As a new book profiling Miss Pat’s trailblazing career is released, Clare Considine meets the 83-year-old music mogul.

It’s 1961 in downtown Kingston, Jamaica. Inside the disused Charlie Moo’s restaurant on 17 North Parade, an eight-by-ten foot space throngs with punters and musicians, here to buy records imported from America alongside the obscure new sounds beginning to emerge from the island.

This is Randy’s Record Mart. Sound clashers pluck turntable needles from the walls, American wholesalers stop by for patty and soup that bubbles on the stove, barefoot musicians head through to the studio upstairs. At the centre of it all a 4’11, 25-year-old woman of Chinese-Indian heritage conducts the chaos from her spot behind the counter. She is Patricia Chin — soon and forever more to be lovingly renamed Miss Pat — and this is her empire. She even made the soup.

Sixty years on, Miss Pat is the founder and head honcho at VP Records: the world’s most prolific distributor, shop and label for reggae and dancehall, with offices in New York, Kingston, London, Miami, Rio and Tokyo. In 2015 she became the first ever woman to win the American Association of Independent Music’s Lifetime Achievement Award. She has helped launch and shape the careers of everyone from Lady Saw to Beenie Man, Bounty Killer to Sean Paul.

When I speak to Miss Pat she has just finished her new exercise routine, honed for lockdown, in her home on the border of Queens and Long Island. I ask if she remembers a moment when she knew big things would happen for her. “I never went to business school and I never see myself as a woman moving up in life,” she muses, Jamaican accent as strong as the day she left the island. “I don’t project too far because if I do, I lose what’s going on in the present.” There’s method in the mindfulness. But I can’t help but think that something deep inside Miss Pat always knew that she was destined for greatness.

For Jamaican music stans Miss Pat holds icon status. Stories shared about her are the type normally reserved for rags-to-riches businessmen. There’s the told-to-death tale of how she sold marbles in the school playground to earn her lunch money. There’s Kool Herc: “What Berry Gordy was to Motown Records; what Russell Simmons was to Def Jam Recordings….Patricia Chin is to the Reggae Industry and VP Records.” For a tiny island, Jamaica has an astronomical cultural clout that is not always matched in terms of commercial success. Miss Pat had a deepset love of the scene teamed with an entrepreneur’s instinct and she made it her mission to get many musicians their just desserts. She is a bona fide mogul.

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