Bob Marley: "Have I blasphemed?"

Universal Music has recently acquired the rights to 211 Marley recordings, and to celebrate the completion of the deal they have just released a three-CD box set called Grooving Kingston 12. They say, to their credit, that unlike other "backstreet record labels" they will pay the musicians their royalties, and they also claim that they have six previously unreleased tracks. Two of them, Music Gonna Teach and One Love True Love, appear on the first new box set. I've listened to all six tracks, and they are certainly not the best of the Wailers. Actually, they're not very good. I don't believe I just wrote that. How could I? I'm his biggest fan. But did I say that there are some Bob Marley tunes that are not very good? Is that allowed? Have I blasphemed? There is a kind of political correctness, a politeness, that dictates that you can't say a bad thing about Bob Marley tunes, and now I risk being force-fed meat by angry Rastafarians. Hippies will curse my karma, and my mum will slap me when she reads this. But it's true - if these tunes were hot, they would have been released years ago. At the beginning of the 1990s I remember being in the Fallout Shelter, a recording studio owned by Island Records, when someone came in rejoicing and proclaiming that a brilliant Marley recording had been discovered. I was in the middle of recording another one of my obscure political albums; it was going well, but I had to stop. I had to sacrifice my precious studio time so that my producer could use the studio to quickly release this new old tune. But I didn't complain; there was something surreal about being interrupted by Bob Marley. What happened next was like an emergency surgical operation. The studio was blocked off and only those with the password could enter. Top musicians were brought in; they swore an official secrets act and began to record overdubs and add more horns, and then the track was given the best treatment money could buy via a state-of-the-art digital mixing console.

That track was called Iron Lion Zion, which went on to become a big hit worldwide. Now that's what happens when a genuine gem is found. Why would a record company place a newly discovered work of art on an album that's a collection of oldies and call it a bonus track? If it was good enough they would release it as a single in its own right, even if it needed attention from fresh musicians in north London. I'm just a keen Bob Marley fan who feels exploited. All of these posthumous releases have nothing new to offer - how many times can you listen to a slightly different mix of that tune recorded in 1968? How many more tapes are waiting to be found in the vaults of recording studios in deepest, darkest Jamaica? At the height of his career Bob Marley could have had the Red Sea parted if he requested it, so have no doubt about it - if he had wanted a track to be released, it would have been released.

The new tracks on this new release are not terrible, but they're not great. As on many of the early recordings, Marley is trying stuff out, experimenting and tuning his writing and recording skills. When you listen to his early works you find that there are many versions of the same songs; many songs borrow lines from each other, and many recordings are drafts of the greater things to come. On the track called Black Progress, it sounds as if Marley is trying to come up with a black power anthem in the style of James Brown's Say It Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud. Marley tries to rouse us with a rather overdone American accent, which he was never to try again, and we know why. What I found most painful, listening to this new box set, is the acoustic tracks on the third CD.