‘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. He and his band, the Wailers, recorded their classic Exodus album, which Time magazine would later anoint as its ‘album of the century’. He especially loved living in a country where neither policemen nor criminals carried guns.įeeling 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 loved to play football just across the River Thames in Battersea Park, with friends including fellow reggae star Eddy Grant. Nothing like that seemed likely to happen in or around 42 Oakley Street. Miraculously, nobody died, even though, in a deafening fusillade, more than 80 bullets were fired. 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.įive of the bullets intended for Marley struck his manager, Don Taylor. Marley had moved to London because he was in mortal danger on his native island. Oddly enough, those that don’t are even more fascinating. Yet there are a thousand stories behind that English Heritage plaque, many of which involve sex, drugs and wild, decadent excess. 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. All it says is ‘Bob Marley 1945-1981, Singer and Songwriter, lived here in 1977’. 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.
A blue 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.
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