The first recording The Wailers made after Bob Marley’s death was with Benjamin Zephaniah. Nelson Mandela asked him to host his Royal Albert Hall concert in 1996.
Banksy provided artwork for his 2005 album Naked. Stormzy joined him on stage in 2018. The creator of Peaky Blinders, Steven Knight, cast him as Jimmy Jesus.
It’s a particular kind of poet who lives that kind of life. And Benjamin Zephaniah, who died yesterday aged 65, was a very particular kind of poet. Growing up in Handsworth, Birmingham – he called it the Jamaican capital of Europe – he was 10 when he fled his abusive father with his mother.
Turned away from women’s refuges because they were black they ended up homeless for a while. His first semi-public performance was in his mother’s church, where one of the pastors gave him the name Zephaniah, or “treasured by God.”
He had dyslexia, was expelled at 13 and ended up in borstal. He was already becoming known locally for his dub poetry when he was imprisoned for affray and burglary.
Moving to London aged 22, Zephaniah’s first poetry book was published by a workers’ co-op and he supported The Clash on their London Calling tour. It was on this tour that your correspondent saw him live at the now-demolished Lewisham Odeon, rolling through effortless cadences to a mob of pogoing white skinheads with the Clash skanking at the back of the stage.
A very particular kind of poet. He once said he’d been called a sell-out for “selling too many books, for writing books for children, for performing at the Royal Albert Hall, for going on Desert Island Discs, and for appearing on the Parkinson show” but, when offered an OBE in 2003, he refused it with a dignified rebuttal: “I woke up on the morning of November 13 wondering how the government could be overthrown and what could replace it, and then I noticed a letter from the prime minister’s office… Me? I thought. Benjamin Zephaniah OBE – no way Mr Blair, no way Mrs Queen. I am profoundly anti-empire.”
Photograph Tom Jenkins/Getty Images