🇲🇸 Montserrat Radio
Montserrat's story runs deeper than its size suggests. AIR Studios drew the world's biggest rock and pop acts to the island in the 1980s, and its St Patrick's Festival — marking both Irish heritage and the 1768 slave uprising — is unlike anything else in the Caribbean. Since the volcano reshaped the island in the 1990s, radio has been its lifeline, carrying news, calypso, soca and gospel. Stream Montserrat live on J.A.W Online.
The Emerald Isle of the Caribbean
Montserrat's Irish connection is genuine rather than marketing. In the seventeenth century the island was settled substantially by Irish Catholics — some indentured, some fleeing persecution or transported after Cromwell's campaigns — alongside enslaved Africans. The shamrock appears on the territory's flag and on the immigration stamp, Irish surnames are common, and the accent retains traces that visitors from Ireland claim to recognise.
It is a small volcanic island in the Leeward chain, a British Overseas Territory, and until the mid-1990s it was quiet, green and largely undisturbed.
AIR Studios and the years when the world came to record
In the late 1970s the producer George Martin built AIR Studios Montserrat, and for a decade the island hosted an extraordinary run of recording sessions. Dire Straits made Brothers in Arms there. The Police recorded Synchronicity. Elton John, Stevie Wonder, Paul McCartney, Duran Duran, Black Sabbath and many others worked on the island, drawn by a world-class facility in a place with nothing to distract them.
Hurricane Hugo destroyed the studio at the end of the 1980s and it never reopened. The ruins are still there. For a decade, though, a Caribbean island of 12,000 people was one of the most important addresses in popular music, and Montserratians have not forgotten it.
The volcano
The Soufrière Hills volcano had been dormant throughout recorded history when it began erupting in the mid-1990s. Pyroclastic flows destroyed Plymouth, the capital, burying it under metres of ash and rock, and the southern half of the island — including the airport and most of the infrastructure — was declared an exclusion zone that remains in force.
Roughly two-thirds of the population left, most to the United Kingdom, which offered residency rights. The population fell from around 12,000 to under 5,000. A new town has been built in the north at Little Bay, and Plymouth remains the only abandoned capital city in the world with a functioning government elsewhere on the same island.
This is not distant history. It shapes everything about contemporary Montserrat, and it is the backdrop to almost every conversation on the island's radio.
St Patrick's Festival
Montserrat is one of very few places outside Ireland where Saint Patrick's Day is a public holiday, but the March festival marks something more complicated than Irish heritage. On the same date in 1768, enslaved Montserratians planned an uprising, timing it for a day when the planters would be distracted by their own celebrations. The plot was betrayed and the leaders executed.
The modern festival holds both histories together — a week of masquerade, string band, calypso, freedom songs and commemoration, with the national dress and the kite-flying and the food. It is a genuinely unusual piece of cultural work: a celebration that refuses to simplify what it is celebrating.
ZJB and the diaspora
Radio Montserrat, ZJB, is the national station, and during the volcanic crisis it was the island's central institution — carrying evacuation notices, ash-fall warnings, scientific updates and the daily business of a community coming apart and reassembling.
It still fills that role for a population split between the island and abroad. More Montserratians live in the United Kingdom — particularly in London — than on Montserrat itself, with further communities in Antigua and North America. For them the station is not a music service but the thread back to a place many left involuntarily, and it carries masquerade and string band and the St Patrick's programming that exists nowhere else.
Live stations from Montserrat (1)
- ZJB Radio Caribbean Music Learn more about ZJB Radio