Jimmy Cliff can’t see so clearly now. He’s wearing funny triangular sunglasses with rainbow-coloured plastic rims that don’t quite disguise a lazy eye - the result, he says, of a cataract. It is, however, a bright, bright sunshiny day; although not as bright as the brilliant red shirt, shoes, trousers and baseball cap he wears when we meet in London.

Cliff is making a flying visit to promote the stage musical The Harder They Come, based on the 1972 film in which he played a hopeful reggae singer swindled by the Jamaican music industry and sucked into a world of drugs and violence. The stage version, built around the same story and soundtrack of reggae standards, has already had two successful runs - at the Theatre Royal Stratford East, where it drew a predominantly West Indian audience, and at the Barbican, where it attracted a mixed one. The producer, Jan Ryan - surely the only West End theatre impresario with waist-length dreadlocks - believes it will make history by attracting a similar crowd to the Playhouse.

“It really has been cross-generational and cross-cultural so far, and we have kept the ticket prices quite affordable for a West End show,” she says. “I’m sure it will pull in a large black audience, because everyone from the Caribbean is familiar with the story. It will attract an audience that knows the film, an audience that knows the music and an audience for whom this is all new. If we can achieve all that, then we will have achieved something very very special in the West End.”

Cliff starred in the film version of The Harder They Come and wrote several of the songs - including The Harder They Come and Many Rivers to Cross - used in the musical. The movie turned him into one of reggae’s first world-renowned singers.

Back in the early 1970s, Jamaican music was seen in the UK largely as a novelty, or the soundtrack to a new dance craze, thanks to hits like Millie’s My Boy Lollipop, Prince Buster’s Al Capone and Desmond Dekker’s The Israelites. The worldwide success of the film should have made a superstar of Cliff, who had already enjoyed UK hits with Wonderful World, Beautiful People and a version of Cat Stevens’s Wild World.

Instead, and perhaps ironically, he remains best known for his acting role in the film, while the first name on anyone’s lips when thinking of reggae is usually Bob Marley - a man Cliff discovered in 1962. He insists that he has no regrets about his protégé stealing the limelight. “I started my career long before Bob and had big international hits,” he reminds me. Cliff was a 14-year-old schoolboy when he started in music, and his experience mirrored that of the character he plays in the film. “Yeah, I had my share of being ripped off with my first few records,” the 60-year-old recalls. “Isn’t that the story of black music?”

He had his first hit, Hurricane Hattie, for Leslie Kong, the Jamaican-Chinese restaurateur turned record boss, and went on to act as a talent scout for spotting the potential of a song brought in by Desmond Dekker. That launched Dekker’s career and led directly to Marley’s first record deal. “Bob was working with Desmond at the same welding place, and Desmond told Bob that I’d helped him record his first single. So Bob came to me with a song called Judge Not. I listened to it, then introduced him to Leslie Kong. And that was the start of his career.”

It says a great deal about Cliff, who is still recording, touring and acting, that he har-bours no resentment at the way he has been forgotten as a pioneer of reggae music. “I’m not bitter at all. The way I see life now is you get what you make of it. Bob got what he made. And the reason I have no regrets is that I’m still alive and well - very well.”

Despite Dekker and Marley achieving musical notoriety, it was Cliff who was first brought to London by Chris Blackwell, a white Jamaican who started Island records in 1959, to be groomed as reggae’s first international star. Cliff remembers the casual racism of England at the time, such as when his landlady first met him face to face and gave him 24 hours to leave his bedsit in London - “Until she saw me dancing behind Nina Simone on Ready Steady Go the next week.” But he enjoyed it enough to stay for the best part of a decade. “At first it was a big shock,” he recalls, “but most of what I experienced in England was because of ignorance, not prejudice.”

The band hired by Island to back him were British: “I had to teach them how to play reggae, especially the drum beat and the guitar.” Cliff’s breezy pop-reggae style, combined with Blackwell’s determination to break his native reggae music to the world outside Jamaica, meant that he played mostly on the white Club and university circuit rather than the blues clubs of Britain’s immigrant communities. He had also fallen victim to the rock’n’roll lifestyle. “I was out of control for a while and I needed an anchor. I didn’t know how to handle the whole thing.” Disillusioned with waiting for a breakthrough, he left London - and Island - in 1973. Unbelievably, just one week later, Marley turned up at Blackwell’s London office seeking a loan to record what would become Catch a Fire, the first reggae album to become an international hit.

After leaving England, Cliff went on a “spiritual journey” to Africa, where he embraced Islam, but, having dabbled with various faiths, he says he no longer adheres to any religion. He is equally skilful at avoiding any political agenda, though this was a task made more difficult by the recent adoption by the Conservative party of his song You Can Get It If You Really Want - the second time it has been used as a political campaign song, following the Sandinista National Liberation Front in Nicaragua’s 1990 general election.

“Love is my thing,” he says, when asked if he has any political preference. “In one of my songs I say, ‘I love the rich because they are so lonely and I love the poor because they are so many, so love is all I really have to give.’ I don’t have to choose one of them; I give my songs with love.” He adds: “I have never been partisan politically. Politicians prey on the morals of the people. And that is why my thing is love.”

The Harder They Come opens at the Playhouse, WC2, tomorrow