A LEGENDARY DISAPPOINTMENT
BY NICK HORNBY

When you live long enough, you can impress younger people simply by listing the artists you’ve seen, mostly because rock stars die younger, and with more frequency, than the rest of us. Rory Gallagher, the first person I ever saw play live, is dead; Ronnie Lane of the Faces, my favourite band when I was 16, is dead. I saw The Who with Keith Moon, Zeppelin with John Bonham, I saw Elliott Smith, Luther Vandross, Tim Buckley, Albert King, Teena Marie, Alex Chilton and the original line-ups of the E Street Band, the Pretenders, Dr Feelgood, The Clash and the Ramones. And if one of these experiences ever comes up in a conversation with a young person, the young person will say something like, “Wow. That must have been awesome.”And at that moment, you rewrite your story, and start to talk about the gig you’d like to have seen, the gig you should have seen.

You can’t disappoint the kid. You can’t tell him that you had the worst seats in the house. You can’t tell him that the sound was shit, or you were splitting up with the girl you went with and you spent the night arguing, or you needed the toilet all the way through. You can’t tell him that you went to the show where the band played their difficult concept album from beginning to end, no hits, no encores. You can’t tell him that the guy next to you shouted out 'ROCK AND ROLL’ during every single ballad, and you spent the evening working out how hard he looked, and whether he’d hit you back if you punched him. And you certainly can’t ever say that you’ve forgotten the whole fucking thing.

I went on the Internet to try and find out what Bob Marley played the night I went to see him, at the Hammersmith Odeon in June 1976, and I found a little review from someone else who was there. "We saw no need for the seating arrangements, as you cannot dance in a chair, so we danced on them. We danced in the aisle, we danced in the restroom, we danced in the street, we danced on the tube. We forgot our sorrows and danced. My lasting memory of the night was down in the tube station, after it was all over. I was packed into a huge throng of people, people of every creed, colour, sex and age, all singing the same song: 'One love, one heart. Let’s get together and feel alright.'"

Isn’t that beautiful? Don’t you wish you’d been there? Let’s forget, for a moment, that the definitive version of 'One Love' is only to be found on an album that wouldn’t be released for another year; let’s forget, too, that the bootlegs of the show you can find online do not seem to contain the song. Let’s just picture this happy underground train, full of people of every creed, colour, sex and age – old Chinese men, middle-aged Pakistani women, young Eskimos – all bursting into a redemptive, happy, healing tune they haven’t actually heard yet. Isn’t that exactly how a Bob Marley concert should be? You can’t blame the guy for trying; I’m surprised he didn’t describe how this happy band of multi-racial brothers and sisters exchanged email addresses, twenty years before anyone had an email address.

Here’s something else I found out while looking for information about the Marley show I saw: that a year later, when Marley returned to London to play at the Rainbow Theatre, eighty uniformed police were present in the auditorium, "to prevent a repeat of the 1976 Hammersmith Odeon concert". In other words, there wasn’t as much hugging of old Chinese men as the other guy remembered; on the contrary, bad stuff was happening. And this version of events, I’m afraid, corresponds much more closely to my own memories of that night.

First of all: how do you get tickets to see Bob Marley, when you’re nineteen years old? Marley is a legend. Surely I must have known someone who knew someone who could pull some strings on my behalf? The truth is that legends are rarely legends while they’re alive. I have a friend who saw Jeff Buckley twice in the same evening, the second time at the suggestion of the artist; he was so uninteresting to the people of London that, having played a half-empty show in a tiny West End club, he invited the audience to his late performance up the road, presumably to swell the numbers. My friend and a few other people who took him up on the offer walked there with him. I got tickets to see Bob Marley by sending off a postal order and a stamped addressed envelope – that’s how you bought tickets for everything then. You really had to want to see shows back then, and the desire usually excluded the riff-raff. Now, apparently, it’s quite common for the front row of a show to be half-empty – people buy tickets online when a gig is a first announced whimsically, often late at night, drunk, and months in advance, and then forget all about them.

I went with my girlfriend, and when we showed our tickets at the door to the bouncer, he looked at her, and he looked at her handbag, and he said, "You shouldn’t have brought that with you, love. They’ll take it off you in the first five minutes." I looked at him. Who were ‘they’? And very slowly, I understood what he was saying. 'They' were black people. Black people were going to steal my girlfriend’s handbag. There was a lot in this short sentence that I had to process.

First of all: black people! At the concert I was going to see! It hadn’t escaped my notice that Bob Marley was black, of course. That was one of the reasons that the New Musical Express and my hipster school friends and I liked him. But the NME was white, and we were all white, and I had somehow just kind of presumed that the audience would be made up of white boys and girls who read the NME. This was, I could see now, stupid. Bob Marley was from Jamaica, and so was a sizeable part of the population of West London. They too would want to see Bob Marley, right? But this was great! I was going to a mixed-race show, for the first time in my life!

That was the good news. The bad news, according to the bouncer, was that one half of this mixed-race crowd wanted to mug the other half, and I was in the wrong half. I didn’t like this bouncer. He presumed that I was part of his “us”, and clearly he loathed “them.” But I was afraid, walking into the Hammersmith Odeon, and I stayed afraid for the entire evening. I didn’t know that nothing was going to happen; and anyway, I couldn’t be sure that nothing was going to happen until I was safely home. But I wasn’t just afraid. I was troubled, too. If these people stole my girlfriend’s handbag, would she expect me to do anything about it? If fifteen young Yardies from Ladbroke Grove came to see us in our seats, could we just give them the bag straightaway? Or would I at least have to put on a show of resistance? Surely she’d understand, if we just let it go? I’d pay her back, whatever it was she lost.

So I had a lot to think about when Marley took to the stage, and I carried on thinking about it throughout his set. And as a consequence, I can’t remember a single song he played, a single word he said, or a single pose he struck. This is nothing to do with the passage of time, either; I couldn’t remember anything by eleven o’clock that night. Was there any dancing on the seats? Not that I saw. Dancing in the toilets? No. (I was too scared to go to the toilet.) Singing on the tube? No, no, no.

But yeah, I saw Bob Marley live. He was awesome. I expect.