No really. International supermodels do not, in the usual run of things, make a beeline for me across crowded bars. So when a six-foot vision in blue does just that I’m reduced to jabbering inanity (to her credit she doesn’t miss a beat). “Hi, I’m Damaris…” she says.
“Amazing heels," I stammer.
“… and I’ll be hosting the festival on Saturday night.”
This is my first encounter with Damaris Lewis, Sports Illustrated swimsuit model, dancer, actress and bestie of Prince, but I will see plenty more of her over the next three days. As she has just intimated, not only is she one of the hosts of the St Kitts Music Festival, which I’ve flown 4,000 miles to attend, but she is also a committed ambassador for the tiny Caribbean island of St Kitts, where it happens, and loves bigging the place up to foreign media.
On the 10-hour direct flight from Gatwick (there are two a week) I have already genned up on the basics. St Kitts and Nevis is a federation of two islands (though I confine myself to the former, the main island, on this trip) that would fit comfortably inside the old English
Shaped on a map like pieces of fried chicken – respectively, a drumstick and a nugget – in the Leeward chain of the West Indies, it is a former British colony with a rich cultural history to go with its more obvious Caribbean charms of sun, sand and affable people. This is the festival’s 19th year and while it may not have the recognition factor of, say, Glastonbury – which always takes place simultaneously, at the end of June – the cognoscenti know where they’d prefer to be.
The English jazz saxophonist, Courtney Pine, for instance, is unlikely to be found in a muddy field in Somerset for as long as St Kitts is on the calendar. “I’d rather be here than getting rained on,” he tells me on the first morning of the festival, when I run into him in the Marriott Resort where we are both staying.
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