News of Rolling Stones front man Mick Jagger holidaying in Port Antonio, Portland has once again put the spotlight on Jamaica as a tourism destination.

Mick Jagger is familiar with the Caribbean and has often been seen watching England take on the West Indies, particularly in Barbados. He is a big cricket enthusiast.

Furthermore, the Rolling Stones spent time in Jamaica making their album Goats Head Soup which made it to Number One and had the hit Angie. The Stones spent time working on it at Dynamic Sounds studio in Kingston in 1972.

Of that time, legendary guitarist Keith Richards said: “Jamaica was one of the few places that would let us all in. By that time about the only country that I was allowed to exist in was Switzerland which was damn boring for me, at least for the first year, because I didn’t like to ski. Nine countries kicked me out, thank you very much, so it was a matter of how to keep this thing together.”

Richard recalls having a good time in Jamaica and noting  the professionalism and ingenuity of Jamaican studio music makers.

He continued: “The album itself didn’t take that long but we recorded an awful lot of tracks. There were not only Jamaicans involved  but also percussion players who came from places like Guyana, a travelling pool of guys who worked in the studios. It was interesting to be playing in this totally different atmosphere. Mikey Chung, the engineer at Dynamic, for example was a Chinese man – you realise how much Jamaica is a multi-ethnic environment.”

With recording completed, Richards and his family decided to stay in Jamaica and moved to Mammee Bay on the north coast. He fell in with the Rasta community in Steer Town and bought a house there close to Ocho Rios, one designed by Andrea Maffessanti, that he still owns.

Recounting his days in Steer Town in his autobiography Life, Richard writes: “I respond instinctively to kindness with no side attached. In those days when I hung out in Steer Town, I could walk in any door and my every need would be satisfied. I was treated as family and I acted as family. Not acted! I behaved like family, became family. Me sweep the yard, me mash up coconuts, me make chalice for the sacramental smoking. Man, I was more Rasta than they. I’d fallen in with just the right bunch of guys, and their old ladies.

“It was another one of those across-the-tracks things – just being accepted and welcomed into something I didn’t know existed.”