Concert Background
Since he was elected Prime Minister of Jamaica in 1972, Michael Manley pursued a socialist agenda intended to redistribute wealth by nationalizing the country's major export industries. His agenda proved to be financially unsustainable, as his policies deterred foreign investment in Jamaica. Beginning in 1974, he was opposed by the more conservative Edward Seaga of the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP), and the two politicians hired local gangsters to help them increase their hold on power.
Ironically, the idea for the One Love Peace Concert came from two such gangsters from rival political factions, who happened to be locked up in the same jail cell together and who both wanted to alleviate the violence. Claudius 'Claudie' Massop (JLP) and Aston 'Bucky' Marshall (PNP) decided that the best means to bring the country together was to use music as a uniting factor and organize a major concert. Quickly realizing that Bob Marley, living in exile in London, was a critical element upon which their success depended, Massop flew to London after being released from jail to convince Marley to perform at the event. Marley accepted the invitation, and the concert was Marley’s first performance in Jamaica since he was almost assassinated there in 1976.
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Famous quotes containing the words concert and/or background:
“Science is unflinchingly deterministic, and it has begun to force its determinism into morals. On some shining tomorrow a psychoanalyst may be put into the box to prove that perjury is simply a compulsion neurosis, like beating time with the foot at a concert or counting the lampposts along the highway.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)