Bob Marley’s Exodus – 30th anniversary

Exodus, the quintessential Bob Marley album, first released 30 years ago, has been treated with respect by record label Island/Universal.

Having released re-mastered single CD and De Luxe 2CD versions in 2001, Island have just released no fewer than five 30th Anniversary versions of the great album: single CD, CD/DVD, vinyl LP and – here’s the interesting bit – CD/SD memory card version and CD/USB memory stick version.

The CD/DVD combo looks like the pick of the crop.

Exodus: Bob Marley and The Wailers, a new book (ed Richard Williams, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, £25), published on Thursday, gathers together a collection of articles on the seminal album. Looks interesting.

Bob Marley’s Exodus, Sunday’s Arena programme on BBC2, was disappointing. It made the schoolboy error of playing the album tracks under a series of ill-chosen, unrelated contemporary news clips. And compounded the error by inserting an endless series of inconsequential comments on the album by anonymous wo/men in the street.

The leitmotif of clips from a ceremony dedicating a plaque on a block of flats off London’s Tottenham Court Rd., where Marley briefly lived, was the most squirm-inducing bit of TV I’ve seen for ages.

The Arena documentary was nowhere near as good as three earlier Marley TV documentaries I have on VHS tape: largely unwatchable; a missed opportunity.


Gerry Smith