THE RASTA'S HISTORY

The militant Malcolm X to Bob Marley's Martin Luther King Jr, Peter Tosh would take to the stage brandishing an M16-shaped guitar, clad in a karate uniform indicative of his black-belt skills. Nicknamed The Stepping Razor, the six-foot-four-inch former Wailer cut an imposing dash. But was that the whole story? Rich Davenport gets tough

- Rich Davenport

The Wailers' international breakthrough in 1973, with the classic albums Catch A Fire and Burnin', came on the back of a decade-long career in Jamaica, where Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, and Bunny Wailer had been headline-news since their debut single, Simmer Down, shot to the top of the national chart in 1964. Since forming the band as teenagers in Kingston's Trench Town, the trio's development before signing with Island Records in 1972 mirrored the evolution of the roots reggae sound they'd pioneered, from ska to rocksteady and onto roots touchstone Soul Rebels in 1970. The departure of Wailer and Tosh in 1974, and the subsequent rebranding as Bob Marley & The Wailers, often saw the other two founders' vital contributions overlooked thereafter, as would also be the case for their post-Wailers solo catalogues, despite both releasing albums that matched Marley's best-known works.

A month before his death in May 1981, Jamaica's prime minister, Edward Seaga, awarded Marley the Order Of Merit, and the extended Marley clan have since kept his profile high. Tosh, too, would receive the Order Of Merit, but it would take until 2012 to arrive, a quarter-century after he'd been murdered at his home on 11 September 1987, during a robbery led by Dennis “Leppo” Lobban, a man he'd known in Trench Town, to whom he'd repeatedly given financial help.

Similarly, it would take many years for Tosh's legacy to receive the long-overdue reappraisal that has been ongoing these last two decades, not only with regard to his music and activism, but also in terms of the long-perpetuated, one-dimensional perception of him asa fierce, confrontational, deadly-serious firebrand, and vocal marijuana advocate.