Not because he didn’t love him, but through necessity, he says. Ziggy stayed on in Jamaica along with the rest of his siblings (Marley had 11 acknowledged children) but claims he didn’t miss his father during the separation. It’s there that he wrote one of his most enduring songs, Three Little Birds.
RITA MARLEY SONGS FREE
“Football helped him free his mind,” he says.ĭisturbed by the shooting at his home, Marley moved to London for a spell, living in the relative calm of 42 Oakley Street in Chelsea. His dad was always in demand, he says, and sometimes it felt like everyone wanted a piece of him. He thinks playing football was a way for Marley to alleviate some of the pressures of his day-to-day life.
RITA MARLEY SONGS PROFESSIONAL
He would sometimes come to Ziggy’s primary school and play against his teammates, he says, adding: “He was fast and he had a good kick.” He laughs out loud though at the idea his dad’s game was on a professional level, as friends who played with him have claimed.
He loved boxing, running, table tennis, he was a sporty guy.” “It was a big part of his life, and my life as a child around him, but it wasn’t just about football – he loved all sports. They are un-posed candid shots, some capturing the singer playing football, which he said was his greatest passion after music.
Ziggy explains that they were discovered in the storage locker of photographer Jean Bernard Sohiez, who died last year and whose two dozen photos are all seemingly taken on the same day in Kingston, more or less a year before Marley’s death.īob Marley in Kingston in 1980. A silent disco, which they’re calling the Soul Shakedown Studio, invites visitors to don headphones and groove to a reggae dance party.īut the highlight of the show is arguably a collection of never-seen images of Marley himself. In another space, they have recreated a concrete urban landscape with huge art installations and there’s even a mock-up of the backstage corridor of a Bob Marley and the Wailers concert. One room, for example, is designed as a forest with the sounds and smells of Jamaica, the visual backdrop to many of the songs. The exhibition – which includes a giant vinyl installation of Legend – is pitched as a “multi-sensory experience” with numerous rooms and spaces, each highlighting different aspects of Marley’s life. His posthumous greatest hits album, Legend, released in 1984, has spent more than 950 weeks in the UK top 100 and has sold more than 25m copies worldwide. It’s the latest celebration of a singer who four decades after his death from cancer, aged 36, is still one of the bestselling artists in the world.
Now 53, Ziggy is speaking to the Observer on the eve of a new exhibition about his father’s life and influences opening at the Saatchi Gallery in London next month. Bob wouldn’t be Bob without Rita, you know what I’m saying?” I’m proud of both my dad and my mum because there’s a team work going on between them. “She still showed up for the show, the same as he did. The gig was seen as a rallying cry for peace against the backdrop of Jamaica’s spiralling violence and political unrest, with 80,000 people watching Marley swagger his way through classics including Get Up Stand Up.įor reggae fans it’s the stuff of legend, though Ziggy insists his mother, who had been shot in the head on that night, deserves equal credit. Yet just two days later, on 5 December 1976, Bob Marley insisted on playing the Smile Jamaica Concert at Kingston’s National Heroes Park, as planned – even though he had bullet wounds in his arm and chest.
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