Off the record

Rip It Up, Issue 94, 1 May 1985, Page 38

Off the record

Catch A Fire Timothy White (Corgi) This exhaustive study of the life of Robert Nesta Marley is the

result of numerous exhaustive intervews with Marley’s family (especially his mother, Cedella Booker), his friends and fellow musicians. It joins several other volumes in a similar vein, the most worthy being Stephen Davis’s biography and Vivien Goldman’s Soul Rebel, Natural Mystic. This book serves more as a companion to the others rather than a

competitor, for it covers Marley The Man in far greater depth. Catch A Fire gives the most detailed portrait of Marley as a boy, growing up in a one-room hill country shack in the parish of St Ann, under the benevolent influence of his maternal grandfather, Omeriah Malcolm. White delves deeply into the ancient superstitions, the fear of

the ’duppies’ or ghosts, the spiritualism which underlies Rastafari. For the first time, a detailed portrait of Marley’s father, Captain Norval Sinclair Marley, is also given. Bob tried to deny his father’s existence in latef life, once claiming they’d never met. Yet, as Catch A Fire states, it was Captain Marley who brought his son to Kingston, ultimately to Trenchtown, which set him on his road.

This is actually the second edition of this book, and has been enhanced with more fascinating photographs, mainly from Cedella’s private collection. Its appeal lies in its painstaking portrayal of the burgeoning Jamaican music scene of the early 60’s, into which a naive but brashly confident Bob Marley was thrust. His first encounter with the legendary Leslie Kong is a gem all by itself. Timothy White’s book is a true labour of love, portraying the development of both a man and a music. The man is gone, but the music lives and breathes. So does this remarable book. Duncan Campbell The Police Chronicles Phillip Kamin/Peter Goddard (Virgin) Simple Minds: The Race Is the Prize Alfred Bos (Virgin) These two offerings from Virgin concentrate on the tried and proven formula of a text about a band’s personnel and its history, liberally dosed throughout with scores of glossy high-class pics. The Police book has the slighter of the two texts and is basically a Readers Digest-style introduction to the group. The Simple Minds "official biography", on the other hand, while slicker and more posed, has a fuller account. Although it is superior fare, beware the irritating chapter quotations, which range from Nietzsche and

Longfellow to someone called Lao Tzu; they add a needless pretention to a book which is a good browse through during the ads on tele. S.O’M GRANTA: The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones and Other Stories, Various (Penguin) GRANTA calls itself a magazine of new writing and it looks like a magazine, except for the fact that it’s bound in paperback like a novel. Originally an ailing Cambridge University "mag ordinaire", until in 1978 brash Bill Buford from California hustled writers Susan Sontag and Thomas Pynchon into contributing articles by duping them as to its true, lowly status. From small beginnings ... grew a thriving backroom operation which eventually spawned into a Penguin deal; it now publishes quarterly. In this issue (12), there are writers of the calibre of Gunter Grass, Garcia Marquez, as well as the excellent title piece on the Stones at Altamont, written in the famed gonzo journalism style. It’s by Stanley Booth and was 15 years in making it to print. GRANTA has been described as essential reading for the busy reader it’d be hard to disagree. Stephen O’Meagher