Talking

Saturday 15th October 2011: I will be  interviewing Colin Grant, author of the wonderful The Natural Mystics – Marley, Tosh and Wailer at the Ilkley Literature Festival.  So many great things about this book: it’s a cultural history of Jamaica, as well as an account of the Wailers’ long and troubled ascent to greatness (and Tosh and Livingston’s split with Bob).  Strongly focussed on the Jamaican working class (always noting the colour grading and the class and ethnic divisions), it gives real insight into Rastafari, Obeah (even referencing Zora Neale Hurston), the brief Black Power period (referencing Walter Rodney) and the tragic overlap between reggae and the sometimes violent conflict between the PNP and the JLP.

To stir yourself up, you can get a taste of The Wailers Live at Leeds (Leeds Polytechnic, 23rd November 1973)  here . Of course the whole concert in Leeds is available on the brilliant deluxe double CD Burnin’.  If you listen really carefully you can hear me (and about 50 others) shouting ‘more’. One of the many amusing things Colin Grant tells us is that the Wailers’ weed during the 1973 tour of England was procured by the Honourable Benjamin Arthur Foot, brother of the great, late, Trotskyist journalist Paul Foot, sons of the late Baron of Caradon, who was once a governor of Jamaica.