Reggae legend still has rivers to cross

Music, says Jimmy Cliff, is like oxygen.

Jimmy Cliff realised he had a good voice when he started singing at school during lunchtime and the girls came running.

"They said they thought they heard a radio. I said, 'No, that was me'. And that's when I thought, 'Hey, I think I've got something here'," he laughs huskily.

"And even when I sing now, people are attracted to my voice," says Cliff, 57, who heads to New Zealand in March.

He's not reluctant to blow his own trumpet. But when you were one of Jamaican music's biggest stars by the age of 16 - back in 1964 - and responsible for classics such as Many Rivers To Cross, The Harder They Come and Reggae Night, then it's worth blowing.

"I was always very ambitious. I always had a vision of making it internationally, not just in Jamaica, and I aimed really high so that made me stand out from the rest," he says of establishing himself in the early 60s.

At the age of 13 Cliff moved from rural Jamaica to Kingston with his father to attend technical college and learn how to make and fix radios and TVs.

"But I wanted to be on the TV because acting was the thing I loved first," he says.

He started writing songs at this time too, with the intention of getting them recorded.

He loved it in the city, although he remembers: "Coming from the country I was used to people being really friendly and polite. It was in Kingston that I realised it was a jungle out there and you have to watch your back ...

"But it was a wonderful place to live really."

Much of Cliff's early success had a lot to do with his mentor, music producer Leslie Kong.

"He and I had a good chemistry. I had tried almost every other producer in Jamaica - right from when I went to Kingston to go to school - and they all turned me down.

But when I sang a capella for him he said, 'I think that's the best voice I've ever heard in Jamaica'.

"I said, 'Well, at least someone is thinking the way I'm thinking'."

They stuck together as a team until Kong died of a heart attack in 1971.

In that year Cliff, Kong and Island Records' boss Chris Blackwell were putting together the soundtrack to the film The Harder They Come.

Cliff went on to star in the movie as Ivan Martin, a country boy who travels to the city to make his fortune from music, only to become a gun-toting, drug-dealing rude boy - a kind of Jamaican gangsta.

The movie is a cult classic but the album, which was released in 1972, was even better and remains one of reggae's best.

Even though Cliff has only four songs on it (or six if you count the two that are repeated) his material is the highlight and includes Many Rivers To Cross, You Can Get It If You Really Want (made famous by Desmond Dekker), the title track and Sitting In Limbo.

To complete the soundtrack, Cliff, Kong and Blackwell chose some other songs, most notably Rivers of Babylon by the Melodians and Sweet & Dandy by Toots and the Maytals.

The Harder They Come helped to push reggae into the mainstream.

"Chris Blackwell really wanted to take reggae out of that little box that it was in to sell it, and he added rock elements," says Cliff.

"The tricky part of it was the big balancing act to maintain the integrity [of the music]. But I think it did because the lyrics, the concept, and the expression of the music remained the same, even though musically it was a little different."

Speaking of taking reggae to the mainstream, Cliff is well known in New Zealand for his hit single Reggae Night, from the 1983 album The Power and the Glory.

Reggae purists might scoff at that disco-funk flavoured collaboration with Kool and the Gang but it gained him a Grammy nomination and wider recognition.

He didn't win, but 1985's follow-up, Cliff Hanger, did.

He continues to release albums, the last being Black Magic, a collection of duets with artists including Sting, Joe Strummer and Wyclef Jean, and wants to keep making music "because I don't feel I've accomplished all I set out to do".

"It's not the only thing I love and need - because I do still think I'm a better actor than a singer - but the music is oxygen for my life."

*  Jimmy Cliff, with Brazil's Chico Cesar play the Bowl of Brooklands, New Plymouth, Saturday March 18

* An interview with Third World, who play at Waitangi weekend's Soundsplash Festival in Raglan, appears tomorrow.