LOVELY, TOUCHING AND INSPIRING – JIMMY CLIFF

Jimmy Cliff: My family values
The Jamaican singer and musician talks about his family

Jimmy Cliff: ‘When you broke the rules you got a beating. I broke the rules a lot.’ Photograph: Rex Features
We were a really big family, and a Christian one. There were nine children and we had to compete for attention. There was about 10 years difference between us all and I was the second to last, which wasn’t so good because the bigger ones could always manipulate you. The competition did get quite messy at times but once we went to school we put away our differences if someone tried to come between us.

Christian values were important at home. Cleanliness. Don’t steal. Don’t lie. Those were the rules and they were strictly enforced. Especially the stealing and lying. When you broke the rules, you got a beating. I always broke the rules a lot. When the time came for the beating I disappeared. Then, when the night came, I sneaked back in. They allowed me to sneak in and out for two days and when I thought I was safe they would just grab me and I got it.

My mother and father separated when I was a baby and my mother wasn’t really around. My most important relationships were with my father and grandmother. He was a very, very strict disciplinarian. But my grandmother played an important role in my life. I was always singing – but I was told I was singing the songs of the devil. My grandmother, though, always said: “Leave the boy alone. He’s going to come to something one day.”

I dared not let my father hear the songs I was singing. I was supposed to be singing the songs of the church, but I was singing things like calypso songs. There was a song called Water the Garden and it wasn’t about watering the garden – it was about sex, so I couldn’t let dad hear it. But if one of my bigger brothers heard me, he’d say, “OK, I’m going to tell on you,” so then they had something over you, and then they said: “You go and do my chores today.”

By the time my father passed away we were very, very close and his passing was a big blow. A big shock. So much so that I got alopecia. All my hair came out. All of it. When my grandmother passed away, I was unable to go to the funeral because I couldn’t find the bus fare from Kingston to Somerton. That hurt a lot, too.

After I became a star in Jamaica and had a few hit records, I decided that I wanted to see my birth mother. My big brother knew where she was so he took me to see her. But she didn’t recognise me because she hadn’t seen me since I was a baby, 15 or 16 years before. It was incredibly emotional for both of us. She wanted to talk about the relationship she had with my father, but I didn’t really want to hear that. I felt it wasn’t my business and my father always protected her. As children, we missed her but we couldn’t say anything bad about her. Father would say, “Stop that. That’s your mother.” Eventually, I bought a home for her in St James and we became close until she passed away.

I now have two young children and they are showing an inclination towards music. The girl, she is a very good singer. The boy is very talented, too. He plays the drums. They are seven and eight. I’m passing on the same values I learned: cleanliness, don’t lie and don’t cheat, but I don’t expose them to organised religion. I just try to tell them the path of right and wrong. I won’t send them to church or to a mosque or synagogue. I talk a lot. I speak hard, and I still do a little of what my grandmother and my father did. If it gets to that point I use the cane or the strap, but not much as my parents did.

In hindsight, I see the great value of family and how it moulded my life and kept me together. So now family means everything to me. I have a career, which is important, but my family is the priority. First family, and then career. It’s a delicate balance.

• Jimmy Cliff’s new album, Rebirth, is out on Universal. See him at Womad on 27 July, Camp Bestival 28 July and Jamaica 50 at London IndigO2 on 6 August, jimmycliff.com