Chris Blackwell: the original trustafarian That said, Branson never claimed to be a music man or necessarily have the ear for a hit. And Blackwell had no ear for punk. "Island was saved by reggae during the punk era," he says. I know a very important element is attitude but I just didn't hear the music in it. He also turned down Pink Floyd, Dire Straits and Elton John, who he thought "too shy" to be a performer. Music was and remains Blackwell's passion. He's full of stories, like the time he was stopped by a police roadblock in Kingston on his way to listen to Lee Scratch Perry mix Junior Murvin's classic Police and Thieves, how Bob Marley lent him the money to buy GoldenEye, or how he used Perry's technique of "sprinkling" the sound on the mixing desk faders to mix Marley's Kaya. The music business itself may be broken (Blackwell sold Island in 1989 for $270 million) but music itself is still as relevant as it ever was. "Music really is at the centre of everything," he offers simply. For Blackwell, going into the rum business is both a solid business proposition and a coming together of several strains of his experience and history. Distilling marketers say dark rum is the next big thing in the spirits business and this distillation, it is broadly agreed, goes especially well with pineapple juice. Blackwell's young business manager Andreas Redlefsen nods in agreement. But for Blackwell to consider the rum a success, it has to be successful in Jamaica. To create a sexy image, Blackwell has gone back to his youth - an ad campaign re-enacting the Ursula Andress shot. But instead of a knife in the belt, the model carries a bottle of rum. The question is, which image? Full-length or cropped thigh-to-breast? Blackwell selects the latter. Sadly, neither option would meet British advertising standards. "I've spent my life promoting musicians, so this is a new experience," Blackwell explains. But in many ways the businesses are similar. Record people are, in general, relatively uneducated people - misfits basically - and I think liquor people are the same. They always have some little thing going, some little angle. Plus there's the natural link between alcohol and music. "And women!" he points out, though he's not going into that business. Wine, women and song. Blackwell, who was born in London but grew up in Jamaica, could be described as the original trustafarian. Born into one of the oldest white Jamaican families, he was sent to England to be educated at Harrow. By the late Fifties, he was driving around in a Mini Cooper selling ska singles he'd licensed for his fledgling Island label. One apocryphal story tells of him being shipwrecked on a coral reef and managing to swim ashore. In bad condition, he was rescued by Rasta fishermen, forging an understanding with that culture that would become crucial to Island's success with reggae music. He's twice married, first to Ada Blackwell until the mid Nineties, then to Mary Vinson, a designer who established Island Outpost, a business selling and promoting Jamaican and African arts and crafts. She died in 2009, after a long battle with cancer. The lyrics of the U2 Bond theme GoldenEye are inspired by their romance. He has three children, but is a beloved father figure to many more: Naomi Campbell, for one, who was so close to Mary that she insisted on redoing her make-up as she lay in the funeral home. To join Blackwell in Jamaica is to enter an informal cult of personality. He surrounds himself with managers and publicists, drivers and accountants, who keep each other informed of the king's whereabouts by mobile phone. The king is in his chamber. The king is 10 minutes away. The king will be here on Wednesday. He never stops moving. When he started out in the music business in Jamaica, the sound systems that carried the music into the communities were owned by the distributors of beer and spirits. The main players, Duke Reid and King Edwards, made their money from sales of alcohol while the organisers would take the gate. Blackwell's part in this trade was to fly to New York and buy Louis Jordan and Ray Charles records for the sound systems to play. A sound system was more popular if it had the hottest records. If Sir Dodds Coxsone had a hot record and Duke Reid didn't get it, it added to his brand value. I knew the records the audience would like - I had a good ear. I'd buy them for 43 cents each in New York, cross off the labels so they didn't know what they were and sell it for 200 pounds to the sound system guys. But I just sold one - if I'd sold two I wouldn't be alive today. The bigger concerts, it turned out, tended to be controlled by gangsters. That's how he met Christopher "Dudus" Coke, the Kingston gang leader who was extradited to New York last year on drug smuggling charges. "He was a tiny guy and, like a lot of gangsters, charming," Blackwell recalls. At least they're charming when they're not p----- off at you. Coke is believed to have ordered dozens of killings. But Dudus Coke is a long way in time and attitude from the glamour of Jamaica that Blackwell was witness to in the Fifties. One afternoon we take a trip up to Noël Coward's house, Firefly, overlooking Port Maria. It's been a government-run - and gently rotting - museum for years. Blackwell, who owns the place, is preparing to restore it - possibly as a holiday rental, but possibly not. As it stands, with pictures of friends like Marilyn Monroe still sitting on the piano and Coward's initials still on the towels in the bathroom, it's a fascinating, faded monument to a time when Jamaica was a playground for Hollywood and, to a lesser extent, royalty. Blackwell's mother once helped Coward host the Queen Mother when she visited Firefly in 1965, and the guest was "quite taken" with her. "It was a very glamorous era," says Blackwell, and some echoes remain in the flesh - Errol Flynn's widow, Patrice, still lives up the road on the coconut plantation he left her. In Blackwell's office there's a photo of Flynn himself, signed "To my pal Chris." Blackwell was a sickly and shy child, but one who often found himself in the same room as Flynn, Fleming and Coward "at great dinner parties where [his father] used to play Wagner and Strauss very loud." "Noël Coward was a superstar," he tells me. You'd see how his visitors like Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were in front of him. They all called him The Master. He was very funny but he could turn his sharp wit against people and be brutal. Blackwell recalls going with his mother to see Coward in a stage show in New York in the Fifties. He was 30 years past his peak and it didn't work - it was as dull as could be. I remember thinking gee, if only he'd just transferred the dinner we'd had a few days earlier to the stage, it would have been so much funnier. Down at Strawberry Hill, the hilltop hotel overlooking Kingston that Blackwell bought in 1972, reggae music pulses though the bar; it has more of the relaxed spirit of the island and less of the frenetic energy that gives Jamaica a bad reputation for danger and hassle. Blackwell knows the reputation well and believes it is waning. Blackwell, who keeps a working farm in the hills above Ocho Rios, has been good to his homeland and it has been good to him. He's about to accept an advisory position with the Jamaican tourist agency. I've told them I'm bad in committees, that I'm not house-trained. But I am going to give it a go," he says. He hopes the recent Bob Marley documentary by Last King of Scotland director Kevin Macdonald will reclaim his friend from the flat image of One Love and ganja and bring more visitors to the island to boot. He describes Marley as "a character forged through loneliness," which he thinks comes across in the film. He didn't fit in with his country family, he didn't fit in when he went to town. He didn't fit in with his father's family. And nor did he fit in at GoldenEye; Marley bought the property in 1976, but signed it over to Blackwell after deciding it was "too posh" for him. Blackwell places himself up one end of the long bar at Strawberry Hill. Lee Perry's minimalist classic Roast Fish and Cornbread comes up on the playlist. "My favourite song," he enthuses. A pretty New York fashion executive tells him she prefers his rum over a rival brand. Blackwell brightens visibly. Another Marley tune comes on. Another drink of rum. "It'll send you to rehab," he observes gaily.