A Fifty-Year Love Affair: Four Days in Jamaica with Crossfire Hurricane | Live

Some love affairs announce themselves; others just refuse to end. The Rolling Stones‘ relationship with Jamaica is emphatically the second kind. It began in exile, late 1972, US visas denied, the band routed into Montego Bay and down to Kingston to cut Goats Head Soup at Dynamic Sounds, and across the next fifty years it never once loosened its grip. Reggae 45s ferried into nightclubs from New York to London. Keith Richards going cold turkey at Casa Joya on the north coast, pulled into all-night drumming with the Rastafari brethren of Steer Town. Peter Tosh signed to Rolling Stones Records off the back of an incendiary One Love Peace Concert set. The rhythm was absorbed, then re-released with interest. Crossfire Hurricane, the super-premium rum made with the band and co-created by Global Rum Ambassador Ian Burrell, is the newest verse of that long song, and this July it flew a small group of press out to read it at source.

The brief, stated plainly, was to recreate the emotional texture of the Stones’ island years: late nights, music-led conversation, cultural proximity, unforced intimacy, all inside settings big enough to hold a group and warm enough to earn the comparison. Four nights, one base: the Jamaica Inn in Ocho Rios, a heritage property that deals in barefoot luxury and golden-era cool without ever raising its voice about it.

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The liquid, first

Every rum lives or dies by what’s in the glass, and here the pour did a lot of the talking before a distillery ever came into view. The proposition is genuinely new, and the story, separate to the Stones, is fascinating. Crossfire Hurricane is the first brand to unite rums from four of Jamaica’s most storied distilleries, Hampden Estate, Long Pond, Worthy Park and Clarendon; four house styles, four different voices, folded into one. It’s 100% Jamaican, pot and column distillates married together, the island’s signature high-ester funk threading through tropical fruit, depth and balance. No added sugar, ever, a line Ian delivered less as a slogan than as a principle.

The name, Crossfire Hurricane, is lifted straight from the opening bar of ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’, and the bottle wears the famous Stones’ tongue-and-lips logo at its centre, haloed by radiating soundwaves. Two expressions carry the range: Gold (£36), the versatile mixer, and the Reserve (£45), a slower, sipping proposition. Both are on shelves at Tesco now, with more retailers to come.

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Day One; Welcome to Jack-Rock

We landed into Ocho Rios in the late afternoon, and the trip declared its intentions immediately, a rum in hand before the bags were unpacked. ‘Welcome to Jamrock’ opened in the Jamaica Inn’s private garden over a welcome cocktail before spilling into the restaurant for some modern Jamaican cooking built on incredibly fresh seafood and local produce, Crossfire Hurricane running quietly alongside the serves. A characteristically smooth landing; the kind of first night that tells you the people behind it understand pacing.

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Day Two: Keith’s St Ann

Day two went straight for the mythology. St Ann is Keith’s beloved: the parish where he disappeared up at Casa Joya in the early seventies, this was Keith Richards’ Plato’s Cave. He went cold turkey, refreshed his mind, and fell in with the drummers and chanters of nearby Steer Town who would become the Wingless Angels. After a chilled morning, enjoying a beachfront view from Jamaica Inn, with the waves crashing lightly, we rolled out before midday and drove through Steer Town itself for context; not a stop so much as a deliberate passage through the community at the centre of the story.

Then it was up into the hills to Stush in the Bush, the farm-to-table vegan restaurant run by Chris and Lisa that landed on a list of North America’s fifty best. It absolutely earns that title. These are flavourful, innovative concoctions, all made with fresh product off the land. Chris toured us through the farm, plucking pineapples off the vine, slicing them up, sharing them out. Lunch stretched across the whole afternoon, the menu underscored with Crossfire Hurricane. The Bush is exactly the kind of hillside hush and seclusion that reads instantly as the thing the Stones kept coming back for. A representative from each of the four distilleries pulled up a chair, walking us through what their spirit brings to the blend.

The evening delivered another fantastic meal. Dinner was a Jamaican Bar Night at Miss T’s Kitchen in Ocho Rios: ackee arancini with scotch bonnet aioli, curry goat and oxtail with rice and peas, a rum-flambéed snapper, and a Crossfire Rum Punch to wash it down. Good as the food was, it wasn’t the only headline. We were greeted by a performance from the surviving members of the Wingless Angels, the same Rastafari lineage that runs straight back to those Steer Town covenant sessions Keith once sat inside. Fifty years on, the drumming that first pulled him in was in the room with us, and you could feel the history close the distance.

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Day Three: Rum and Trelawny culture, a night on the beach

If day two was music and myth, day three was craft. It opened with an early-morning rum tasting led by Ian Burrell, a taster of the heritage we’d soon see for ourselves, then a two-hour run to Hampden Estate in Trelawny, one of the towering names in high-ester Jamaican rum. The late morning moved through an estate walk weighted toward history, process and terroir: a guide led us across the grounds, past the machines that turn cane into liquid and the back-end graft of a generation-spanning trade. In between, the team had the England v Argentina match running. If ever there was a time to be in a distillery for England fans, it was July 15th.

Then, onto the evening. ‘dRum & Stories’ took over the Jamaica Inn beach at seven: tiki torches, the sea folding in softly, vintage sound-system boxes stacked in the sand, Goat Head Soup cooking live over open flame, a wink at the record and, for the avoidance of doubt, a serious bowl. Then the Niyabinghi drummers, demonstrating the form in its truest state, hand-drumming and chants pulling a straight line back to the covenant sessions Keith once sat inside at Steer Town. The high point arrived acapella: Eric Donaldson, the reggae great whose ‘Cherry Oh Baby’ Charlie Watts once carried into the band (the Stones cut their own version for ‘Black and Blue’), singing unaccompanied under the torches, that lilting voice carried by a light breeze. Around it all were storytellers with real ties to the band’s seventies orbit, recollections surfacing between courses, the first-hand kind no press deck can fake. This was the evening’s, and the trip’s, whole thesis: proximity, intimacy, storytelling, knowledge sharing. No coincidence that the full picture came together on the final night.

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Close

Crossfire Hurricane could have leaned on the logo and coasted. Or on the weight of the Stones. But it chose the harder, more convincing route: to prove the brand is actually rooted in the island, in its distilleries and its drummers, its hillside kitchens and its roadside bars. Born out of exile, crafted in Jamaica, as the bottle has it. Trace that fifty-year thread from Steer Town to Trelawny and the rum holds up to the story it’s telling; so, four days deep, did the trip. Batch 0001 clearly has plenty left to say, and if this was the opening verse, the rest of the record is absolutely worth waiting on.

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Words: Damola Oladapo