BOOKS & ARTSThe cult of Holy Bob
Ian Thomson
So Much Things to Say: The Oral
History of Bob Marley
Text and photographs by Roger Steffens
W.W. Norton, £20, pp. 434The Harder They Come, Jamaica’s first (and
still finest) home-grown film, was released
in 1972 with the local singer Jimmy Cliff as
the country boy Ivan Martin, who becomes
a Robin Hood-like criminal outlaw amid the
ganja-yards and urban alleys of the Jamai-
can capital of Kingston. The film’s director
Perry Henzell, a ganja-smoking white Jamai-
can who had been sent to board at Sher-
borne school, was influenced by the gritty
‘newsreel’ school of Italian neo-realism
(Bicycle Thieves, Obsession), which aimed
for a documentary immediacy off the street.
The soundtrack, assembled by Henzell in
under a week, effectively introduced reggaeto white British audiences.
Without the soundtrack album, it is fair
to say, reggae would not have taken hold in
Britain in the way it did. Fashionable dinner
parties in early 1970s Britain often enjoyed
a musical accompaniment of the Maytals’
gospel-hot ‘Pressure Drop’ or Desmond
Dekker’s ‘007 (Shanty Town)’. Earlier, in
the 1960s, scooter-riding Mods had adopted
Jamaican ska as a supplement to their diet
of imported American soul, but reggae was
a ganja-heavy newcomer, whose strangely
hymnal, incantatory quality insinuated itself
happily into the middle-class hippie culture
which Mods (and indeed skinheads) pro-
fessed to despise.
Prior to Henzell’s film, reggae had been
given only minimal airplay on BBC radio,
and the British press was hardly enthusi-
astic. It was ‘black music being prostitut-
ed’, Melody Maker reported Deep Purple
and the Edgar Broughton Band as say-
ing. In 1985, going one better, Morrissey
of the Smiths announced: ‘Reggae is vile.’
(Bizarrely, in October 2007, British Con-
servatives adopted Jimmy Cliff’s rousing
‘The Harder They Come’ as a Tory anthem,
the party of law and order thus endorsing, if
unwittingly, the crime habits of a Kingston
rude bwoy.)
The Harder They Come, a favourite,
oddly, with George Melly, was part-financed
by the Island Records founder-boss Chris
Blackwell, who saw in Jimmy Cliff’s rebel
film image a means to promote his lat-est signing, Bob Marley.
In many ways the ground-
work for Marley’s eventual
success was laid by Hen-
zell. The first Bob Marley
and the Wailers album, pro-
duced by Blackwell, Catch a
Fire (1973), was a Jamaican-
American hybrid, whose
hard-driving Kingston
rhythms had been overlaid
in a London studio with
rock guitar solos. It was
Blackwell’s, not Marley’s,
idea to aim the music at a
‘rebel’ white college audi-
ence. Unsurprisingly, Catch
a Fire was ignored by Brit-
ain’s black reggae crowd
(to whom the Harrow-edu-
cated Chris Blackwell was
‘Chris Whiteworst’).
To date, more than 500
books have been published
on the ‘Reggae King’ Bob
Marley, who died of can-
cer in 1981, aged 36. For
many non-Jamaicans, Mar-
ley is reggae: he remains
an international celebrity,
honoured with a waxwork
at Madame Tussaud’s and,
as Roger Steffens reminds
us, listed in Forbes magazine at Number 5
among the ‘highest-earning dead celebri-
ties’ for 2014.
Steffens, a US-based music critic and
longtime Marley fan, has spent years inter-
viewing friends, associates and admirers of
the Jamaican superstar. So Much Things to
Say, an ‘oral’ account of Marley’s life and
times, amounts to an absorbing alterna-
tive biography. Among the author’s many
interviewees are Blackwell (whose mother
Blanche Blackwell, incidentally, died last
month at the age of 104), Carlton ‘Carly’
Barrett, Junior Braithwaite and Peter Tosh
of the Wailers (all three of whom would
eventually be murdered by Kingston gun-
men), as well as the reggae singer-songwrit-
ers Bob Andy and Joe Higgs.
According to Higgs, the word reggae,
originally spelled ‘reggay’, first appeared in
1968 with a Leslie Kong-produced hit called
‘Do the Reggay’ by Toots & the Maytals.
It was a black music imaginatively rooted
in the soul of ancestral slave Africa. Mar-
ley himself was not, however, black. With a
Caucasian father (Captain Norval Marley of
the British West Indian Regiment), he found
it easier to deal with the world at large —
that is, with white people. Although Marley
was brought up in Kingston’s impoverished
Trench Town ghetto, his mixed race com-
plexion and handsome aquiline features lent
him an acceptable ‘uptown’ look.
In his brief introduction, the British-
Jamaican poet Linton Kwesi Johnsonity of the Holodomor even from children
like Lenina Bibikova who were growing up
in its midst — then spent 70 years denying
its crimes. Applebaum has drawn back the
veil — with the same force, clarity and read-
ability as in her earlier books on the Gulag
and on the Soviet postwar conquest of East-
ern Europe — on one of the 20th century’s
most egregious crimes.Bob Marley and the Wailers at the Crystal Palace Bowl, 7 June 1980GETTY IMAGES