Harry J’s studio, Kingston, Jamaica, winter 1976. Wearing a Spartan Health Club T-shirt and busted sandals, Bob Marley finishes singing a take of a weirdly cheery song called Smile Jamaica. I had been reporting from the island for the British rock press and was popping by to give my farewells – only to be surprised by this ditty that sounded like a tourism commercial. Why so upbeat? Marley took a swig of green juice and, frowning, crisply replied: “People in Jamaica too vex.”
Vex means angry, and the truth of his analysis would soon become all too clear over the coming days. Within a week, a reported four gunmen broke into Marley’s Hope Road home and shot him.
It was already a turbulent time on an island rocked by faraway cold war conflicts that trickled down to dominate the island’s two parties, each with their own gang affiliations and colourful leaders. The JLP (Jamaica Labour party) was headed by Edward Seaga, dubbed “CIAga” in downtown graffiti, and the PNP (People’s National party), led by the LSE graduate Michael Manley, relieved to get help from the Soviet Union and Fidel Castro’s Cuba. Marley wanted a forthcoming concert, also called Smile Jamaica, to be non-partisan, but the perception of many Jamaicans was that it was in support of Manley. The assumption is that the JLP ordered the gunmen in retaliation.
Marley survived and played the concert two days later, but then left the island and was unsure he could return. Over the next two years, living in London, he galvanised Britain’s growing Rastafarian community and he and the Wailers band recorded Exodus – later voted album of the century by Time. Marley returned to Kingston in triumph to perform the One Love Peace Concert in 1978.
Having been present for much of this cycle, I covered it in my 2006 Book of Exodus. The period has now been interpreted for the screen by the vivid and engaging film Bob Marley: One Love (the original working title of which was Exodus). Marley is introduced to a new generation by the immaculate performance of the British actor Kingsley Ben-Adir. Luminous and radically compassionate, he powers what Ziggy – Marley’s eldest son, who co-produced the movie along with his sister Cedella – has modestly called “a quick glimpse into my father’s life”.
The marketing of Bob Marley has been through several phases since his death from cancer in 1981. His once-edgy political Rasta image was flipped by Dave Robinson, then Island Records’ managing director, who conceptualised the bestselling Legend compilation, focusing on the feelgood songs. From then on, in much of the wider world, Marley was understood as Cuddly Dread, the reason for red, green and gold beer bongs and crochet caps with woolly dreadlocks. In 2012, Saturday Night Live’s Seth Meyers lampooned the Marley course I was teaching at New York University, winking that stoner students would miss class as it was in the morning. Yet Marley was an exceedingly hard worker, last in the studio and first on the bus the next day.
Marketing emphasis then shifted again with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, when Universal began positioning him as the revolutionary pan-Africanist he always was (10 Bob Marley Protest Hits That Remain Powerful Today was one such post on its site). The challenge for the One Love film was how to reconcile it all.
The movie opens in a kind of Rasta nirvana, as Marley and a group of “bredren” pound down the beach in Jamaica’s scenic Bull Bay. Laughing, the dreads wash their locks under waterfalls, the kind that pound your shoulders and your mind at once. The film has made the past come thudding down on me with dizzying force, immersing me in memories, my twentysomething self often hovering just out of frame, Zelig-like.
My own first real-life lessons from Bob came before the point at which the movie begins, when I was a junior press officer for Island Records – then a hip indie label – looking after the Wailers, Burning Spear and Aswad. Already on fire about his music since my recent student days, I wrote press releases projecting the original rude boy as a spiritual firebrand, a poet-revolutionary, who was also a heart-throb à la Che Guevara.
Bob and the band triumphed when they flew in to play the Lyceum theatre in London in 1975. The trip was also my first chance to see how Marley worked, as I shuttled a series of journalists in to interview him. Funny and mischievous, Marley would wind up any British journalists who were dismissive of Rasta by switching from standard English into deep patois – but he was ever alert, reading the interviewer, subtly adjusting his approach. His desire was, above all, to communicate.
By the time of the Smile Jamaica sessions the following year, I was a music journalist and my hotel tab had just been closed by Virgin’s Front Line reggae label. Marley stepped in and invited me to stay at his communal house in Kingston’s Hope Road (now the Bob Marley Museum), which I did for a few days. But my employers, the weekly paper Sounds, insisted I return just before the Smile Jamaica concert. Thus, I narrowly missed being at the rehearsal where not only Marley, but also his wife, Rita, and his manager, Don Taylor, all got shot.
“I am bringing the ghetto uptown,” Marley insisted, when I teased him about the difference between living right by the prime minister and his old Trenchtown ghetto digs. Always mindful of each word’s impact, he continued: “You have to show people some improvement; it doesn’t have to be materially, but in freedom of thinking.”
A scene in the movie where Marley plays to a group sitting around a campfire mirrors a night when faint sounds drew me downstairs. Marley sat on a single iron bed, strumming his guitar and singing to a girl perched on the other end, while more stray kids gathered round. We were mesmerised by the words: “These are the big fish that always try to eat down the small fish … Guiltiness rest on their conscience …” Just weeks later, in London, I stood in the crowd of devotees at sessions in Basing Street Studios, Notting Hill, and recognised, with a start, the song coming from the speakers. I realised Marley had been commenting on the forces around his near fatal attack days before it happened. The song was called Guiltiness.
The movie also has Marley looking baffled at a London punk gig. Did he really go to one? My mind flew back to when I had got hold of a coveted pre-release of the Clash’s first album and I wondered what Marley thought of its version of Junior Murvin’s reggae song Police and Thieves. At Basing Street, I unexpectedly found him relaxing with Lee “Scratch” Perry, the producer of Murvin’s sweet-voiced original and I played it to them. Within the first bars of Joe Strummer’s punky grunt, the old friends looked first shocked, then surprised, then appreciative. A lengthy reasoning followed, positioning punks as his other rebel constituency, in which Marley said he didn’t like the look of safety pins jammed through the cheek, but admitted: “Me like to see a man can suffer pain without crying.”
Chris Blackwell, Island Records’ founder, was glad of my enthusiasm for Marley, telling me at the time: “Bob is extremely important to the label – and to me.” Blackwell, played by James Norton in One Love, now praises the finished film, including Lashana Lynch as Rita Marley. He adds that the director, Reinaldo Marcus Green, “did an incredible job. I didn’t like the idea of a film on Bob, because I thought people enjoyed their own relationship with him when they related purely to the music, but enough time has passed and I am very happy with the family’s decision to do the film.”
The film does feel like an authorised production. A touching moment shows Rita explaining to Bob the Rasta principle of “I and I”: the community superseding the individual. However, that concept doesn’t always play out across the film, totally fixed as it is on the great man.
The film clearly defines its narrow timespan – the months that impelled him to record Exodus. But puzzled Wailers-lovers will still wonder – just as they did at recent Bob-heavy immersive photo exhibitions – about key figures in his career, such as the others in the original Wailers trio, Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer; or the Barrett brothers, drummer Carlton and bass player Aston “Family Man” (who died last week). Characters like these are well cast in One Love – notably Family Man, played by his son Aston Jr – but with such a vast tribe, they often remain undifferentiated.
Bob was always keen to work in a team. “Why do you always interview me? Why don’t you talk to Family Man?” he asked me. “He’s the bandleader.”
Among the tribe is the barely there, wordless Cindy Breakspeare, Damian Marley’s mother, crowned Miss World in 1976 just as her liaison with Marley prompted “Beauty and the Beast” headlines and catapulted the then little-known Bob on to tabloid front pages. But while Breakspeare was his leading lady, Bob – who had a complex, polyamorous Rasta lifestyle – was still having children with other women. (Breakspeare did not want to comment for this article; the film’s studio, Paramount, could not provide interviews with the screenwriters.)
Some see the film’s slant towards Rita as natural: a love letter by the producers Cedella and Ziggy to their mother. But, whatever the reason, it underplays a love triangle that shook with class and colourism. A posh, uptown, light-skinned girl, Cindy was the blithely beautiful daughter of privilege, while Rita, from a more hardscrabble background, struggled for years alongside Bob, her privilege hard won. They met when Cindy lived at Hope Road; she and Bob had a genuine rapport. In the film, Bob plays Turn Your Lights Down Low to Rita, but he wrote it for Cindy. Rita was integral in cementing Bob’s relationship with Rastafarianism, and promoted a demure image of Rasta womanhood, the reverse of Cindy’s glam allure. It is all the more profound a manifestation of true One Love, then, that, during Bob’s final days, his locks lost to chemo, the women were able to set aside any differences.
As in every biographical movie, other details are necessarily fudged, but the real backstory of Bob and one childhood friend is even more dramatic than the depiction. On screen, we see the JLP’s Claudie Massop in his trademark red beret, looming through the mist as Marley retreats to Strawberry Hill – Blackwell’s house high in the Blue Mountains – right after he gets shot. Massop stops him and explains he had nothing to do with the attack. Marley believes him and drives on.
In reality, Massop could not have been there – his party had made sure he was locked away in the Gun Court prison so he would not interfere. Massop had managed to phone Bob from inside the prison and warn him, yet Marley trusted that Jah would protect him and continued with the concert plans.
Later, while recording Exodus, the movie’s Marley is surprised to run across Massop and Massop’s former gang rival Bucky Marshall in a London park. The two have brokered a truce and invite Marley to return to Jamaica and play the Peace Concert. In reality, Marley paid for the two men’s air tickets from Jamaica specifically to discuss it and Massop was a guest at Marley’s home in Chelsea. Too much information for a film designed to bring Marley to the masses of all ages, perhaps, but helpful in understanding his courage, faith and deep bonds with the dons: men so like him, but more deeply trapped in lethal circumstances dictated by distant superpowers.
Other than the shooting itself, and the financial betrayal by Taylor, whom Bob confronts physically, One Love avoids downers, so there is no hint here that Marshall and Massop were killed within months. The only suggestion that the fighting in Jamaica and Marley’s shooting were part of a broader cold war conflict is overheard as Marley watches TV news in London.
But the job of this film is accessibility, blurring the edges of Marley’s unconventional choices to extend his message of unity, pan-African and pan-human. Anchored as it is by Ben-Adir’s dynamite performance, it sweetly succeeds on those terms. The film underlines how Marley flipped a standard revenge narrative: he took one of the young gunmen out on the road with him, confounding and alarming many of his fellows. Such is the compassionate, unifying vision of One Love, which Marley knowingly risked his life to spread. Hopefully, this tender, energetic movie will help encourage that desperately needed purpose.
• Bob Marley: One Love is released in cinemas on 14 February. A new collection of Vivien Goldman’s journalism, Rebel Musix, Scribe on a Vibe, will be published this year by White Rabbit. The Book of Exodus: The Making and Meaning of Bob Marley and the Wailers’ Album of the Century is published by Three Rivers Press/Random House
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