An Irishman's Diary

For the last few years of his life, home for the great reggae singer/songwriter Bob Marley was 56 Hope Road, in Kingston, Jamaica, an address close to the official residencies of some of the most powerful members of Jamaican society, and a long way in social terms from the poor and violent Trenchtown area where he spent part of his youth.

It is a relatively modest two-storey house with a high wall around it. In the courtyard stands an old Land Rover that once belonged to Marley, the blue paint faded by the Caribbean sun, sheets of A4 paper stuck to the windows warning visitors not to touch. Marley's music plays on outdoor speakers and young Jamaican men and women hang around, pretending to apply themselves to various tasks. The entry fee is $10.

The house was formerly owned by Chris Blackwell, of Island Records, who made many of the early recordings of Marley and the Wailers. In the mid-1970s Marley bought the house from Blackwell and he lived there until his untimely death in 1981, from a brain tumour.

Not only did Marley and his family live there but he also did a lot of his writing and rehearsing and recording in the house. When he was in residence, there was always a string of visitors, including gunmen from Trenchtown he'd known in his youth, American hippies, and supplicants who as often as not came away clutching some much-needed funds.

The tour guide is a young Kingston woman, her long dreadlocks tied behind her back. On my tour there was a white man and woman from South Africa and their two sons, as well as a Caribbean woman with a strong British accent. The afternoon was hot and the house has no air conditioning.

There is an austere atmosphere to the house; wooden floors, overhead fans, windows with no glass, the home of someone more devoted to his work than to the easy life or the accumulation of material goods.

It is an attractive house, old by Kingston standards. The hallway is lined with the awards and honours given to Marley by Jamaica and others. Doors on both sides of the hall lead to square-shaped rooms, and a wooden stairs leads upwards.

The walls of the first room the guide brought us into were papered with newspaper articles about Marley, beginning from very early in his career. There was also a map, showing the cities around the world where he played. I was surprised to see a black pin on Dublin and for a moment suspected that it was an error.

However, proof that I was wrong was presented in the next room, which was again papered with pages from newspapers from around the world. There, taking centre place on the wall opposite the main window, was a front page from the old Irish Press, dated July 1980. The main picture was one of the great artist playing a concert in Dalymount Park, Dublin. The front-page report on the concert was by Brian Bell - who must have been about 10 then and is now the deputy managing director of the Wilson Hartnell public relations firm in Dublin and a popular figure in the Irish business world.

Then I noted what was beside the front page of the Irish Press - the front page of The Irish Times, from the same date, with a report by Joe Breen. Poor Joe, unlike Brian, is still in the newspaper business. He is a managing editor of this newspaper.

On the tour went. We were shown a little booth from which early Bob Marley records were sold on the side of the street, an old bicycle that Marley used to cycle around on when he was a poor man on the streets of Kingston.

His bedroom was bare, ascetic looking, (Marley was about as active in the bedroom as he was in the recording studio).

The kitchen was tiny, like something you might see in a high spec modern apartment in Dublin, with the juicer Marley, a vegetarian, used for making his favourite juices sitting there waiting where he'd left it. Two gourds hung from the wall and the guide told us he used to bring them on tour with him, using them as water carriers, in order to remind him of where he came from and the culture he represented.

In the yard behind the house there were various workshops and shops that were all closed. A hall at the back had an exhibition of photographs that included a photograph of Marley's white English father, who died when Marley was only 10, and his black Jamaican mother who is still alive and lives in the US. The guitar he could be seen playing in so many of the photographs was in a glass case in the middle of the hall, as was the very simple-looking mixing desk he used when making some of his best-loved recordings.

Quite a number of the photographs showed him playing football.

As well as being one of the best popular singers and songwriters ever, Marley is also, to this diarist's knowledge, the first popular music superstar from the Third World.

He is the original Empire Talks Back hero of popular culture, an artist who had the strength and intelligence to write and sing his songs in his own Rasta English. (The children's books in the bookshops in midtown Kingston are still almost exclusively about the adventures of white kids. The dolls in the toyshops have white skin and blond hair.) Everywhere you go in Jamaica there are pictures of Marley. The people (who despite all Jamaica's difficulties are remarkably upbeat and friendly) seem to love and admire him.

As well they should. Jamaica's history is a horror story of unimaginable cruelty. Marley's songs are full of righteousness and anger but most of all love of life and concern for others.

"We free the people with music," he sang.

He did his best.