Jimmy Cliff, Jamaica’s sweet-voiced reggae star, has died at the age of 81. His brand of gospel roots reggae, with its Rastafari back-to-Africa ideology, offered hope of deliverance to “downpressed” Jamaicans and encouraged a generation of British-born black West Indians to embrace a part of their heritage – Africa – that their parents had often shunned. At the age of 28, Cliff played a Robin Hood-like outlaw in Jamaica’s first (and still finest) home-grown film, The Harder They Come, released in 1972. Cliff contributed four songs to the soundtrack, including the gospel “Many Rivers to Cross” and “Sitting in Limbo”. Assembled by the film’s director Perry Henzell in under a week, the soundtrack pretty well introduced reggae to college audiences abroad. Without The Harder They Come album, reggae would not have taken hold outside Jamaica in the way it did. Fashionable dinner parties in mid-1970s London and New York often had a musical accompaniment in the Slickers’ “Johnny Too Bad”, Desmond Dekker’s “007 (Shanty Town)” and other hits from the film. Henzell’s trailblazing film paved the way for Bob Marley’s success soon after.
Born James Chambers in rural Jamaica in 1944, Cliff was a teenager when he moved to Kingston, the island’s capital, and adopted the surname Cliff to express the musical heights he intended to reach. In 1969 he triumphed with his single “Wonderful World, Beautiful People”, and the politically charged “Vietnam”, which Bob Dylan reckoned “the best protest song ever written”. The idea for The Harder They Come had occurred to Henzell, a white Jamaican, while at his boarding school in England as long ago as 1948. Kingston had been terrorised that year by the antics of a Jamaican Ned Kelly figure called Vincent “Ivanhoe” Martin, who in a series of armed hold-ups killed three bystanders. After a manhunt the police shot Martin dead on Lime Cay Island off Kingston. To Henzell’s schoolboy imagination, Martin resembled the West African Anansi trickster, who eludes capture even as he taunts the authorities. Martin was the embodiment of “Anancyism” as he fought the law.
Henzell decided to update the story to contemporary Kingston, where a country boy tries his luck as a singer and drugs entrepreneur, before he goes out in a blaze of glory. Cliff was chosen to play the part of Ivan O Martin (as the outlaw was now renamed). In Martin’s story, Cliff said he saw the plight of the little man crushed by authority, and he bought a touch of rude boy swagger to the role. Filming began in 1969 but dragged on for two years as money ran out and some cast members even died. Cliff’s own song, “The Harder They Come”, provided Henzell with his title, and captured the desperation of Kingston youth fighting for survival.
So as sure as the sun will shine
I’m gonna get my share now, what’s mine
And they harder they come, the harder they fall
One and all.
The film is, among other things, a documentary bleakly fixed in the ganja-yards and urban alleys of western Kingston that Cliff knew so well. At the premiere the crush of people outside the Kingston cinema was so great that not even Cliff could get in. Sally Henzell, the director’s wife, had to be hoisted up and passed over the heads of the waiting crowd towards the entrance. For over an hour the audience hooted, howled and fired non-stop praise of Cliff. It was the first time that Jamaicans had seen themselves portrayed on screen; Sally told me later that it was the “most moving experience” of her life.
Overseas, the film’s reception was more restrained. At the Cork International Film Festival an invited audience of media personalities (among them Peter Cushing of Hammer Horror) watched the film in silence. Cliff feared a critical drubbing but, in fact, the Irish had loved his thoughtful portrayal of a rural migrant gone to bad. At the Classic cinema in Brixton (now the Ritzy) the press screening was so poorly attended that Perry Henzell was reduced to handing out publicity flyers at the tube station. Britain’s expatriate Jamaican community stayed away in droves as they did not want to be reminded by Cliff of the violence and the poverty they had left behind. It was not until the Observer’s film critic George Melly ventured into Brixton to review the film that the middle classes began to take notice; before long the Classic was packed at every screening as word spread of Cliff’s screen triumph. “The film opened the door for Jamaica,” Cliff recalled. “It said, ‘This is where the music comes from.’”
Before The Harder They Come, reggae had been given only minimal airplay on BBC radio, and the British music press was hardly enthusiastic. Reggae was “kind of monotonous” and “black music being prostituted”, Melody Maker quoted Deep Purple and the Edgar Broughton Band as saying. In 1984, going one better, Morrissey of the Smiths announced that “all reggae is vile”. (Bizarrely, in October 2007, British Conservatives adopted “The Harder They Come” as a Tory anthem, thus endorsing, if unwittingly, the crime habits of a Kingston street chancer.) Henzell’s film was part-financed by the Island Records founder-boss Chris Blackwell, who saw in Cliff’s rebel screen image a means to promote his latest “discovery” Bob Marley. For many non-Jamaicans, Marley is reggae, but Cliff got there first, big time.
[Further reading: Tupac Shakur: lion or loser?]
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