Under the Volcano tells the story of legendary AIR Studios on Montserrat. Built by famed Beatles producer Sir George Martin, this state-of-the-art recording studio was located on a secluded and beautiful Caribbean island with a dormant but looming volcano. Throughout the 1980s, the studio attracted many of the biggest names in the music business: Jimmy Buffet, Sir Paul McCartney, Sir Elton John, The Police, Duran Duran, Dire Straits, and The Rolling Stones. Many of these artists recorded their biggest albums there, but a combination of changing times and natural elements lead to the end of the studio. In 1989, Hurricane Hugo devastated the island of Montserrat and the heavily damaged studio was forced to close. A couple of years later, the island’s formerly dormant volcano activated again and further devastated the island. The studio now stands as a ruin and symbol of a bygone era in popular culture: When analog recording and the art of the album reigned supreme. 

Featuring unearthed archival footage and new interviews with some of the biggest artists who recorded at AIR Studios (including Sting, Stewart Copeland, Mark Knopfler, Jimmy Buffet, and many others), Under the Volcano is a definitive account of this special place and era of music. When I asked writer-producer Cody Greenwood and writer-director Gracie Otto about the origins of the project, a personal history and connection to the island was revealed:

“I had grown up going down to Montserrat,” Greenwood explains. “My mom was a painter there in the seventies. And also George Martin came down. So the island was someplace I’d go for Christmas holidays. Pre-volcano and post-volcano I’d be down there, collecting relics with my dad, and then became a documentary filmmaker over many years and [eventually] decided that I should make a film about it — which was quite a crazy quest — and I went and shot an interview with Sting. He was the first person to come on board, who was wonderful, and then I brought Gracie on board a couple of years later.”

“Cody brought me into the process around the time she was close to getting it financed,” Otto says, “with this incredible 70-page research doc of every band that had ever gone down there and every artist to record, which to me was a lot of months of catching up to her speed — to get an understanding of the place — because obviously, it wasn’t my time, the eighties, or Cody’s either. So I guess we kind of started together in 2018 and started shooting in 2019, and then it was like this whirlwind. I think we interviewed the first twelve people in six days in London for some of the key interviews, and then we went down to Montserrat, and we were editing at the same time. So it was a kind of a wild travel experience as well, which you wouldn’t be able to do today. We were lucky.”

Sir Paul McCartney, Sir Elton John, and The Rolling Stones all recorded comeback albums at the studio (1982’s Tug of War, 1983’s Too Low for Zero, and 1989’s Steel Wheels respectively), inspiring me to ask about the therapeutic nature of Montserrat, which gave these artists the space and environment to reclaim themselves.

“I think how the Stones ended up doing their comeback album,” Greenwood says, “was Keith Richards was down there and said, ‘If there is anywhere that we can go and come back together as a band, it’s going to be the island of Montserrat.’ [He saw] how tranquil it was and that they really couldn’t escape each other; and there were no distractions for Mick Jagger. And with Elton’s band, they were not having a very good time in Paris, where there were a lot of excesses, so I think for many bands of the time it was, ‘How can we go back to the roots of creating music and spending time together?’ I think what’s really beautiful about Montserrat is when these bands went down — for example, Elton John’s band, they all bonded so much that they’re all still touring together to this day. It was like this place that really solidified the relationships within the band. I think that has a lot to do with cutting out distractions and focussing solely on music and creation. I think that’s one of the most beautiful things about the place.”

“I think it’s also a testament to those bands,” Otto says. “It’s funny watching some of that archive when people are like, ‘Is this the last time the Rolling Stones are going on tour?’ And to see and meet those bands now and see that many of them are still together and — when you think about it — it’s like twenty-five years post of them singing the hit songs and touring, and loving being around each other. It’s also a testament to the music that came out of there. Those songs are still people’s favorite songs of all time, and they still stand the test of time with young generations now. So I found that incredible. And then obviously there were bands like the Police that had an interesting arc because they had two different experiences down there, and decided by the end that they didn’t want to be a band anymore, but could recognize the fact that isolation and their three strong personalities — and the fights and everything that went on between them — brought out the best in the music all these years later.”

One of the most enjoyable and intimate pieces of archival material in Under the Volcano is audio from an impromptu performance by Stevie Wonder at a local bar on Montserrat. Wonder was on the island recording his parts for what would become a number one hit duet with Paul McCartney, “Ebony and Ivory” (from the Tug of War album). In the unearthed audio, Wonder sings loosely and impressively and even namechecks McCartney sitting in the audience.

“The whole recording goes for an hour in total,” Greenwood reveals about the Stevie Wonder performance. “It’s incredible to listen to because it goes from him singing hit tracks to just generally riffing, to getting the audience to sing. It came about because my dad — when I was researching the film — was like, ‘I think in the attic we’ve got a recording of Stevie Wonder singing at a bar.’ And he pulled it out of the attic and we transcoded it and got it onto digital, and it was amazing. It was one of those gold moments. That audio recording is a gold mine that we were very lucky to stumble across.”

Another classic album recorded at the studio was Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms, spawning many of the band’s biggest hits. The album is also revealed to be one of the first digital recordings ever. This becomes ironic as the massive success of the album and this more cost-effective recording process would ultimately lead to the decline of studios like the one founded at Montserrat. 

“That really was the beginning of the end,” Greenwood says. “For us, the volcano became a metaphor of the film for the end of the analog era. So we realized that when the volcano went off, it tied in very neatly with the end of the analog era, the move into digital, and also really just a change of the guard in music from the old — Elton John, Eric Clapton, and all those guys — and shifted it into the Nirvana era. So that volcano for us was a metaphor that we constantly wanted to play with and I hope that comes across in the film. But yeah, there is definitely an irony there. Also, budgets were just changing so much towards the end of that studio. We were never going to see a time where recording artists got unlimited budget to go record in the Caribbean. So it was definitely a period of time in music history that will never be again.”

“It was a time and a place,” Otto says. “I think the people who recorded down there, and especially with the Neve console, it had that special kind of sound to it. I’m not from the music industry, but it reminds me of what it would’ve been like to shoot on film, and there was this respect for that format. Whereas with digital now it’s, ‘We’ll do another take, we’ll do another take,’ but part of the process of film was going to the lab and getting it developed, and that’s what I think it would’ve been like to be an artist back in that time.”

After the Rolling Stones recorded at Montserrat in 1989, the island was hit by Hurricane Hugo and a few years later the volcano began erupting. It would almost seem as if elemental forces were working in conjunction with changing times.

“I’m a big believer in everything has a time and a place,” Otto says, “and everything happens for a reason. I loved back in the day studying cause and effect, the butterfly effect or the moth effect, and all those things I’m a believer in. The easier part of the process was we always knew how the film was going to end. There’s always a struggle with documentaries where it starts off great, but how are you going to wind this up? Well, there was no more studio at that time.”

“I think the volcano is a bit of a reminder in the film of the impermanence of our existence,” Greenwood muses. ”And I think what we were trying to say as well, was, that music can transcend that. Sir George Martin is gone and the studio is gone, but we do have something that can evoke memories and emotion, and that it’s something that exists outside of elemental forces.” She adds, “Very early on in the research period we came across that footage of Sir George Martin where he says, ‘Everything has a period. You bring something out of nothing and it always goes back to nothing again.’ That was kind of the thesis of the whole film. So I feel like it was always going to end in that way. But what Sir George is saying does have a really positive message. It’s okay for things to have their time and sort of like that gust to dust message. That became our thesis and we stuck to that and it made sense for the story we were telling.”

Under the Volcano is now available On Demand and Digital.