'Under the Volcano' The paradise that broke up The Police and comforted

The camera hovers overhead, training its unblinking eye on an empty pool near a neglected home that crumbles into a mountainside in the middle of the Caribbean Sea. Much like the haunting undersea images of the R. M. S. Titanic, the opening shot suggests that this faded house, like the ill-fated British liner, once was home to brilliant parties, dazzling people and epic moments. And so it was. The new documentary “Under the Volcano” (in theaters and streaming on Apple TV, Vudu, Google Play) brings back heady '80s days. It was a time when recording budgets were limitless and everyone who was anyone – the Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, Stevie Wonder, The Police, Marvin Gaye, Dire Straits, Duran Duran, Elton John, Earth Wind & Fire, Jimmy Buffett – flew or sailed to AIR Studios Montserrat. More private home than industrial studio, the idyllic ocean-view estate, built by Beatles producer Sir George Martin as a way to fire the imaginations of musicians, held much magic until a one-two punch – Hurricane Hugo in 1989 and the Soufrière Hills volcano eruption in 1995 – silenced it all. In “Under the Volcano,” artists struggle to define their AIR experiences. Dire Straits' Mark Knopfler said “it was like going into a dream.” Elton John’s drummer Nigel Olsson said thinking of AIR “makes me tear up, you can never go back and get the same energy.” But Martin says it best with philosophical simplicity: “Everything has a period. You bring something out of nothing, and it always goes back to nothing.”Today, Montserrat (population 5,000) is a lush 10-by-7-mile gem in the British West Indies that offers tourists a popular beach escape from city life. But four decades back, when AIR Studios was in its 1979-1989 heyday, the place was culturally off the map. Some musicians found the isolation restorative (Sting jogged to the studio, entranced by the volcano’s “presiding spirit”) and others grating (Lou Reed was annoyed by the ocean, sand and palms: “I need to hear traffic”)."Volcano" director Gracie Otto combines vintage videos with present-day interviews to conjure a once-in-a-lifetime place, a musical Shangri-La where Mick Jagger and Keith Richards rekindled their cooled friendship, Wonder jammed with locals into the wee hours and McCartney found solace days after the death of John Lennon. Among the tracks and albums recorded on its fabulously expensive Rupert Neve-designed mixing board: McCartney and Wonder’s duet “Ebony and Ivory,” Duran Duran’s “Rio,” Buffett’s aptly named “Volcano,” the Stones’ “Steel Wheels,” Dire Straits’ “Brothers in Arms” and John’s “Too Low for Zero.”But perhaps no album better defines both the highs and lows of recording on a fertile dot worthy of Robinson Crusoe than The Police’s final studio effort, 1983’s “Synchronicity.”The band had quickly risen from punk-ska upstarts to global superstars, and their relationships had frayed. The trio recorded in three separate rooms. Sting alerted his bandmates he was through with the group.


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Article Link: https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/movies/2021/08/20/under-the-volcano-documentary-paradise-where-stones-police-mccartney-recorded/8195976002/


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