The darkness on the stage was punctured only by the red lights on the amps. All around me Caribbean voices shouted excitedly and the inactivity seemed to last an age until the stage-lights came up and Bob Marley and the Wailers exploded into ‘Trenchtown Rock’

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That was back in June 1976 at the Hammersmith Odeon (now the Apollo) and Bob was back in town to consolidate the tremendous impact he and the band had made at their epic gigs at the Lyceum in the Strand in the previous July when police had struggled to clear thousands of ticketless fans. Check out the live album (‘Live!’) or the classic single ‘No Woman, No Cry’ to get a taste of the atmosphere. Reggae and its derivatives are now rightly enjoyed as serious music but until Bob emerged in the mid-Seventies most people outside of the Caribbean scene were…