We’re going to stray a little bit from our “famous music videos” path today in order to go with just the right bit of music for the gorgeous weather we’re having these days.

Robert Nesta Marley, better known as “Bob Marley” grew up in tiny Nine Mile and later Trenchtown, the ghetto of Kingston, Jamaica. He formed a vocalist group with his childhood friends Bunny Wailer and Peter Tosh, and was encouraged to learn the guitar by the local popular artist Joe Higgs. It would take another decade, a few name changes and a label change to Island Records before they would gain international success, but in the end they were fired as opening band for “Sly and the Family Stone” because they had become more popular than the main act. The international breakthrough came with the live version of “No Woman, No Cry” (which is Jamaican patois for “Woman, Don’t Cry”, not what many people think namely “There is no reason to cry when there’s no woman”) in 1975, their first big hit outside Jamaica.

There is a Zurich connection as well: It was after a Bob Marley concert at the Hallenstadion in the end of May 1980 when fans coming from the concert joined forces with young people protesting against the city’s decision to let the Opera house use the “Red Factory” during renovations. The youngsters had tried to secure a cultural space of their own there for a long time, and that night they clashed hard with police at the first of what is these days known as the “Opernhauskrawalle”.

Marley died a year later from cancer.

I wanted a video from back then, which is why you’re seeing a recording from the Rainbow Theatre, London – performed the day after the release of his probably most acclaimed album “Exodus” – instead of the better known breakthrough version that received a much newer video two years ago.