get It If You Really Want.

Sadly, producer Lesley Kong, who had continued to work closely with Cliff, died of a heart attack the following year. Before his death Kong had been working on the soundtrack to The Harder They Come, starring Jimmy Cliff and featuring several of his songs. Written, directed and produced by Jamaican Perry Henzell, the film featured Cliff as Ivan, an aspiring singer turned to a life of crime after mistreatment at the hands of an unscrupulous record executive.

As the gun-toting drug-dealing rudeboy, Cliff was an unlikely folk hero, and the undoubted star of the film. The Harder They Come was the first internationally successful Jamaican film and raised Cliff’s profile and that of reggae music still further, assisted by the rapid sales and enduring popularity of the fantastic Kong-produced soundtrack album.

Rolling Stones

The seventies saw Cliff continue to make world-class albums, including a blistering greatest hits collection Live – In Concert recorded on tour, a project overseen by Rolling Stones’ producer Andrew Loog Oldham. By the early eighties he had formed a new band – Oneness – and performed several US dates with former Wailer Peter Tosh. His 1983 collaboration with Kool & the Gang resulted in the Grammy-nominated album The Power and the Glory, an achievement bettered in 1985, when the follow-up Cliff Hanger won Cliff a Grammy.

Film work again gave him a huge US/UK hit when his cover of Johnny Nash’s I Can See Clearly Now featured on the soundtrack to the 1993 Jamaican bobsleigh comedy Cool Runnings, and his vocals appeared with Elton John’s in Disney’s enormously successful Lion King. He also made a return to acting, taking roles in Club Paradise , with Robin Williams and Peter O’Toole, and Marked for Death, with Stephen Segal.

Thirty years on from The Harder They Come, Jimmy Cliff’s music is still as relevant as ever. It’s not only reggae that bears his influence: Cliff has worked with an incredibly diverse range of artists, from Erykah Badu to Elvis Costello.

For more information on Jimmy Cliff visit his official website: www.jimmycliff.com

Fantastic Plastic People is out now, on CD.

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