‘We are all loyal to papa Marley’
The music and powerful messages of Bob Marley and the Wailers continue to echo around the world. Vicki Anderson talks to top New Zealand musicians about Marley’s influence.
Bob Marley lit a fire in New Zealand music that has never been extinguished, say some of our biggest music stars. His message of love still speaks across generations of every colour and creed.
Marley died in 1981 from a melanoma-related illness but, 37 years later, here in New Zealand his birthday – Waitangi Day – is still celebrated at events around the country and his music lives on.
Marley and the Wailers have sold more than 250 million albums in the past four decades. Exodus was Time magazine’s album of the 20th century and, for many, stands as the definitive statement of the concerns and artistry of a man who rose from the obscurity of a third-world shanty town to become an icon.
The band spread messages of love with political bite which took the Rastafarian movement and Jamaican music to the globe. Talk to some of this country’s leading musicians and you’ll discover that many believe Marley’s 1979 tour was a pivotal moment in our cultural history.
It’s why some of our music industry’s big names, endorsed directly by the Marley family, are performing a one-off show of Marley’s music together in Christchurch this month under the banner, Marley: Celebrate the Legend.
They consider it a homage to one of the ‘‘greatest influences’’ on New Zealand music.
Those on stage will include Tiki Taane, Annie Crummer, P Diggs (Shapeshifter, Peacekeepers), Laughton Kora, Fran Kora, Logan Bell (Katchafire), Ria Hall, Anna Coddington and Joel Shadbolt (L.A.B).
They are backed by the NZ AllStars band, featuring present and former members of Katchafire – Grenville Bell (guitar), Hani Totorewa (keys) and Leon Davy (percussion), alongside Kora’s Fran Kora (bass/vocals), L.A.B.’s Joel Shadbolt (guitar) and Ara Adams-Tamatea (bass), The Black Seeds’ Lucien Johnson (sax) and Barrett Hocking (trumpet), drummer Paul Russell of Stomp/ Supergroove, guest drummer Shelton Woolright of I Am Giant/ Blindspott and Godfrey de Grut (keys) of Elemeno P, Che Fu & The Krates fame.
New Zealand’s answer to the I-Threes features none other than Annie Crummer, Ria Hall and Anna Coddington on backing vocals.
‘‘I don’t do covers,’’ says P-Digsss, aka Paora Apera, of Kiwi band Shapeshifter. ‘‘These shows are the first opportunity I’ve ever had to perform Marley’s music.’’
As a kid, he listened to a lot of heavy metal, but says ‘‘uncle Bob’’ was a huge part of his community.
‘‘For me, it was almost sacrilegious to cover his music. When I got asked if I’d like to perform his stuff I was tentative at first. I hold him in such high regard, I wanted to do him justice. When I was told about the players involved, all the Katchafire brothers, I was like, ‘yes, I’ll do this’.’’
Logan Bell, staunch frontman of popular Kiwi reggae band Katchafire, agrees that Marley’s music and his New Zealand tour had a ‘‘powerful and lasting influence’’ on our music that ‘‘shouldn’t be underestimated’’.
‘‘I am moved by Marley’s music,’’ says Bell. ‘‘I don’t know how else to put it but other people feel it, that intangible thing we are talking about and that is powerful and that’s what I try and take into my music with Katchafire.’’
Bell has ‘‘rubbed shoulders’’ with Aston ‘‘Family Man’’ Barrett of the Wailers. ‘‘Family Man has his thoughts on New Zealand’s reggae music. He says we have a ‘certain swing’,’’ says Bell.
‘‘Family man is humble, he’s a great man, he smokes ganja like a train and he’s loveable. What happened to the Wailers after Bob passed away is quite sad. They should be millionaires, all of them. A lot of them ended up with nothing.’’
Bell recalls when Katchafire was playing huge sold-out shows in Los Angeles and winning fans around the globe but struggled to find media attention at home.
‘‘As a genre, we still need to kick down that front door. Even when we are doing big things we are still not being celebrated or mentioned, it’s an acknowledgement of what we are doing. If New Zealand doesn’t claim us, Australia will,’’ says Bell.
This year he’ll spend three months on a world tour with Katchafire, and the band will release their long-awaited Legacy album.
Anna Coddington grew up with Marley’s music ‘‘always on in the background’’.
As she’s making her young children dinner, Coddington vividly recalls the first time she performed Marley’s music in front of a several thousand people.
‘‘When you grow up in New Zealand, a lot of those songs are background noise, they’re always there. The simplicity of those songs . . . for example, Get Up, Stand Up. It’s very simple but to play it to 2000 people to whom it really means something . . . to play these songs to large audiences I saw the songs in a new light.’’
Annie Crummer, meanwhile, adopts a reverential tone as she utters the name Bob Marley.
‘‘I got into this show and I didn’t let go,’’ says Crummer. ‘‘The mana . . . We are all loyal to papa Marley. Keeping papa Marley at the top of the pyramid, that’s very easy to keep as your motivation, that’s the kaupapa of the whole event, that’s what drives us.’’
Crummer says the spirit of Marley’s music influenced our music and musicians in many ways.
‘‘He came here in 1979 and is still a massive influence.’’
While on tour in New Zealand in 1979, Bob Marley played soccer in a park at Port Resolution.
Original Wailers guitarist and vocalist Junior Marvin once told me that on tour marijuana, beautiful music and the beautiful game mingled together with ease in the Wailers camp. Marley even had his own football team, the House of Dread.
‘‘Bob was a big fan of soccer. If there was a soccer match on TV you had to put a hand in front of his face to get his attention,’’ says Marvin. ‘‘Whenever he got a chance, in the dressing room, during rehearsals, he’d always be playing soccer.’’
You don’t have to look far to find examples of Marley’s influence on our music scene.
For example, Che-Fu met Bob Marley when he was just 4 years old.
Bob Marley and The Wailers were headlining the Babylon by Bus Tour at Auckland’s Western Springs on April 16, 1979.
Children weren’t allowed at the concert and Che-Fu’s parents, Tigilau – poet, activist and NZ reggae legend – and Miriam, couldn’t find a babysitter.
‘‘She rang Rita Marley at the hotel they were staying at in Greenlane,’’ Che-Fu once confided.
‘‘She ended up getting 16 backstage passes and we cruised up to the hotel and spent some time with Bob and Rita and the band. We got to go backstage. I was four . . . Bob played drums with me by tapping his fingers on a table.’’
Miriam belonged to Nga Tamatoa (the young warriors), a Ma¯ ori activist group, and she and Tigilau were actively involved in the hikoi, the Ma¯ ori land march, and helped organise the Bastion Point occupation in 1977.
Nga Tamatoa also initiated the annual protests at Waitangi on Waitangi Day.
Both Che’s parents were also members of the Polynesian Panthers, a political activist group with an ethos based on the American Black Panthers’ ideal of control over their own communities.
The Panthers also advised on legal rights, with the help of a brilliant up-and-coming Auckland lawyer named David Lange.
When Che was eight, his parents converted to the Rastafarian religion, the international organisation that Bob Marley belonged to.
In 1981, the year Marley died, Tigilau was on the frontline singing ‘‘amandla ngawethu’’ (power to the people) through a megaphone at the anti-apartheid Springbok tour protest.
In turn, Che-Fu revolutionised the way New Zealanders viewed hip-hop when his hit with DLT, Chains, smoothly rolled onto the airwaves in 1996.
Savage, aka Demetrius Savelio, was the first New Zealand hip-hop artist to have a platinum commercial single in the United States.
But, when he was a kid living in Samoa, Savage only owned one tape and he listened to it every day as he walked a couple of kilometres to and from school – it was Che-Fu’s Chains.
Coddington says that she’d always known and understood that Ma¯ ori people had found a ‘‘real resonance’’ in Marley’s music, but it wasn’t until she performed the songs that she understood how deep the connection was.
‘‘To stand on stage and appreciate the gravity of what those songs mean for people was mindblowing for me,’’ she says.
A Marley masterclass has been ‘‘magic’’ for other top Kiwi musicians.
‘‘It blew me away,’’ says P-Digsss. ‘‘It’s given me an even greater appreciation for the legacy Marley has left us all.’’
"As a genre, we still need to kick down that front door."
Katchafire's Logan Bell
❚ Marley: Celebrate the Legend, is on at The Foundry, Christchurch, on Friday, April
6. 0800 BUY TIX (289 849), limited tickets available.