I never met Bob Marley, which isn’t such a ridiculous admission given I was the deputy editor of a music paper called Echoes (formerly Black) that among championing a variety of rhythm driven music fancied itself a ‘Burning Spear’ head for reggae.  During my five year term I interviewed many reggae acts often struggling so much with the patois (I sometimes suspected was deliberately over emphasised to confuse a lobster tinted bald-head such as I) that I would drive to distant north London where a colleague John Etienne (aka Williams) would assist me in transcribing cassette recorded interviews; extracting printable quotes from the opaque soup of I ’n I rasta inflection. I recall taking Cyril, the office gopher, to an interview with a legendary reggae star in a London hotel room fogged with ganja. “He’s already answered that,” said Cyril alert to my struggle with the red eyed singer. I simply couldn’t risk a similar debacle with a man of Bob Marley’s stature and so reluctantly stepped aside.

I was mulling this over in the car the other day on my home having seen and enjoyed mightily Bob Marley: One Love. The film is a dramatisation of a three year period following the musician’s near assassination on the eve of the Smile Jamaica Concert at which he would endeavour to bring and end to the violence and bloodshed of a polarising national election by uniting the leaders of the two biggest political parties. That and his subsequent exile in London. 

I admit I was prepared to be disappointed as films come sometimes fail to live up to the expectations of viewers familiar with a story or book, be it fact or fiction. Yet from the start I was enraptured by director Reinaldo Marcus Green’s down played almost documentary style. Especially the way the landmark Exodus album came together in London with an energy Marley had for something new, almost before any semblance of song. In this Kingsley Ben-Adir in the lead role is a revelation of under statement bringing me to tears during an acoustic intimate rendering of Redemption Song in a garden with some of his children and his wife and I-Three singer Rita, Lashana Lynch, by his side. Others shot that day in December 1976 included Rita and manager Don Taylor. In the darkness of a spring night on the north Cornwall coast, wanting more than anything to return to The Regal cinema and sit through the film once more, I was reminded how the man I never met is the headline act in two of the most emotional days of my life. I think of them often and how things could so easily have turned out so very different, so very wrong, and so very humiliating.

The first of those days was Monday May 11, 1981 the day Bob Marley just 36 years old, died of cancer in a Miami hospital. An avid football lover and player he’d damaged a toe some years prior that had turned cancerous but after treatment and remission returned to take his life. 

The fact that this happened on a Monday is crucial. It was the day my editor Chris Gill travelled to the printers in Bedford to oversee the paper’s typesetting and give final approval prior to it ‘going to bed’ – ie printed. It would be on sale, as per usual, the following Thursday. I’d heard the news about Marley early that evening but this being a time before mobile phones it was impossible to reach Chris to discuss what could be done. He hadn’t ridden his 750cc motorcycle to his home in Clapham and ringing around non of the likely sources knew where he could be. At the time national newspapers paid little heed to international pop stars other than the multi million selling white ones. My worry was other music papers, possibly with later print deadlines than ours, that would break the news a entire week ahead of the paper meant to be at the forefront of reggae. 

Staring at a beer in a pub in Ladywell south east London a short walk from my basement flat I reflected with friends what had happened that day and how helpless I felt to prevent an imminent shaming. It was no good, something had to be done, and it began with pen and paper. Having drafted a short report on Marley’s death and with no idea where my editor was I called the Bedford printers from an old fashioned call box armed with a stack of coins and explained the situation. We needed a story and a photograph on the front page. I was put through to the copy takers who I read my story to. This is before email and even facsimile machines. If newspaper text could not be delivered on paper by hand it had to be read slowly and meticulously over the phone with clear instructions for capital letters, paragraphs, full stops (full points) and commas. 

With that done I was transferred to the type setting department. Essentially a row of upright desks where every page was assembled with cut out photo printed text, headlines and photographs arranged and stuck on to a page prior to final photo setting. I couldn’t see the front page my editor had approved and that I had to alter to include my obituary and a photograph of Marley. Did the type setters even know what Bob Marley looked like? On visits to the printers I’d never been struck by their knowledge or interest in our subject matter. I knew there was a folder of photographs of musicians we’d published in the past and hoped my description of Marley would lead the people in Bedford to the correct one? Hoped! Hoped! What if we come out on Thursday with a story about Marley’s death on the front page alongside a photograph of someone else. I remember explaining what dreadlocks look like. Some publicity photographs of musicians have their names on them, but not all. There had to be dozens of dreadlocked musicians in that folder. I thought of driving up the A1 but we’d have missed the print deadline by the time I’d have arrived. I was told they were pretty sure it was Marley which had the effect of making me feel worse. I should have just left it as it was. 

Many years later Kim and I were staying at the Strawberry Hill hotel in the hills above Kingston, Jamaica. There was an infinity pool and rum cocktails. I was researching a travel article for The Sunday Times that necessitated I sample a range of organised tourist tours. The most appealing a tour of the Bob Marley Museum housed within the Tuff Gong recording studios in Hope Road, Kingston. It was an interesting tour focusing on the years and success Bob Marley and The Wailers enjoyed with Chris Blackwell’s Island Records. Interesting and yet a period naturally familiar to me. Stepping away from the assembled holidaymakers and guide my gaze was drawn to a small room lined with press cuttings of Marley behind glass. 

Almost exactly a year before his death Marley had played an open air concert at London’s Crystal Palace Bowl. It was a warm late spring day and a handful of fans had waded into the water infront of the stage to get a better view of the man The Wailers addressed as ‘Skip’. By then his dreadlocks were waist length and I can see them now fanning out like some exotic headdress as he danced to ‘this drumbeat, as it beats within. Playing a rhythm. Resisting against the system…’

I decided to join them in the water. I had my camera with me and soon I found what I took to be a milk crate beneath me in the murky pool. It would stabilise me head and shoulders above the others while I focused my lens on the star. 

My image of Marley in full flight at the Crystal Palace Bowl that day was awarded a full half page in Echoes that week, and there it was accompanied by my report of the event and my byline – centre stage in his museum. During a life in journalism nothing has come even close to matching the feeling of pride triggered that day in Kingston. Most of yesterday’s news winds up in the bin. But not this one. That small shred of shoe and jean sodden work is there forever, for all to see.

And in case you are wondering I ought to have more faith in the Bedford type setters. The May 14, 1981 issue came out with a photograph of Bob Marley and my short report of his death on the front page. John Ettiene and I combined on an extensive four page obituary for the subsequent issue.