Happy 50th birthday to the greatest shows ever recorded!
There were two of them, on consecutive nights at the Lyceum in the Strand in late July 1975 – nights so sweltering that its retractable roof was rolled back and people could see the stars.
And they propelled Bob Marley to international renown. But the road to get there was bumpy and full of potholes, not least his fractious reputation when he was signed to Chris Blackwell’s Island Records three years earlier.
Fiery-tempered and not averse to a physical brawl, he’d been toughened by years of ruinous deals in the gangster world of the ’60s Jamaican music business and he trusted nobody. So when Blackwell, after huge success in the new albums market with Free, King Crimson and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, told him he planned to remodel the Wailers’ roughshod reggae for the same white student rock audience, it didn’t go down too well.
But he managed it, polishing and sharpening their sound and sweetening it with familiar Western signatures such as lead guitar solos. And he even expanded the band’s name to Bob Marley and the Wailers, to put the spotlight on its singer, songwriter and, it was hoped, superstar.
But still there were no significant sales, despite the applause of the press and the rock cognoscenti (Keith Richards stumbled on-stage in a Bob Marley T-shirt), until another classic – if slightly dispiriting – example of a white star’s version of a black musician’s track bringing it to a wider public.
In the same way that Elvis Presley’s Hound Dog outstripped Big Mama Thornton’s rendition, or Pat Boone’s Sweet Little Sixteen trounced the Chuck Berry blueprint, or the white rapper Eminem finally brought hip-hop to the masses, it took Eric Clapton’s cover of Bob’s flop single I Shot The Sheriff to make the first Marley song a hit.
But Blackwell’s commercial masterstroke was to come. Convinced the Wailers’ records had never captured the mesmerising, rubbery bounce and spontaneity of their live sound, he parked the Rolling Stones’ mobile studio outside the Lyceum Ballroom in a last-ditch attempt to bottle it and make some hay.
The recordings were a revelation. Everything about those shows seemed new, dazzling and extraordinary. The way the band spoke – in a glorious, coded, faintly lawless patois. The way they looked – their whirling dreadlocks, sinuous, skanking dance moves, and red, gold and green flags. The poster of Haile Selassie behind them – Selassie revered in their cryptic Rastafarian religion as the living son of God.
And the songs they played, which spoke of the struggle of the starving and oppressed in Kingston’s ghettos against a corrupt and hypocritical ruling class.
For those of us who’d grown up in the Home Counties listening to Joni Mitchell, it was mind-blowing.
Blackwell released one of the two nights’ highlights, No Woman, No Cry, and the Live! album four months later. And Marley never looked back.
If you need proof they were the greatest concerts on record, just listen – and imagine being there. Many happy returns!
