Jammin after all these years

All the light seems to fade from Damian Marley’s eyes as, 20 minutes into our conversation, I get around to posing what, ultimately, is the only question anybody ever wishes to ask of him: how does it feel to grow up the son of Bob Marley?

“Honestly, it’s not easy for me to answer that, because it’s all I’ve ever been,” says a weary Marley, whose patter might sound stoned and meandering were it not for the directness of his gaze. “There wasn’t a specific day when I woke up and thought, ‘I’m Bob Marley’s son’. It’s always been part of who I am, so it’s never been strange to me.”
Nonetheless, it was only in his teens that Damian (aged just two when his father died) started to gain a real inkling of who Bob Marley was and what he represented.
“For as long as I can remember, I’ve known he was a singer,” Damian proffers, “But it wasn’t until I got older that I realised he wasn’t just some Mick Jagger type, that he stood for something else, something deeper.”
We are speaking at the Oxegen festival, where Marley and his crew are enjoying some refreshments in the airless environs of the backstage area. Several hours earlier, delivering a soulful, impassioned reggae set to a packed tent, the singer demonstrated that, from the tips of his boots to the frayed ends of his shoulder-length dreadlocks, he can lay justifiable claim to Bob Marley’s legacy.
Soldiering in the footsteps of a famous parent is, obviously, a chore, one that has overwhelmed countless artists – among them another Marley scion, Ziggy. The difference is that Damian has at least one cast-iron anthem up his (tie-dyed) sleeve: ‘Welcome To Jamrock’ is an unflinching tirade against Jamaican street violence, and the equal of anything in his father’s songbook.
A global hit, the track has certainly put Marley’s name up in lights, not least back in Jamaica, where the tourist board was, putting it mildly, incensed at the track’s explicit critique of Kingston gang culture.
“I’m thankful it was ‘Jamrock’ which opened things up for me,” he resumes. “I want to be known as a political artist no less than as a popular artist. I want to be a force for change, for improving people’s lives.”
In the flesh, Marley is physically striking, with huge liquid eyes and petite, almost china doll features. For this he may thank good genes rather than luck: his mother is the Canadian former model Cindy Breakspeare, the 1976 Miss World. She was, of course, far from the only woman in his father’s life (Bob left his wife Rita for her in 1976); Damian shares his bloodline with a dozen half-siblings.
“Yes my father had lots of kids,” he says, flashing a toothy grin. “Lots and lots of them. For that, we should give thanks, don’t you think? Nature wants us to be bountiful, my brother.”