Film-maker known for his world
music documentaries, in particular his Beats of the Heart series
Jeremy Marre, who has died aged 76, was a
British documentary maker specialising in films about popular music of every possible kind. Widely travelled, and with eclectic taste, he had a lengthy career that included adventurous documentaries about music in Africa, the Americas, the
UK and the US, and profiles of artists such as Phil Spector, Roy Orbison, Youssou N’Dour and Count Basie.
His first major success was Roots Rock Reggae (1977), which grew out of an earlier commission on the British reggae scene for the ITV arts programme Aquarius. Deciding that he needed to go to Jamaica to fully understand the music, Marre “scraped together some money” and travelled to Kingston, filming in lawless areas of the city. Threatened by some locals who accused him of being a CIA agent, he convinced them he was English only after they quizzed him about cricket. He returned with historic footage of artists including Bob Marley, Sly & Robbie and Jimmy Cliff, but still had difficulty in placing the film. As Marre explained in an interview with fRoots magazine in 2014, “the
BBC said it was boring, and you can’t mix music and politics, while PBS in America turned it down as communist propaganda. But it won a documentary prize at Cannes and then the BBC wanted to show it. It was different to anything, with no presenter and no commentary.” It is now regarded as a classic film on the genre.