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PHOTOGRAPHS: HOLLY MARIE-CATO


JAMAICA Pages 2-3


RIOJA Page 4


BATH Page 6


Island spirit


Jamaica is in the throes of a creative rebirth. Six decades after independence from the British, the Caribbean island is looking to a brighter future. Words: Stephen Phelan


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Reggae singer and tour guide Ricky Chaplin greets me at Tuff Gong studios with a fist bump and the word “Rastafari”, affirming his religion in lieu of a hello. He wears his dreadlocks coiled up inside a baggy tam, crocheted in the colours of the faith — yellow for the gold of Ethiopia, green for Jamaica’s mystic forests, red for the blood of the slaves transported here to Jamaica. His Trenchtown Lions football shirt has Bob Marley’s name on the back. “His energy is still right here,”


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says Ricky, standing amid dormant musical instruments and unplugged amps in the very rehearsal room where Marley and his band Te Wailers worked on some of their best-known songs, including One Love. Ricky tries to reconstruct their process: “Sitting and strumming over there, Bob Marley sings ‘one’. Te next one in the circle sings ‘love’. Te next sings ‘one heart’. Ten they all sing ‘let’s get together and feel all right’,” he says. “Tat one-two beat is the sound of your heart.” Tis is my first time on the island,


exactly 60 years after it became an independent nation. Landing in the tropical autumn of 2022, at the tail end of hurricane season, I’m too late


for the anniversary celebrations and too early for the full reawakening of the tourist trade after a protracted spell of pandemic isolation. Downtown Kingston seems half-


deserted, though I’m told it’s been that way for decades, most of the city’s activity having long since moved uptown. Local nonprofit arts organisation Kingston Creative is trying to bring it back with new attractions and incentives centred around fresh street art that it has commissioned along Water Lane. Bob Marley is painted on the


walls, of course, alongside Jimmy Cliff, Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry and other pioneers from that period of riots, raids and block parties just before and after independence. One full corner is wrapped in a pop art mural by Caribbean artist Shanique Stewart, rendering contemporary national icons into cartoons, from Olympic gold medallist sprinter Usain Bolt to signature lager Red Stripe. Shanique has titled that piece ‘Jamaica Is Not A Real Place’, quoting a viral phrase now in common use around the island the meaning of which seems to vary. “In this context, I think it’s meant to sound positive,” says


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