The first time I arrived in Kingston, Jamaica, I was prepared for disappointment. It was 1996, and the city could hardly be expected to look as it had in The Harder They Come, the classic reggae film of the early 1970s. Jimmy Cliff had played a young country boy who arrives on a bus with dreams of making a hit record. He is robbed within minutes and his mother, taken in by a cruel and licentious preacher, ripped off by a record-company boss, and drawn into the ganja trade in the ghettoes, before getting a gun and going on the run, shooting and singing his way to fame.
I arrived with my boyfriend, to stay with his Jamaican mother not far from the bus stop where the opening scenes of the film were shot.
It felt as if we'd walked right on to the set. We reached her house through a dusty commotion of buses and handcarts, potholes and goats. And, as she greeted us with folded arms, I took in our surroundings.
Biblical quotations had been daubed in big red letters all over the walls and between them were dotted various examples of really quite hardcore pornography. That evening, his mother took us to an open-air church ceremony where, amid the confusion of people speaking in tongues, somebody managed to sell us drugs.
Kingston has changed a bit in the decade since then, but it is still recognizable today from The Harder They Come. Many tourists are put off by its violent reputation, but the capital is actually no more dangerous for foreigners than anywhere else in Jamaica, and in countless visits I've never encountered trouble. It isn't a beautiful city, but tourists who head straight for the resorts miss all the entertaining chaos of its color, history, drama and, above all, its music.
The best place to begin is Strawberry Hill, an 18th-century colonial house perched high above the city in the Blue Mountains belonging to Chris Blackwell, the record producer who discovered Bob Marley and founded Island Records. Marley convalesced here after being shot in 1976 and it is now an extravagantly elegant hotel, the cool mountain air as pure as its crisp white linen and polished mahogany floors.
The 12 Georgian-style cottages scattered around the Great House look out over velvety emerald peaks rearing and dipping in 360
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