Adam Edwards recalls a meeting with 'a waif in brown flares, weighed down with huge dreadlocks' who spoke in a strong Jamaican accent interwoven with a Rastafarian patois
Over four decades ago, on a perfect Manhattan spring day, Ross Waby, the Antipodean chief of Rupert Murdoch’s New York news bureau, interrupted my lunch at The Palm, a steak-and-lobster restaurant on 44th and Second Avenue, and ordered me to Kingston, Jamaica.
‘The Sun has set up an interview with a bloke called Bob Marley,’ Ross said. ‘I’ve never heard of him. You go – you’re a Pom.’
I never did know why being British rather than Australian was a qualification for the job but, with my press pass to hand, I boarded the Air Jamaica flight from JFK to Norman Manley International Airport in Kingston that afternoon.
Sixteen months earlier, in December 1976, Marley had escaped an assassination attempt in Jamaica and fled to London. Now, after recording the successful Exodus album, he had finally returned to Kingston to headline the One Love Concert at the National Stadium on 22nd April 1978. Before the show, he had agreed to do his first interview since the shooting with the Sun and two other British journalists (Robin Denselow, then of the Guardian, and freelance Nik Cohn, whose journalism was the source for the film Saturday Night Fever).
The following morning we waited in the yard outside Marley’s home in Hope Road. He arrived, late, flanked by a pair of minders, in a silver BMW (‘It’s a BMW because it’s “Bob Marley’s Wheels”,’ said the Island Records press officer with exaggerated slowness).
Marley was tiny; a waif in brown flares, weighed down with huge dreadlocks. He led the way past a mango tree to a perimeter wall in the courtyard, put his forefinger into one of half-a-dozen rough bullet holes and said laconically, ‘Dis is where dey shoot I and I.’
His strong Jamaican accent was interwoven with a Rastafarian patois, a jargon laced with incomprehensible words, phrases and improvised proverbs. It was further impeded by the regular puffing on a chillum of marijuana. Still, he was very chatty, laughed at his own jokes and spoke to us at length about Jamaican politics, Rastafarianism, Haile Selassie and reggae.
And then, after an hour or so, he bade us a cheerful farewell and, with a limp handshake, climbed back into his Beemer.
At the concert that evening, a tiny handful of whites, including the three of us, were seated in a pen at the front of the stage. Peter Tosh, Marley’s former bandmate, took to the stage and towards the end of his set switched the lyrics of his song Legalise It to ‘Kill the Whites’. We were promptly pelted with empty bottles and cans and thought the end was nigh. Fortunately for us, Marley followed Tosh’s performance and restored the peace.
The truth was, none of us had understood a word he said.
Adam Edwards
