Hot Press Article - 'A Twist In The Wail' (2005)

Playing with Bob Marley changed Natty Wailer‘s life. A quarter of a century since Marley’s death, Natty, now living in Belfast, is devoted to keeping alive the reggae godfather’s legacy. WORDS Colin Carberry

Apparently, it’s all in the way we say ‘Car’. The hard K sound at the start, the loop-the-loop A, and the stunted, unrolled R at the end. The first time Natty Wailer heard a Belfast resident say the word, he thought he was back home in Jamaica. “And people say ‘wee’ all the time – my wee house, my wee brother, my wee friend,” he adds. “In Jamaica, we say things like that also. I tell you man, I come to Belfast and very quickly I say, yes – this is a good place.” We’re here to listen to a self-confessed evangelist bear witness. To hear how a young man fell under the influence of a brilliantly charismatic figure and then, after that figure had died, how he spent a good part of his adult life attempting to alert others to his work.

If he had lived, Bob Marley would have turned 61 on February 6. For Natty Wailer – musician, yarn-spinner, rebel rouser – this date proved the ideal excuse for a celebration of a life he’s taken inspiration from since his youth. Which is why, with his band Reggae Blues Vibe providing sterling backing, he took to the roads of Ireland at the time of the anniversary, delivering his own, personal tribute to Marley at Cork, Dublin and Belfast. Once you decide to spread the word, after all, who knows where the trip will take you? “Reggae is an international thing,” he says, smiling. “It gives inspiration to people not just in Jamaica but across the world. It shines a light. There’s a better way, there’s a peaceful means.”

Natty’s story begins at the age of 18, when, after moving to Kingston from the impoverished Jamaican countryside, he happened across a performance by the definitive early Wailers’ line-up of Marley, Peter Tosh, Aston ‘Family Man’ Barrett and Bunny Livingstone. In common with many young Jamaicans (and prefiguring what would soon become a global phenomena) the band’s influence was to prove life-changing: both musically and politically. “They blew my mind open,” he says. “Here are some lads, they don’t cut their hair, they’re talking about making their own clothes, their own shoes, they’s talking about a religion called Rastafari. It was new, I hadn’t heard this before. What’s Rastafari? Through them I find out about Marcus Garvey, a prophet, and how he spoke about a time when a king would be crowned in Africa, and bring redemption to the black people.” Revisionist history may have it that Rastafarianism (and, by extension, Reggae) enjoyed an uninterrupted ascent to prominence and respectability in Jamaican society. Natty begs to differ. “Jamaica has the slave history,” he says. “It’s the place where they break the rebelliousness of the African slave before sending them to Europe and America. Jamaica was still that kind of port – slavery is over, but there are still chains. Chains of poverty, mental chains. People in Jamaica were looking at the Wailers as something strange. They saw them as something radical and were saying: ‘we don’t want radical’. Then they looked further and saw that they weren’t preaching violence, they were preaching love.” It was around this time that Natty claims he was privileged with a close-up look. Falling under the wing of Family Man, the aspiring musician was invited along to watch the Wailers practice and, after a few false starts, was finally introduced to Marley himself.

“I met the rest of the band first, but would show up and Bob wasn’t there. It was a few days before he came. But when he did, Bob Marley – I tell the world – wasn’t an ordinary human being. Everyone is beautiful, everyone is special, but Bob Marley was above that. His eloquence, his bravery, his peacefulness – there are no words to describe him. He was of a kingly nature.” Marley’s decision to run an almost open house at his home on Hope Road meant that fans had a degree of access to him almost unimaginable today. Natty’s tale finds the former devotee soon progressing through the ranks of backing musicians until finally becoming an integral part of the Wailers' entourage.

“During the rehearsals I was always there,” says Natty. “I played guitar, but at that time I loved the keyboard and tried that too. We would all get up early, go for a jog, come home for a bowl of banana porridge and some fried dumplings, maybe have a smoke or two, maybe play some football before we started recording.” However, it wasn’t long before the grim, sectarianrealities of Jamaican politics began to impinge on this idyll. Tensions between the PNP party of incumbent Prime Minister Michael Manley, and Edward Seaga’s JLP, fuelled by CIA subterfuge, were descending into open warfare. When Marley accepted an offer from the PNP to perform at a Smile Jamaica Concert in December 1976, some extreme opposition forces were enraged. Two nights before the event was to take place, gunmen peppered his home with bullets. Marley was injured in the process. Despite fulfilling his commitment to the show (bringing the gig to a dramatic halt by revealing his wounds to the audience), Marley afterwards moved to London and began work on the Exodus album. In his absence, the political situation deteriorated in Jamaica. Soon the island faced the very real prospect of civil war.

“There was a time when brothers were killing brothers, burning down houses,” says Natty. “It was a war – like Beirut or Baghdad. They had M-16 rifles; every kid in the ghetto had one. Where did they get them from? Who paid for the ammunition? It all came from the head of the dirty stream. The politicians realised that it had got out of hand. This is not what they had planned for and they needed a way out. So they come to Bob. And Bob says we’ll try to bring the people together with music.” The subsequent One Love concert of April 1978 – where Marley led Manley and Seaga on-stage and joined their hands together – has passed into lore. Not only did the event manage to successfully“Minutes before the news came to Jamaica that Bob Marley is dead, we had an earthquake. The earth shook. And then we got the news coming through the wires. We knew that the universe – which sent you, which sent me – was aware that a great man had died.”

Natty’s CV shows that he spent the subsequent years touring with Family Man under The Wailers’ banner – a time that, once again, he describes in evangelical terms. It was a situation that lasted until 2000, when, after meeting an Irish woman in Jamaica, Natty followed her home to Belfast, and found himself,much to his own surprise, feeling at home. “There are a lot of similarities between it and Jamaica,” he says. “First and foremost, the love of reggae music. There’s the way people speak. Most importantly is the love of family – having the grandparents close by. That’s very like Jamaica.” He also wasted little time introducing himself to local music circles. Natty set up the Reggae Blues Vibe, DJing at club nights around town and collaborating with trad-rockers Breag. PSNI figures (and anecdotal evidence) may suggest otherwise, but Natty dismisses Belfast’s tag as the most racist city in Europe. “Let me tell you, I was speaking to an African friend the other day and they were saying ‘yeah, they write on the walls ‘N****rs Go Home’ and all that shit’. I said: when you really look deeply, that’s not racism – it’s ignorance. People still have inferiority about themselves. As far as racism go, the Irish man is like a Jamaican and Natty has never experienced racism here. If I do – they’re in for trouble, cos I’m not someone who sits back and takes that.”

Mixing both defiance and positive thinking, this would suggest that the lessons he learned three decades ago in Jamaica continue to serve Natty today. While Marley still exerts a powerful influence long after his death, one can’t help but wonder what impact he would have had if he had lived on. “He would have been immense,” Natty claims. “One of the reasons that politicians wanted rid of Bob Marley was because he would pose a threat if he went into politics. He was crossing over into other fields – other music. Punk brothers loved him, I’m sure the hip-hop brothers would have loved him too. I’m sure he still would have been around spreading that joy, speaking the truth. This is why I’m still doing what I do. Bob Marley’s music was a message for all people for all times. Give praise.”

And with that Natty Wailer claps his hands and says yeah.