Bob Marley by Dennis Morris

Babylon by van, 1973

‘They asked me if I wanted to come on tour. “Yes!” I said. I met the band at their hotel, the following day after the Speakeasy gig. There was no tour bus as such, just a transit van and a driver cum roadie cum manager Benji Foot (Michael Foot’s son) and a woman named Hazel Charik. They were a little surprised to see me. “Who is this?” they asked. “It’s my photographer, Dennis,” said Bob. “You ready, Dennis?”. “Yeah, I am ready!” I replied’

Bob Marley 

by Dennis Morris

Photographer Dennis Morris worked extensively with Bob Marley between 1973 and 1980, charting his rise from small crowds to global superstardom. After greeting the reggae star at a London club in May 1973, Morris was invited to join the tour – the start of a strong friendship and unrivalled photographic access. We hear from Morris about his memories of photographing Marley

• An exhibition, Portraits of the King: Bob Marley by Dennis Morris,
  runs at 28 Old Burlington Street in London until 7 March
• Morris’s book Portraits of the King is published by Tang Deng

Photographs by Dennis Morris

Main image: Bob Marley in his tour van, London 1973. Photograph: Dennis Morris

Fri 16 Feb 2024 11.22 GMT

Hand on Heart, on tour, UK, 1973

‘I first met Bob in 1973 outside the Speakeasy club in London on the first date of the Wailers UK Catch a Fire tour to promote the Catch a Fire album, his first for Island Records. Bob invited me into the club.’ During a break, he says Marley asked him: ‘So, you wanna be a photographer? Well, they will tell you you can’t do it. You have to believe, Dennis’

The Marley I knew was not a real person … Marlon James. Photograph: Felix Clay for the Guardian

Man Booker winner Marlon James: ‘I was the nerd, I wasn’t into sports, assumed gay'

BIOGRAPHY

The novelist talks about nearly packing it in after his first book was rejected 78 times, growing up listening to Eurythmics and Pet Shop Boys – and A Brief History of Seven Killings, his multi-voiced epic about the attempted assassination of Bob Marley

By Paula Cocozza

Wed 14 Oct 2015

M

arlon James’s third novel is epic: hefty in grammes, timespan, ambition and structure. It has been described as a cacophony, a din of voices, telling their stories, often in patois; and in tangent, the story of the 1976 assassination attempt on the singer Bob Marley. Some passages are almost made for singing. Odd pairs of words are spliced in rhyme: lockdown and downtown, sistren and shitstem. There are so many voices. The book’s cast list names 76 characters. Fifteen have speaking parts. Even James used to open his laptop and think: “Who am I going to see today?” The effect is clamorous. And as the death toll mounts, each name at the head of a new chapter is as ominous as an engraving on a tombstone.