NATURAL MYSTIC
IF there is a single day that captures the extremes of the extraordinary year Bob Marley spent in exile in London, it occurs in the autumn of 1977 at the Keskidee Centre, an Afro-Caribbean community hub in Islington. Marley is there to make the video for “Is This Love?”, as yet unreleased but destined to become the latest in a line of Top 10 hits. The filming takes place at a children’s birthday party, at which one of the guests is the eight-year old future supermodel, Naomi Campbell. Marley jigs and japes merrily for the camera, every inch the family-friendly entertainer. Behind the scenes in the converted church, meanwhile, he presides over a council of war. In the wake of a peace treaty recently brokered on the Caribbean island, several Jamaican dons have flown to London to persuade Marley to return home, following the assassination attempt in December 1976 that led to him seeking refuge in England.
“The two sides of all the gangsters in Jamaica came over,” recalls Marley’s great friend and mentor Chris Blackwell, who signed him to Island Records in 1972. “Bob knew all of them because he was based in a really rough part of Kingston. They wanted him to go back over to do the One Love concert.” For Marley, contemplating the offer involved confronting some raw emotions.
“He didn’t talk about the shooting much, but he was very upset that people would come to shoot him,” says Blackwell. “Bob wasn’t at all someone who was boastful or thought he was the greatest thing ever – he was a very natural person – but I think he was shocked that people would want to shoot him, and it took him a while to work through that.” The reggae superstar had chosen to deal with the fallout from the shooting in London, where his recent brush with mortality infused his life and music with a new sense of purpose. On the one hand, it was business as usual. “Bob set up his Rasta camp here,” says Don Letts, at the time a budding DJ, entrepreneur and “baby dread” who was befriended by Marley. “It was like he had picked up a bit of Kingston and transplanted it to Chelsea.” The cultural exchange worked both ways, however. In London, Marley integrated with young punks and Rastas, visited West End nightclubs and dingy shebeens, played football in his local park, recorded with his wife, conceived a son with his girlfriend, and fell prey to the injury that eventually led to his death four years later. “It was an amazing time,” says Marcia Griffiths, a member of his vocal group, The I-Threes. “Everything was happening all at once.”
“EXODUS TOOK REGGAE TO THE NEXT LEVEL”
ZIGGY MARLEY
The duality of Marley’s year in exile is most clearly reflected in the music he created during that time. In London he made two albums, Exodus and Kaya, in a matter of months. They feature some of his deepest and most spiritually resonant music, from the lowering “Natural Mystic” to the declamatory “Exodus”. Yet it was also the year in which Marley recorded the songs that transformed him from a roots reggae star to a pop pin-up. “Three Little Birds”, “One Love”, “Jamming”, “Waiting In Vain” and “Is This Love?” were all released during this remarkably fertile period. “He was sending messages to the world,” says Griffiths. “Those two albums cover everything.”
At the heart of it all is , perhaps Marley’s most ambitious and universal statement. “It was very advanced, very progressive – almost futuristic,” says his eldest son Ziggy, who remastered the album in 2017. “took reggae to the next level in terms of instrumentation, beats and musicianship. It made reggae a more international and accessible thing, with elements people could relate to in their world.” Blackwell puts it more succinctly: “was a huge record for Island – and a revolutionary record for reggae.”
