Catch A Fire - Recording

Recording

Sessions for the album started in early 1972, with recording taking place at three Kingston, Jamaica studios, all members recording inside one room: Dynamic Sound, Harry J's and Randy's. Engineer Sylvan Morris put an eight-track tape, which has the drum mixes on one track and piano and guitar together. In the winter of 1972, Marley flew back to London to present the master tapes. The deal with Island led to a dispute with CBS and Sims, to whom the band were already contracted. The case was won by the first, who received US$9,000 and two percent of royalties from the band's first six albums, and Sims received GB£5,000 and the publishing rights to the Wailers songs.

Catch a Fire, which is Jamaican slang for "catching hell" (getting in trouble), features many backing musicians, but none of those were credited in the liner notes. Muscle Shoals session guitarist Wayne Perkins, who at that time recorded a new Smith, Perkins & Smith album at the Island Studios on the Basing Street, was asked by Blackwell in the early 1972 to make overdubs for Catch a Fire in the studio below. Perkins, not knowing what reggae was, agreed with the proposal and first played the guitar solo, including the three-octave feedback, on "Concrete Jungle". After playing the lead guitar on "Stir it Up", which was later covered by Nash's band, Rabbit and the Jungles, on their I Can See Clearly Now, peaking at number 11 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, he then went back to the studio to complete his album. Rabbit Bundrick played on all songs on numerous keyboards, including on a synthesizer and a clavinet. Robbie Shakespeare played the bass on "Concrete Jungle", while organist Tyrone Downie performed on the same track as well as on "Stir it Up". Chris Karen, Francisco Willie Pep and Winston Wright served as percussionists, and the female backing singing was performed by Rita Marley and her friend Marcia Griffiths, the latter of whom was already popular in Jamaica as a solo artist and together with her husband Bob Andy released successful singles. Tommy McCook played the flute.

According to Aston Barrett, "some of the songs had been recorded before, ..., in different studios and with different musicians, but we gave them that strict timing and brought the feeling out of them more". "Baby We've Got a Date (Rock it Baby)" is similar to "Black Bitter", recorded in an earlier session.

The song's lyrics deal with political injustice towards blacks and poverty, as is the case in many of their albums. Catch a Fire is about "the current state of urban poverty", and "Slave Driver" "connects the present to past injustices". But politics are not the main theme; "Stir it Up", for example, is a love song.