Bob Marley

By the time The Wailers (Bob Marley was just an ordinary band member at the time) released the Catch A Fire LP in 1972, reggae had been lurking in the background of Britain's pop scene for more or less a decade. It had never been taken seriously as a genre, and was considered as little more than ghetto music. This image might well have persisted had not Chris Blackwell, the independently wealthy white Jamaican owner of Island Records, decided to promote The Wailers using the same methods applied to major mainstream rock acts. 

Thus Catch A Fire was made 'palatable' for a wider audience with the addition of acoustic guitar and keyboard overdubs on top of raw reggae tunes, and it was marketed in an elaborate flip-top Zippo lighter-style sleeve that became an instant collectors item. The strategy succeeded brilliantly and it broke The Wailers (and reggae in general) to a new, album-buying college audience.

The original trio of Bob Marley, Bunny Livingston and Peter Tosh had come together as the Wailin' Wailers in 1964 and, before signing to Island in 1972, had evolved their music from rude boy ska to righteous Rasta reggae, with every member of the band sharing equal billing. Island felt it would be easier to promote the group if the charismatic Marley became a figurehead, and so renamed the band Bob Marley & The Wailers. Within 18 months of Catch A Fire being released, both Tosh and Livingston had left the band.

Marley repaid Island's long-term investment in him and went from strength to strength as the Third World's first superstar. His vibrant personality, his ability to project reggae into the global marketplace and his good relations with the media, combined with his tireless recorded output, elevated him to a household name. He also became the only reggae artist to make any lasting impression on the USA.

Whether or not Marley could have taken his celebrity to new heights in the following decade will sadly never be known. In 1980, while preparing for the biggest US dates of his career - opening for Stevie Wonder - he collapsed and was diagnosed as having cancer. On May 11 1981, following treatment at a clinic in Switzerland, he died in a hospital in Miami of lung cancer and a brain tumor. 

As a lasting testament, Bob Marley's birthday, February 6, is now a Jamaican national holiday.

HISTORICAL NOTE
In 1976, just before the 'Smile Jamaica' concert, a team of assassins tried to kill Marley. He was hit once, but his manager Don Taylor took five shots (four of them to the groin). Taylor later claimed that the CIA had played a part in the shooting.