ZIGGY MARLEY ON ONE LOVE
ZIGGY MARLEY WAS just 12 when his father succumbed to cancer in 1981, but some memories of his Jamaican childhood with the reggae star are indelible. Like the night seven gunmen burst into their home at 56 Hope Rd. in Kingston, injuring the entertainer and three others, including Ziggy’s mother, Rita Marley.
“It was like shell shock,” Ziggy said in a recent phone interview from his L.A. home, about the night in 1976 when police whisked the eight-yearold and his siblings away from another house where they were staying. “I remember those experiences of what happened the night of the assassination [attempt]; when we got picked up and went to where my father was hiding out. It’s very vivid memories, but we look back on them like a frickin’ movie.”
Now Ziggy, a producer on the biopic Bob Marley: One Love – which stars Kingsley Ben-Adir as Bob and Lashana Lynch, the first female 007 (in the latest Bond film, No Time to Die), as Rita – is reliving that night, and that volatile period in Jamaica’s history, frame by frame. “In movie terms, this is a very entertaining part of Bob’s life,” said Ziggy, who was a constant on the movie sets in London (where Bob went into selfimposed exile after he was shot) and several Jamaican locations. “In personal terms, it’s a very lifechanging experience that he was going through, where, at some point in this journey, he decided that his life is not for him, it’s for people. And this was the period of time where he came to that realization.”
Bob’s key tenets set an example for Ziggy, his eldest son, and Bob’s 10 other children. “Discipline and hard work and respect for the music and the purpose of the music,” Ziggy outlined. “Music has to be your lifestyle; it can’t be something that you just do. We learned that from a young age.”
Some of Bob’s kids have followed in their father’s footsteps and become, like Ziggy, Grammy-winning artists. The next generation also has music in their blood, including Ziggy’s 16-year-old son, Gideon, who sings and plays the guitar, and was a drum tech on his dad’s 2023 tour. But Ziggy pushes back on the suggestion the Marley legacy is a family entertainment business that he and his siblings, or Bob’s “hundreds” of grandkids and great-grandkids, are conditioned or entitled to join.
“I have a different kind of concept,” he explained. “If you have
something in your heart, then you can speak it, but if you’re going to do it just because of your name, then it’s a different thing. The family business is really a business of how you treat other human beings. Music is one way we express that, but our business is humanity.” The Marley name, which is stamped on everything from coffee to musical instruments, is also attached to philanthropic work through the Bob Marley Foundation, like educational scholarships, hospital equipment and support of the Reggae Girlz, Jamaica’s national women’s soccer team.
Although Ziggy acknowledged the film will undoubtedly attract more visitors to locations like 56 Hope Rd. (where a replica of the house was built near the original) and Bull Bay (16 kilometres east of Kingston, where Bob used to jog on the beach), he said it will show “the real side of Jamaica.”
He is proud that One Love was partly filmed in Trench Town, the Kingston tenement where he was born and where his dad came of age, and that residents were tapped to work in front of the cameras and behind the scenes. “It kind of uplifted the community, not only in a material way, but in a very spiritual way also. Trench Town is a tourist attraction now, and will be more after this film. We used to play around there, so we have friends still in the community. I tell them: ‘Listen, Bob is doing this, it’s not me. This is Bob still helping out Trench Town.’”