'It was heartbreaking': the day Bob Marley played for Crystal Palace

What turned out to be the last Garden Party in Crystal Palace, on 7 June 1980, had already been pretty memorable. Joe Jackson was booed off stage after swearing at the audience before several people fell into the lake when a branch broke off a tree. But like most in the crowd that day 40 years ago, a teenage Rob Baker had come to see one act: Bob Marley and the Wailers.

“For the last song, the sun came out,” says Baker, who travelled from his home in Salisbury to south London for the concert. “And he came back on stage to play Redemption Song with just an acoustic guitar. It was a very special moment because no one had heard it before.”

Marley was about to release Uprising, his final studio album before his death less than a year later. “Bob hadn’t worked for a while but none of us knew he had a tumour,” recalls Garden Party promoter Harvey Goldsmith. “I spent two or three months trying to convince him and we were just thrilled to have Bob Marley come and play in the end. It was a fantastic concert because his music lent itself perfectly to a lovely day in Crystal Palace Bowl. He was a little bit slower but nobody really knew why.”

The bowl was originally established in the park as part of the Pageant of London during the Festival of Empire in 1911. Down the hill from where the old Crystal Palace had moved 60 years earlier before it burned down in November 1936, and bordered by the motor racing circuit that hosted unofficial grand prix for several decades afterwards, the natural amphitheatre was renowned for its excellent acoustics but had been exclusively used for classical music until Goldsmith was approached by the director of entertainment at the old Greater London Council in 1970 to host pop concerts there.

“The lake at the front of the stage really set me wondering,” he says. Starting with a giant rubber octopus that emerged from the water at the finale of Pink Floyd’s set at the inaugural Garden Party a year later, it became renowned for extravagant backdrops and dramatic entrances from artists, including Keith Moon arriving – dressed as a pirate – via a helicopter and hovercraft in 1972, only to fall in the lake as he disembarked.

Goldsmith also remembers that the park’s proximity to the BBC’s main transmitter for the south of England wreaked havoc with the sound. “Whatever was on radio at the time would come through into the amps – so you would be watching Pink Floyd, and suddenly you would hear Johnners’ commentary on Test Match Special! It was very funny but took us a couple of years before we finally figured out how to stop it happening.”

Faces, Elton John, the Beach Boys, Lou Reed and Eric Clapton had graced the parties by the end of the 1970s, and Marley would be the last big star to perform there, as Goldsmith admits he struggled to finance such big artists at a venue that could only hold 15,000 people.

“It was a really good place to go for music,” says Chris Bohn, editor-in-chief of the Wire, who reviewed the 1980 concert for the NME. “I’d seen Bob Marley a few times and his concerts were really something. But there seemed to be a tiredness about his performance that day. Maybe in retrospect it had something to do with his illness. It’s heartbreaking to see the pictures of that day because he doesn’t look the same.”

Marley would return to the UK later in the summer for four more concerts as part of his mammoth 38-date tour of Europe and the US to promote Uprising, performing his last British concert at Stafford’s New Bingley Hall on 13 July. He played his final live show in Pittsburgh on 23 September, having collapsed while out jogging in Central Park, New York, two days earlier, and died of cancer eight months later.

Yet while several tracks performed at Crystal Palace, including Could You Be Loved and Pimpers Paradise would become part of the Marley legend, at first Bohn wasn’t so sure about Uprising’s most famous song and promised in his NME review to “wait to hear it properly before making up my mind”.

“I think it’s great, even if I haven’t heard it for a while,” he admits, 40 years on. “Redemption Song is one of the records that helped to create the superstars he and the Wailers would have become if only Marley had lived.”

As for Crystal Palace Bowl, it is now known disparagingly by locals as “the rusty laptop” after years of neglect that followed a redesign in 1997, although Bromley council has recently started working with a local action group to find “creative and community-minded business proposals” to reactivate the concert platform. For Baker, now an author living in south London, however, it will always have a special place in his heart. “At least I can say that I saw Bob Marley in the flesh, which a lot of people can’t.”