Island Records Vinyl, CDs & Cassettes

Chris Blackwell started Island Records in Jamaica in 1959 at 21, named it after an Alec Waugh novel, and spent the next three decades building one of the most culturally significant catalogs in popular music. The founding impulse was to bring Caribbean music to wider audiences, and that rootedness in Jamaican sound never fully left the label, no matter how far the roster ranged.

The early British years brought ska and reggae to UK immigrant communities, often with Blackwell himself delivering records from a Mini Cooper. By the mid-Sixties, the label had expanded into British rock, signing the Spencer Davis Group and setting Steve Winwood on the path that led to Traffic, whose records here are among the most enduring of the era. Jethro Tull. Free. King Crimson. Fairport Convention. Cat Stevens. Nick Drake, whose quiet, devastating catalog found its home at Island and its audience long after he was gone.

The Seventies brought Bob Marley, whose Island recordings became the vehicle through which reggae reached the world, and whose catalog here remains definitive. Grace Jones. Roxy Music. U2, who signed to Island in 1980 and built their entire career under this roof.

The thread running through it is Blackwell's ear for artists who operated on their own terms and his willingness to give them the space to do so. Island was eventually sold to PolyGram in 1989 and is now part of Universal Music Group, but the catalog it assembled in those first thirty years stands as one of the great bodies of work in independent music history.