MARLEY’S HOUSE OF HEDONISM
It’s the London home the reggae legend fled to after being shot... seeking solace in the arms of Miss World and a haze of drugs (while his wife lived round the corner). Now it’s earned Bob a rather unlikely blue plaque
ABLUe plaque was unveiled last week on a handsome house in Chelsea, in the respectable- looking street where an icon of edwardian stoicism and valour, Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott, once lived.
The new plaque offers not a hint of attempted murder, adultery, rape, drug-taking on an industrial scale and a fatal show of misplaced pride. All it says is ‘Bob Marley 1945-1981, Singer and Songwriter, lived here in 1977’.
In a way, that’s all it needs to say. Most people know that the reggae legend, neck-and-neck with Usain Bolt as the most famous Jamaican of all time, crammed an awful lot of life into his 36 years. Yet there are a thousand stories behind that english Heritage plaque, many of which involve sex, drugs and wild, decadent excess.
Oddly enough, those that don’t are even more fascinating. Marley had moved to London because he was in mortal danger on his native island. Although he preached reconciliation and love, and tried boldly to unite Jamaica’s warring factions, in December 1976 gunmen burst into his Kingston home and attempted to murder him, quite possibly on the orders of the CIA, who wanted to destabilise a country they feared was becoming another Cuba under its socialist leader, Michael Manley.
Five of the bullets intended for Marley struck his manager, Don Taylor. Another hit his wife, Rita, in the head. Marley was wounded in the arm. Miraculously, nobody died, even though, in a deafening fusillade, more than 80 bullets were fired.
Nothing like that seemed likely to happen in or around 42 Oakley Street. Marley loved London. He loved to play football just across the River Thames in Battersea Park, with friends including fellow reggae star eddy Grant. He especially loved living in a country where neither policemen nor criminals carried guns. Feeling safe, indeed so safe that right under Rita’s nose he contentedly carried on an affair with the reigning Miss World, his fellow-Jamaican Cindy Breakspeare, Marley enjoyed one of the most creative years of his short life while living in england. He and his band, the Wailers, recorded their classic exodus album, which Time magazine would later anoint as its ‘album of the century’.
‘This tough, edgy, militant soldier could actually write the softest, most beautiful love songs, infused with pearls of wisdom and bits of scripture so profound they made you weak at the knees and pricked your conscience all at the same time,’ Breakspeare later recalled.
She was seduced in body as well as mind. Their son Damian was conceived during their stay in London, one of at least seven children Marley is believed to have fathered with seven different women, not to mention the four he had with wife Rita.
Mind you, that seems monastic compared with one of his Wailers, the wryly nicknamed Aston ‘Family Man’ Barrett, who at the latest count was a father of 52. Maybe it was the need to pay child support that explains why in 2006 he sued Marley’s estate for £60 million in unpaid royalties. His challenge was unsuccessful.
Breakspeare’s affair with Marley, which she claims to have embarked on without any idea that he was married, had started before he moved to London. But it was in Oakley Street that it gathered momentum, with her still allegedly unaware of his connection with Rita, even though his wife of more than a decade was staying just round the corner and was one of his trio of backing singers, the I-Threes.
Despite — or perhaps because of — the industrial quantities of marijuana that were smoked at the house, not to mention all the extramarital sex, Breakspeare recalls their nine months or so there as an exercise in domestic bliss.
‘I have wonderful memories of us cooking at 3am and taking long soaks in a hot tub to get the chill out of our bones,’ she said. HER son Damian, just a toddler when his father died, now runs a huge cannabis farm in California. It’s safe to say that the old man would be proud. Marley was almost always shrouded in a fug of marijuana, not only because it was part of his Rastafarian creed (the Rastas believed that ‘ganja’, as they called it, was a sacramental herb that promoted self-knowledge) but also because, well, he adored it.
His ganja habit is the reason why it has taken so long for english Heritage to verify that he lived in Oakley Street, because when in March 1977 he was arrested for possession of drugs, the address he gave to the police was Collingham Gardens, in Kensington. It was a lie. He just didn’t want them searching his house, knowing how much illicit produce he had stashed there.
Upmarket Chelsea was a long way, in more ways than one, from down atheel Trenchtown, the tough neighbourhood of Kingston Marley came from, which is immortalised in his great song of the same name.
‘Say Trench … Trenchtown … we’re the underprivileged people / So Trenchtown, they keep us in chains,’ he sang.
Yet even in Kingston he had already moved well away from Trenchtown, living in some grandeur at 56 Hope Road, the same street as the Prime Minister. In a Netflix documentary about the assassination attempt on Marley, a friend recalls teasing him about his move to such a swish area, when so many of his songs expressed solidarity with Jamaica’s dirt-poor. He just smiled. ‘No, I’m bringing the ghetto uptown,’ he said.
Growing up in Trenchtown in the Fifties, Marley had a street name, Tuff Gong, and a no- nonsense reputation. He was an only child, which meant more room than most families enjoyed in corrugated-metal shacks. His father was a white man, Norval Marley, who had seduced his mother, Cedella, when she was just 17, having promised to marry her. Norval went through with his promise, but abandoned her the very next day.
As a mixed-race child, life could have been even tougher for Marley than for most kids in Trenchtown, but he was strong and smart enough to turn it to his advantage.
even once he became the world’s most famous reggae artist on the back of songs about the dispossessed, he never espoused hatred for white people. Indeed, he tried as hard as he could to stay politically neutral, until Manley worked out a way of exploiting him for the benefit of his People’s National Party.
Back in his teen years, Marley confounded Cedella’s greatest fear, that he would turn to a life of crime.
Instead, he threw himself into ska music, Jamaica’s answer to rhythm and blues, from which reggae would evolve. He formed a band and wasn’t averse to performing covers of commercial Sixties pop songs, such as Sugar Sugar, and What’s New Pussycat?, but his breakthrough was as a lyricist. He wrote a song called Simmer Down, set to an aggressive beat yet with pacific lyrics, pleading with local gangs to stop their violence.
It wasn’t just his mum who loved it. Simmer Down was a hit for the island’s biggest band, The Skatalites. Soon enough, there was a bigger one: The Wailing Wailers, who would become The Wailers, and finally Bob Marley And The Wailers.
In 1966, Marley married the Cubanborn Alpharita Anderson, a young single mother and student nurse. From the start she was a devoted wife, hand-washing his only pair of underpants every night, until he started making money and indulged himself with a more extensive underwear selection. Despite his
serial infidelities, they stayed married until his death.
Sometimes, driven to despair by his latest affair or one-night-stand, Rita would refuse to have sex with him. One night in 1973, during one of these periods of forced abstinence, he raped her. The peace-loving Marley could not only be a physical brute, but also psychologically cruel, once telling a U.S. newspaper that his backing singer Rita Marley was his sister, not his wife, and even bringing home some of the babies he fathered with other women.
Outrageously, he tried to pass off his priapic behaviour as a favour to Rita. She remembers him explaining that he wanted lots of children but, entirely for her sake, didn’t want her to endure multiple childbirths. ‘He’d say, “I don’t want you to get pregnant every year. So some of that is really just taking the burden off you and your body.”
‘When we argued, my line was always, “I’m your wife but I’m not your slave, you know. I’m not going to be your call girl. When you want to have sex, you call me to your room . . . No, no, no!”’
Rita never stopped loving him. But had he lived, she now believes that she wouldn’t have stayed married to him, that his promiscuous lifestyle would eventually have pushed her away. Either that or it would have killed her, she thinks.
‘We didn’t have Aids at that time. But there were other diseases . . . I didn’t know if he was using a condom, but I doubt it, because he was a Rasta man.’ As it was, in 1976 their relationship nearly killed her anyway, when, albeit accidentally, she took a bullet for him. Jamaica was stuck in a terrible maelstrom of violence, so Marley organised a free outdoor concert, in the hope of bringing together the rival gangs and two antagonistic political parties.
He called it Smile Jamaica and pronounced it entirely non-political, but Prime Minister Manley promptly declared a general election, to cash in on Marley’s popularity and moral authority.
The attack on 56 Hope Road took place a few days before the concert. It appears to have been led by a gangster who enjoyed the protection of Edward Seaga, Manley’s Right-wing rival, who was supported by the U.S. government.
But Marley had already received death threats, so Manley had posted armed guards outside his home. On the night of the attack, the guards failed to turn up. Conspiracy theories abounded, such as one suggesting Manley had masterminded the attack, so he could blame it on Seaga.
Courageously, Marley performed the Smile Jamaica concert anyway, but left the island the next day, ending up in self-imposed exile at 42 Oakley Street. In April 1978, he returned to Jamaica to give his famous One Love Peace concert. WHEN he coaxed Manley and Seaga onto the stage and held up their hands, it seemed as if he had achieved the impossible. ‘ That was the night,’ says one of Marley’s biographers in the documentary, ‘that Bob went from showman to shaman’.
To Jamaica’s underclass and plenty of others around the world, he still seemed a kind of god. The ultimate irony is that he died the most prosaically mortal of deaths. In 1975, while playing football, he had injured a toe on his right foot. While living in Oakley Street, he damaged it again. When the toe didn’t recover, a London doctor told him it could turn cancerous and should be taken off. Marley refused. ‘Rasta no abide amputation,’ he insisted.
But the doctor was right. In September 1980, Marley blacked out while jogging in Central Park. The cancer had spread from his toe to his brain. He died less than eight months later in Miami, and his body was flown back to Jamaica, where it lay in state. Thousands of people filed past.
The new Prime Minister, Edward Seaga, declared a national day of mourning. He said in his eulogy that ‘such a man cannot be erased from the mind’. Nor, now, will his legacy ever be erased from the history of a house in Chelsea.