Waterfall
James Chambers grew up in Jamaica and moved to Kingston to start a music career. One night he walked past a shop called Beverly’s. Ice cream parlor and record store. The owner was a man named Leslie Kong. Cliff went in and asked if Kong would be interested in making records with him. Kong said yes. The early singles were local. Ska and rocksteady for Jamaican audiences. By the mid-1960s he was in London. Island Records had signed him and the world he was recording in had changed. Pop arrangements. Studio orchestras. He was placing a Jamaican voice inside a London sound. Most of what he put out in those years found a modest audience. He had not yet found the song that could carry him across.
“Waterfall” was not written by Jimmy Cliff. It was written by two members of a British psychedelic group also called Nirvana. Not the one from Seattle. This was a Greek-British duo based in London. Alex Spyropoulos and Patrick Campbell-Lyons. They wrote the song in 1968 and Cliff recorded it for Island Records. The producer on the session was Muff Winwood. Muff was the older brother of Steve Winwood and had played bass in the Spencer Davis Group. The arranger and conductor was Tony Visconti. He would spend the following decade producing and arranging some of the defining records in British music. David Bowie’s early albums. Marc Bolan and T. Rex. In 1968 he was a young arranger working a soul session for Island Records. That was the work in front of him.
Cliff took “Waterfall” to Rio de Janeiro in 1968. He entered it into the III Festival Internacional da Canção Popular. One of the major international song contests of its era. Françoise Hardy was on the same bill. The festival pressed a compilation of the international entries on Philips Records in Brazil. “Waterfall” was released separately as a single in Brazil and in the United Kingdom. The years that followed brought bigger songs and a wider audience. In 1973 Cliff starred in The Harder They Come. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2010. He died in November 2025. Released July 1968. The song was not his. The stage in Rio de Janeiro was. Nobody in London had seen that coming.