A brief life of Bob in seven songs: radical author stirs up some deep Wailer memories at Brixton Library Black History Month event

Another Black History Month is over,  and you have to admit that Lambeth's events department and the library services organised a really excellent programme of local events. Of dozens of talks, exhibitions,  performances and shows, the event on Wednesday 19 October at Brixton Library was always going to be a big draw: the title, Bob Marley: Roots, Reggae & Revolution - ensured that.

Sure enough by 7pm the seating had all been taken as Bob's totally familiar but always surprising songs kept everyone happy until author Brian Richardson stood up to begin his talk.

Self-effacing from the outset, he joked that he realised most of the audience would probably rather just listen to Marley's music all evening...and of course there's always going to be an element of truth in that. But we also wanted to hear what new things he had to say about such a well-documented modern hero.

Brian Richardson is a prominent activist and campaigner against racism. He's also a practising criminal barrister and - not surprisingly - a deft public speaker. He seemed so modest and self-effacing as he explained the background to his book, and he played the whole event in a very cool and open manner. He straightaway admitted he was indebted to the Booker Prize-winning novel of Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings, for the structure and approach of his book, which chronicles Bob's development against the political turmoil of Jamaica, the USA and the great East-West divide of that era.

In fact he even borrowed a bit of Marlon James' structure for his talk, covering Bob Marley's political and spiritual development in seven songs.

He pointed out how Bob became a musician, a songwriter, an artist - just at the time that the politics and history of newly-independent Jamaica became a microcosm or crucible of all the great global events at the time of decolonisation,  and of the ensuing conflicts, left versus right, rich versus poor, material versus spiritual.

But this was no dry history lecture. As soon as the first song fired up, large parts of the audience were swaying their seats, and just about everyone was smiling. The song was the Wailing Wailers' 1965 hit Simmer Down, which - even so soon after Jamaican independence - showed that the honeymoon was over and that things had got back to normal - poverty, corruption, oppression, violence in the streets.

Over the course of an hour, Brian played six more Marley songs, all of them well-known classics, each capturing a specific phase of the singer's career. We had the obviously political titles sich as Get Up Stand Up,  the reflections on Trenchtown poverty, and his celebration of late 70s London punk meets roots scene in Punky Reggae Party.

That time when The Wailers were more or less in exile in the UK proved to be a rich seam of memories for some of the audience. One guy remembered playing football with Marley in a park, which led on to discussion of the various stories of Bob's toe injury and whether or not it led to his fatal cancer. (Most likely not, is the answer, though it probably didn't help either).

Another audience member was present at the famous open-air One Love Peace concert in Kingston Jamaica, April 22 1978,  when Bob got the two opposing political leaders, Edward Seaga and Michael Manley, to shake hands on stage.

Brian asked if she remembered Peter Tosh's performance earlier at the same event, when, according to some accounts, legend, he gave the two leaders a very critical lecturing, then fired up a giant spliff as a very public display of his opinion of the government's supposed crackdown on ganja smoking. Sadly she couldn't remember - she was very young then, she said. (Other reports suggest it was Jacob Miller who did the most spliff-smoking, but Tosh certainly talked hard politics).

There were other memories of Bob in London, specifically the time when the Wailers performed at a primary school in Peckham, and also of his visits to a Rasta centre in Kennington.

It was this sort of living memory that made the whole event so different. When Brian got onto the Exodus era, with Marley both espousing but also challenging some of the Rastafarian ideas, a big debate broke out. Several very vocal audience members said that  once again - in the light of recent increase in racist attacks in the UK and USA - nothing had changed, and that the only sensible option was to get out of here, take the Black Star Liner back to Ethiopia, re-patriation, to turn their backs on rotten Babylon.

Others disagreed, saying they were here to stay, British citizens, with exactly the same rights as any other, and that this status was not up for negotiation. To an ancient and fairly dumb baldhead like me it was surprising, even sad, that this debate has resurfaced, or bubbled up, gained new heat, what 35 years after the first Brixton riots proved a wake-up call to an essentially racist establishment.

So, it is taking the establishment a veyr long time to get out of bed, and recent events suggest it's eyelids are once again drooping. But what did we see in Brixton just a month before, the Black Lives Matter movement. Have things gone right back to the 60s? Brexit and Trump suggest that's getting dangerously close to reailty.

But this was a great event, and we need more. It was packed out, lively and reasonably mixed in terms of age and ethnicity - though to be honest, seeing how Brixton is now, I'm surprised there weren't more young white hispter types there. We left soon after the speechifying finished at about 9, but according to sources it seems it went on way past official closing time, when debate gave way to music, and everyone turned to dancing. Exactly how any event in the name of Bob Marley  should end.

Bob Marley: Roots, Reggae & Revolution by Brian Richardson, published by Redwords, February 2016, available from the Bookmarks, the socialist bookshop, at £7.99 plus £2.50 postage.

Jah will forgive you, Mr Independent man!

A truly weird piece in tonight's Evening Standard, so odd you wonder what the hidden agenda might be. Ostensibly it's a brief lament by Amol Rajan, the editor of The Independent (a Standard stablemate) - bemoaning the lack of decent reggae nights in London these days.

First reaction - yes, agree - you get much better reggae nights in Leeds, or Brighton, or Dusseldorf, or Osaka these days. So much as I sympathize, it just seems odd - and pretty damn obvious. Reggae as we knew and loved it , roots rock reggae -  peaked in the mid-1970s with artists like Marley, Toots, Culture, Burning Spear, and their many many friends, followers, and copiers.

Some would put the golden age even earlier, with the Studio One recordings of the late 1960s or with Joe Gibbs, King Tubby, etc, and then Lee Perry's Ark.

So the best reggae is already around 40 years old, the music of a generation who are now pensioners. Why would there be great reggae nights in London? It is a reivivalist thing, just like 60s pop and prog and punk and 80s and disco. But roots rock reggae has yet to have that sort of revival in London. "Cool" young Londoners seem to prefer cheesier stuff,  music they can get ironic about, tacky things that have kitsch value.

But, stranger still, Mr Rajan goes on to berate the new generation of London MCs for pumping  out too much rastafarian propaganda and being rather too, well, anti-establishment.

At one point at a Shoreditch nightclub he says he was almost moved to get up on stage to defend the capitalist system.

As the great Joseph Hill of Culture laugh-shouts on "Two Sevens Clash", "he said wha-a-a-at?"

If he doesn't like the rebellious bit, or the spiritual bit, what on earth is it about reggae that this fellow liked so much 15 years ago? Take way the Rastas, the roots, take away the rebellion, and you take away about three-quarters of the good stuff. You're left with a bit of dear old Greg Isaacs when he got all smoochy and sexy, the lover's rock people, and dancehall.

No doubt many of the tenets of Rastafarianism do seem a bit dotty to sophisticated north London secularists of 2013, but without it you'd not have some of the most beautiful, powerful songs of that era. The Congos, War in a Babylon, Exodus, Do you remember the Days of Slavery, Do not forget Old Marcus Garvey, the Twinkle Brothers' Since I threw the Comb Away etc etc etc etc ad infinitum, all the way to Armagiddeon Time itself!

When reggae did break away from the rastas, from its roots and its consciousness, under commercial and political pressure in the 1980s,  it went pretty bad in place. So bad it was rather good, sometimes, but also pretty horrible in others. Rasta was replaced by sex and crime and violence and boasting and  bling. Dancehall reggae, ragga, all that stuff packed with syn-drum beats and exaggerated bleeps and crude mixes, the big bad trouser mob, MC Hammer etc, the toasting duelling types, you know.

If you reckon a dub-step MC in Shoreditch is getting too rootsy, too damn righteous and religious,  what you be looking for? You want it to snuggle up to the big brands, the big money, the TV ads? Do you want UB40 or do you want reggae?

What did Mr Marley say about hitting  us with music? What was reggae  but rebel music? What did LKJ say about reggae? What did Fela Kuti say about music, being the weapon? There are "conscious" reggae artists around now, including the Marley son Damien, and lots of young people all around the world. Often they try too hard to sound like Bob, and don't really take it any further.

It's difficult to untangle such a universal sound as reggae, which is now used  for so many marketing purposes, a billion miles from the original messages, from the backstreets of Trenchtown, the police, the thieves, and the all-knowing, everlasting mercy of Jah.

Now reggae is just another beat tuned into a billion music apps, the rasta colours just another fashion statement for the likes of Adidas.  Some of the worst offenders should know better: the Marley family themselves, using Bob's inheritance to sell fizzy drinks.

Shame on them all!

Can't get enough...of that Brockwell Park reggae stuff

"Lucifer! Son of the morning, I'm gonna chase you out of eart!" 

Thank God for south London, for Lambeth, Brixton, and Brockwell Park. Thank Jamaica for the music that burned with a soul-healing heat on the second day of the Lambeth Country Show.

I would never have expected this - but these two days of music amount to the best I'ver experienced, the most joyous, since the early 1980s. Was it my age, was it the sunshine, the beautiful crowd?

Was it the great attitude of nearly all the performers, who seemed determined to give their very best to this free event, when they could so easily have cranked out the old numbers by numbers and gone  home for a shower ?

Something about Brockwell Park this weekend caused both young and veteran musicians to really extend themselves, to give their best, or so it seemed.

Arriving in the park around 2.45 this afternoon, there was the powerful magnetic tug of high-precision reggae rhthyms which surged up the hill and seemed to fill the entire Brockwell/Herne Hill valley like a lake of sound. As people approached, they walked faster and more and more in time with the rhythms, all the more eager to reach this already packed natural arena.

At first I thought it must be a record, then saw the main stage down the hill with a band on it, a tiny figure with a distinctly Marleyan look about him  singing songs of justice and struggle and so on ....I get closer, the little guy is really singing from his heart, he has an acoustic guitar but also a brilliantly sharp band who give just enough bass and drum to raise the thing, to raise the crowd.

I realise it's this  new star, name of Natty,  with his band the Rebelship. His songs are sharp and full of the righteous anger that marked the best of this music from the early 1970s - righteous anger, youthful idealism, that plaintive voice, again with a little of Marley's grain in it, but fast, the rap inflections just adding bite. Apparently he's born in the USA yet he sounds like a Jamaican Londoner. Check out his music, there's loads of great stuff on YouTube etc.

He's well loved and realises it and is all smiles after a while. He goes down a storm, and he's generous too, bigging up the old guys who will follow him as he leaves the stage.

It's a great taste of what's to come, this fresh  take on old old roots, fresh and new minted, yet with echoes of deep roots decades and the centuries of suffering that preceded them.

On comes a local mixed-race reggae band, The Soothsayers, they are good but are they good enough for this place? Natty's a very hard one to follow, but this band has a trump card to play - they bring on the veteran singer, Cornel Campbell, and things suddenly catch fire. There's a whole segment of the audience - chiefly, I'd say early-middle-aged Brixton mums, who seem to know every word of his back catalogue.

Each time he starts a song, he gets about four bars in and then  cries , "pull  it back", and it grinds to a halt. Then he starts again to a new surge of cheers. Is this him telling the band they're getting things a bit wrong or what? No-one seems to mind, and there's just so much good feeling around, and some to spare - it surely need to be bottled for future use.

This Cornel, in his dark suit and shades, his 1978-look dreadlocks, still jet black, he sings high and clear like a young man, his moves are supple, and yet he must be not too far off 70 maybe? Or at least mid-60s.

The sun is getting hotter, the crowd is still building, and Brockwell Park is beginning to look like a raggae sunsplash site from back in the 80s. What helps is the clarity of the sound in this still, warm air - it'sa very good sound system.

The next act up is the "special guest" Mikey General, backed by the Charmax band. He bounces onto stage in a big fawn corduroy suit and black shirt and big black dreads and you think, "hang on, what?"....but he's already many steps ahead and delivers a blistering short set, enjoying every second of it and working the crowd with great expertise.

You begin to wonder if poor old Max Romeo, the headliner, is going to be able to carry this crowd, so expertly built up by each  act, and even the failings of the sound system (a couple of records seem to have had a few too many plays) are happily tolerated .

And then, here he is, in a mustard yellow, loose-fitting ensemble,  dreadlocks now ash-grey but still full and extending down to knee-level, and god he is moving so well, and his voice is still  fluid as he rushes in with War in a Babylon.

The man has real mastery of this crowd, he has a powerful dignity about him, a deep presence, and he seems to have no doubt how much we love him. He expects us to know the lyrics of each song even before he's two bars in, and amazing;ly, a substantial  proportion of the audience does know them, but not well enough perhaps...

( "I'm gonna put on a iron shirt, and chase the devil out of earth....Brixton, you cannot be serious, I cannot hear you. Again: "I'm gonna put on an iron shirt, and kick satan out of the eart....send him to outa space, to find another race....!)

Near the end  he gives his little speeech on the problerm of poverty - where's the serum, to eradicate it? - and then he slink offstage, and then he's come back, and does a blistering, initially unaccompanied Redemption Song. Tears well up above impossibly wide smiles. Bliss, emotions cranked right up past maximum.

Astounding. Two short afternoons of beautiful music in beautiful weather in a beautiful location, and I am ready to fly the flag for Brixton,  for South London, for reggae music, and - OK this is a joke, Lambeth Council -  and everything that goes with it, just like it's still  1981.

And as for LoveBox, etc, Victoria Park and Hyde Park and what have you? North of river?

Whaaat?

One love!