Happy 80th Birthday, Bob Marley

 

HubMP2012

  FEBRUARY 6, 2025

Co-founder of Philosophy Football Mark Perryman celebrates the meaning of Bob Marley.

As self-styled “sporting outfitters of intellectual distinction” Philosophy Football, we’ve made our name by going in search of philosophical quotes that explain the meaning of football and turn them into T-shirts, name and squad number on the back. Unique? We like to think so: our first, existentialist and Algerian international goalkeeper Albert Camus, swiftly followed by Gramsci. 

Imagine our joy therefore when we found out that Bob Marley had waxed lyrical about his love of the game: “Football is a part of I  – when I play the world wakes up around me.” Into production ahead of Bob’s beloved Jamaica making their World Cup debut at France ’98, we made him our number eleven. Club side? As a man of the people we reckoned Bob might fancy turning out for Kingstonian FC, not Jamaica’s capital, but south London’s premier non-leaguers. 

The shirt proved instantly popular, a tad too popular. The Bob Marley Foundation got to hear about it and sent us a writ for breach of copyright demanding the shirt be immediately withdrawn. We had become kind of used to this. Not many T-shirt companies have been sued by Eric Cantona, Hergé of Hergé’s Adventures of Tintin fame and now Bob Marley! But when we explained what we were about, two football fans with the idea of mixing our love of the game with our interest in ideas and design, plus in those days wildly ambitious festivals on London’s South Bank celebrating the global culture of football, the foundation were so impressed they insisted for Bob’s shirt we remove our legal get-out of jail description “strictly unofficial” and make ours The Official Bob Marley Football Shirt. Blimey, were we chuffed, not ‘alf.

Today, Thursday 6th February, would have been Bob Marley’s 80th birthday, sparking memories of how we described his place in our textiled squad. Playing of the ball on the grass, no dope far out on the wing, climbing high as a kite to catch the long ball. To celebrate his birthday, the shirt has been re-introduced into our unique line-up to rejoin Camus, Gramsci and others who prefer to play the game deep.

But this is a moment also to reflect on the meaning of Bob Marley and others like him. The writer and activist David Widgery had a neat way of describing his politics as “against miserabilsm”:                  

“There is a real danger of getting too depressed about the apparent triumph of a particularly tawdry and irresponsible sort of finance capitalism and the state of the labour movement and the cowardice and lack of vision of its leadership. But I’m very against miserabilism.”

David wrote those words at the peak of Thatcher’s rule, reinforced by the flag-waving aftermath to the 1982 Falklands war. Labour was drifting under the leadership of Neil Kinnock, the latter having led CND marches, promptly dropping any such commitment to nuclear disarmament once leader. The miners in 1984 suffering a catastrophic defeat. And this sorry lot of the early 1980s was just for starters. David Widgery was “against miserablism” because what precisely does being miserable achieve?

Widgery had form on the subject. He was one of the architects of the greatest fusion of a popular agitational politics with a popular joyful music, Rock against Racism. And he had no time for those he would otherwise agree with politically who couldn’t grasp the significance: “Marxists who turn socialism into something as obscure as particle mechanics.” 

As we danced to The Clash, Buzzcocks, Tom Robinson Band, Elvis Costello, X-Ray Spex, Stiff Little Fingers, the punk mainstays of Rock against Racism mixed with UK reggae’s Steel Pulse, Aswad, Misty In Roots, Matumbi, the musical-political combination was natural, vital and most of all wonderfully fun.

Daniel Rachel’s superb book Walls Come Tumbling Down chronicles how Rock against Racism segued into 2 Tone, a musical movement that didn’t have to spell out A-G-A-I-N-S-T R-A-C-I-S-M, it was fundamental to the music, the fashion, the line-up, everything about 2 Tone and in particular label-mates The Specials, The Selecter and The Bodysnatchers.

Bob Marley symbolises the potential and pitfalls of an anti-racism we can dance to such as this. In the late 1970s, Chelsea had amongst its fanbase a fascist hardcore who when the Ska anthem The Liquidator was boomed out of the Stamford Bridge PA system would loudly insert into that pregnant pause in the opening bars “British Movement boom boom”, an outfit for those who found the Nazi National Front a tad moderate. An anti-racism without musical accompaniment is entirely miserabilist. But music, the same goes for football, that doesn’t make the connection between a multicultural soundtrack or team line-up and the society which both exist alongside has a nasty habit of leaving any meaning on the dancefloor or pitch. A territorial anti-racism that is all about liking the music, the player but as for the rest who share his or her skin colour, religion, country they came from to ours, leave it out. Or words, actions – a damn sight worse. How that connection is made in a manner that is popular and connective, rather than waving a placard with a slogan that simply tells those whom the intention is to reach that they’re wrong, wrong, wrong won’t do it. Never has, never will.   

Jammin’ is what Bob Marley excelled in. Never for one moment did his music make us miserable. He lifted our sights to the possible which seemed all but impossible. Oh, and he understood that at its best our much-fabled ‘people’s game’ had every potential to do the self-same. In contrast to the activist-speak sloganising of ‘ Stop this, Fight that, Smash the other’, Bob Marley’s words “I believe racism, hatred and evil can be healed with music” positions popular culture in any contest of ideas not as a sideshow but absolutely central. It’s a practical understanding of how to reverse the current popular drift to increasingly hateful times, and better still one we can dance to.  Thanks for everything, Bob Marley, and many happy returns.

Philosophy Football’s Bob Marley T-shirt is available here.