3 Canal: Kings of J’Ouvert – Wendell Manwarren | The Carnival Imagination

In this special J’Ouvert Morning release, we sit with Wendell Manwarren — co-founder of 3 Canal, pioneer of rapso, and one of the true Kings of J’Ouvert.
From Belmont to the Savannah stage, Wendell unpacks the philosophy behind Carnival, the power of the rope as symbol, and how 3 Canal transformed social commentary into anthem. We explore the origins of Blue, the ritual of J’Ouvert, the evolution of rapso, and why Carnival has always been about resistance, rebellion, and reclaiming space.
This conversation goes beyond music.
We discuss:
The birth of 3 Canal and the rapso movement
The cultural meaning of J’Ouvert
Class, power, and the symbolism of the rope
Mentorship from giants like Derek Walcott and Peter Minshall
The transformation of Carnival from ritual to product
Why noise has always been political
The Carnival imagination and storytelling as nation-building
Wendell reflects on legacy, responsibility, and what it means to stand in history — not just perform in it.
This is Part I of the 3 Canal: Kings of J’Ouvert trilogy.
If you care about Carnival, culture, resistance, and the future of Trinidad & Tobago’s creative identity this episode is essential listening.

Transcript

Opening & Guest Welcome

SPEAKER_00 0:03

And then it leads people right back to King Radio. Like is the radar we want. That's that's from 1939. And when I hear that, it's like but these fellas bouncing and swinging since back then, you know. So we use it.

Corie 0:20

Are you good? Welcome to the Cory Shop Podcast. Welcome back to everybody who's been listening. I have somebody here who I've been listening to for a long, long, long, long time. And I have a pleasure of talking to him today. Wendell Manu, where are you going to?

SPEAKER_00 0:33

My brother. You're good. Respect and blessings.

Corie 0:35

See you in the same time.

SPEAKER_00 0:36

An absolute pleasure to be here with you. I appreciate that. I just want to say right off the bat, General, kudos for what you're doing. I think it's so important that you give someone else the opportunity to tell our story, you know. And in telling our story, we could all learn from each other and appreciate who we are.

Corie 0:51

I appreciate it. I appreciate it. Following you, you know. Yeah, man. Yeah, yeah, following you, I'm following you because maybe that's like a good place to start too. That storytelling is something that I see you doing a lot. I was telling you the other day that I was looking at an interview with you all talking to Valentino.

SPEAKER_00 1:05

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Corie 1:05

Yeah. Important work, boy. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 1:08

I mean, I've just been I'm just curious about us who we are, and I have infinite respect for those who came before me, like fellas like Valentino. So when I got the opportunity to say, make the track just to visit him, and the camera came out and the question started coming. It was natural, it was not anything that was prepared.

Corie 1:24

You know, when you say like learning from them and just being in the space and asking questions, it feels that way when I see you do interview, you are the interviewer.

SPEAKER_00 1:32

It's song like just curiosity. It is natural curiosity. And if I think back now, my grandfather was my alignment partner back as a youth. I was intrigued by my grandfather. He had plenty books, he had plenty style. And while the rest of my cousins was outside running around being wild, I was inside line with my grandfather. And um so that sense of being interested and intrigued by what came before me was always there, really. And you know, growing up in there was a time I spent some time down in Simeon Road just off of Sparrow Hideaway. And the knowledge that right around the corner was Sparrow, you know, that was a biggie for me. And then later on, growing up in Belmont, and just down the road was Jason, um, famous Sailor Man, who was the barber. You know, all of we used to have to go and get our haircut by Jason. And just the knowledge that you're growing up in a community full of all these characters, people contributing to the cultural space, especially. Mass was a big part of it. So I was just always naturally interested and intrigued by who we are and what we do. Yeah.

Corie 2:32

Like when I listen to music again, uh you some of your influences I hear you talk about, you know. You could feel in the music. But

Roots, Family, And Early Influences

Corie 2:40

when I hear talk about that story about Simeon and Sparrow, I was like, oh, there's interesting. You're talking about somebody living downstairs by the hideaway earlier. That's right, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:47

And we used, I mean, as a little boy, I was in sneaking in the hideaway and seeing Sparrow and Kitchener, and then fellas performed things I ought not to be seeing at that age. Some of them performances, you know. Um, but yeah, I was completely all in from early, yeah, yeah. Intrigued. My father had like a wall of records, and I remember, you know, one of the first records I could think of visually was Santana's Abraxas album because of the artwork. But he also had a lot of Sparrow albums and things like that. And of course, you they had a radiogram back in them days, and as I usually weren't allowed to take a record and put it on your radiogram. But I was allowed from fairly early to choose what music I want to listen to and that sort of thing. So music, and I have to credit my father for that. He was always singing and humming. He used to play pan. You know, my mother was always singing, she played pan too. You know, I grew up in a family where they actually had before I was born, they had a pan side in their yard. My uncle was the leader of the band. And so I was telling my aunt the other day, she said, Oh God, people call you in the name, behave yourself. I said, Well, I born in it, I can't help myself, it's all your fault. You know, isn't that my I just doing what comes naturally to me?

Corie 3:57

It is set you so as that, and so I go, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's always been interesting for me too, like the communities, how those communities or spaces shape us, just the interaction. I was telling you as well before we start that no Hallman at all. I just know him as a Spanish teacher. Right, but it's been nice in life when things revealed. Yeah, you know, you come and you say, But wait, this is the same market. He's Ray Hallman, great one. Yeah, he's so quiet. He doesn't talk much in school, he was dread too. He was no joke. What Ray was a man to fear in in school days, as it should be. But going back to that valley interview, there was one part where he was talking about Zimbabwe. Yes, that phone stood out, and I wanted to talk about it here because uh this is something that feel people should should know. He was talking about meeting Bob Marley, just yes, in admiration and that kind of thing, and Bob Marley was equally in admiration of him, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 4:46

You know, I remember listening to something or reading something that Bob Marley said, Sparrow's slave. I'm a slave from my land so far, was big inspiration for him. That's one of the songs that set him on his path to be a singer. So when you when you kind of make them connections and realize, you know, we're always looking out and admiring what's out there, but the people looking on at us and saying, Hey, while you're doing the thing, you know. His Zimbabwe was inspired by Vali's Zimbabwe. Yeah, interesting, so when you say brother, you're right. Almost like saying he's endorsing what Vali was saying. Of course, of course. And Vali, you can't get a more humble man than Brother Valentino, you know. And that day we went up to say it was in COVID times, you know, and my good friend Maria Noons, I call her my compare. And uh, we came really close during the COVID time, and she said, I want to go and check Valley. You want to come? I was like, Of course. Yeah, you know, without a second thought. So that was not an interview, that was just only going to check him early. Yeah, and Robin Foster was there too. Robin is our is our next talker, yeah, our next rack. Plenty of history, plenty history. So I just was happy to be in that company, and he was in the zone that day, you know, he was really relaxed and comfortable. He was happy to see us because as I say, it was COVID time, so people was kind of keeping to the self. We were kind of now coming out of it. And just the opportunity to sit and chat with him was priceless for me. Yeah, yeah. I also had a similar experience with DuVon, DuVon Stewart. Yeah, you know, and um, I also had people I could sit and talk whole day if you give me a chance with somebody. I could have a conversation. If I find you interesting, we could talk all day. Yeah, DuVon is interesting.

Corie 6:22

Yeah, very interesting. Duvan has stories, DuVon has stories. But that moment, talking about Zimbabwe, I found to be really reflective of the way I would see you and some of the things you say. Because when I say listen to you over the years, no the music is plenty things you say to him. Right. You say some things and some short, short words that change shift my access, huh?

Sparrow, Kitchener, And Cultural Memory

Corie 6:40

That's like a God Curry.

SPEAKER_01 6:43

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:44

No, I mean, I've I have had the benefit of being mentored by some serious people, you know, to be mentored by a Peter Mitchell, to be mentored by a Derek Walcott, to be mentored by a Helen Camps, and people of that ilk, you know, you something must rub off, or they see something in you that they encourage. I was telling a young man yesterday who was looking to bring on board to be our DJ, and he was completely overwhelmed at the thought. Yeah. And I said, Well, I wouldn't ask you if I didn't think you were capable. And but I also had to have that same thought of like, why are they pushing me in this direction and realizing, well, they obviously see something in me that I couldn't see because you know, I lazy. I I stay home whole day and do read whole day. And when I was smoking, I smoke all day. You know, so sometimes you need somebody to make you out and say, Hey, you. You know, and I've had numerous opportunities to really push the limits of who I might be, you know, and and get beyond who I am to what I might be. Yeah, and it it wasn't just through the dent of of share my own efforts, it was people saying, I think you have something, and and helping you go towards that. And I because that's how I was shaped, that's how I try to train and work with people.

Corie 8:00

Understand, understand. Even looking from a distance, it's feel like a teacher, no? I'm a teacher. I'll tell you one of them statements, yeah. It's a road. Let me tell you something. That I don't I don't stop it. Yeah, because it's such a such a stupid. But let me tell you about my view of it, right? I was playing mass at the time. I stopped playing mass many, many years ago. Born and grew in St. James. And it's a fine away in our band when you're in St. James and them things. But of course, life change, you get things, you do work, you know, you I could afford to play now. So I had that mentality, like, okay, I pay to play here and the storm was in the ban and the safety. I was big on safety. So sometimes I go in and the band passes in certain places, I frighten using my wife and them kind of thing. I used to be real on people, like, oh, let's control the rope, you gotta control the security. And maybe I'm just thinking of the whole context of it or the or the history of kind of who we are, and some of the things that would have caused or would have caused the rope as a as a metaphor then. It is a what the rope is causing. Yeah, but when you say that, I was like, Yeah, it's a rope. And and to take it literally, my first thing was like, I can't stop it's not making it any more safe.

SPEAKER_00 9:08

Not in the least. It's an it's notional and safety, security is a feeling. If you feel unsafe, so shall it be. If you enter into the arena and it's like it's a safe space, well, it becomes a safe space. I also think, you know, my experience in the mass, for instance, working with Minchell since I was 19, being involved in Minchell's band, growing up, you know, real hardcore in the mass. The first day I decided to sign up to play mass because I always thought it was a stupid idea to pay to play mass.

SPEAKER_03 9:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:41

Me personally, I wasn't really interested in that. My father played King, my mother played Mars. She was the one who was playing in Mitchell, my sister played Kiddie's Carnival. I could care less. Yes. Right. But when we were now leaving school, the group that I was a part of, they decided, let me go and play Mars with Mitchell. And I went along. And the day we went to sign up, there was a sign saying help wanted report to a particular camp on Carl Street. And we decided, you know what, let me go and see what it was all about. And that day we were walking in the gate. Minchell happened to be walking down the steps with a handful of feathers, and he saw us and he said, Who has an eye for colour here? I never hear an expression like that in my life. I never made the man before in my life. You know, I was naive enough to think that when they say Minchell make that, he makes everything, not realizing he's a team, right? And we fell in and became part of the team in that instance. And in that moment, we met Mailing, Jeffrey Stanford, Judy Sanchez, Alison Brown wasn't around as yet, but Charles Applewhite, all kinds of people who were doing things that you never thought you would have the opportunity to work with. They were all there hands-on. And that was a Saturday. We stayed, we worked. In my mind, it seems like we worked through the night, or we might have taken a break and come back. And the next day, the mass was going up to the savannah. And we marched the mass up from Carl Street to the savannah, and I saw the mass appear on the stage and I I wept. Yeah, I was transformed. You know, Mitchell have a mass call. I've seen the bird of paradise. She spread herself before me, and I will never be the same again. And that was my experience. That was Madame Hiroshima. And that was um that was Kalalua, one of them bands. Um yeah, we just fell in, and and and from there, because we fell in on an individual, I guess, you know, and because we happened to meet the man himself in that moment, from then on we were part of the team and part of the crew. And I had the opportunity from early to be part of the thinking about what we were doing and helping him organize his thoughts and whatnot. So the idea of what the mass was started in entering my brain in a different way then. But the point I was making is that in those days, no, nobody was asking for security. What security it have, nobody was asking, what

Curiosity, Mentors, And Becoming A Teacher

SPEAKER_00 12:00

drinks it have. The mass was the thing, right? There was a point though when people started asking about those things. I didn't realize, oh, well, we're the security. I mean, there's a big crew. We never thought that we needed to provide security, right? Yes, you'd be on the road and people will be they were they push cards selling drinks and whatnot, and it was just the thing. And if you wanted to eat something, you went to the side road and eat. And if anybody getting unchupid of you, we go chuck them out or whatever. But for the most part, you didn't have a need for it. And so them early days we're talking about mentioning road. There's no rope, there's no separation. Now I heard that long time there used to be rope and people on lorry and truck, but people laughed that out of tongue. So I do even understand how we come at a certain point to take this stupid notion that a little piece of rope will keep me from being infiltrated by that mob to that rab that is out there and you know, protect this little piece of turf that is everybody road. The road makes a walk, kitchener say it a long time, right? It's dying, and the wonderful thing about mass is we all have to negotiate the use of the space. And we found ways over the years to do that. You know, if a man comes eating and he put eating on the corner and you come after him, well then he has right of passage. If all you recognize that, well, then we clash. Right.

Corie 13:18

And you deal with that accordingly.

SPEAKER_00 13:19

Yeah. Bust two, three heads, and then you go your way, right?

Corie 13:22

So you see how it shifts with my thinking because I think uh again, I never thought of it in that way at all. You're just thinking of, and I saw it for me as a shift because as a little boy in St. James, you can't tell me don't play mass. It it is not possible. The mass in St. James is part of the mass. I never saw this separation until the rope thing came. Until you pay for it. I feel on the outside. So maybe it's me really dealing as a little child being on the outside or being rejected from something, fighting to be inside the space. And maybe that's where you're talking about being Trump.

SPEAKER_00 13:52

Here's where we get into an interesting phenomenon about the mass, right? And the social dynamics of the mass. And where we start entering into the class dimension. So people of a sudden ilk feel that they have paid for this service. Now, you see what we start to call service. Is mass? All of a sudden, we're going from mass to customer service and delivery of this premium experience and all that kind of harseness. I could say harshness on this. I just want to know if I can say harshness because that's as mild as it gets. You know, because for me it's hardness. I mean, and there's a mental shift that took place in the society where we suddenly went from an egalitarian affair to uh this is my domain and don't tread here, and then they start to have things like extraction crews. We've had people, we had a little camp on Arapita Avenue, and we've had some of our people beaten, trying to get from one side of the road to the next side where our camp is. You know, beaten, bad for what? Because they try to pass under the rope and whatnot. How that how that could be right?

SPEAKER_03 15:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:04

They ain't making no raps, they ain't making no nothing. So I have real issue with it, and I think it speaks to a depth of our insecurity and a depth of classism that is infecting the society and not too good away. Because not because you could afford it means you have more right to the road than me. Everybody have a right to the road. And I back to the mention thing. We were never overwhelmed by people coming in the band because we were playing mass. If you understand what I mean. It was mass. People have respect for mass. It had volume, it had dimension, it had width, breadth, depth, and whatnot. If you're just playing the ass, well then yeah, they go come and pluck some feathers off you and wine upon you. If you're just playing yourself, I can't tell why you're playing, where you're playing, right? So I'm not saying it's right, I'm saying it's a consequence, it's a trade-off. All right. So we could we could get into the depths of what that means for us as a people in many, many ways. But um, the rope for me is sim is a s is a regressive symbol.

Corie 16:08

Yeah, I appreciate you saying it. And I mean, who with Richard Reach and ever ready for a message? So I suppose you're ready for it.

SPEAKER_00 16:13

Well, I tell the people who are holding the rope, and I've been saying it for years, me afraid to say it. Yeah, yeah. You know, we've made shows around it, you know. We've we've created characters that ball down the place of the notion that the rope has returned, you know. We did a show where uh uh the original black job who they throw in the Vatamolasses for being a recalcitrant and a bad behave slave, you know, come back because what's the job? The job say pay the devil, you go beyond the level, you know me. Well, I come from hell. He comes for a payment, he comes for a come upons, right? The bad slaves they used to deal with dread. So when we got the opportunity to, when I say we, and this is where it becomes interesting, as a student of history, as a student of the carnival, when you read the historical record, you have to say, Well, what side of the story am I on? So the side of the story that I settled on is that I had to be on the side of the story that there was bad talking to people and saying they was bad behave and obscene and they're making too much noise. We get back to the noise, right? Because the noise was one of the things they said from the beginning. It's ironic that right now looking, they're looking to tackle noise again. So noises that's not noise, noises have one of them dog whistles elements that we have to be very careful about, right? But in reading the history, what side of the story are you on? Where are you in the story? Most people don't see themselves in the story where their ancestors would have been. They see themselves on the side of the story of the people who are trying to quell this thing, this mob. Yeah, quell it. Yeah, keep it to keep it in uh in a gear. Because that's what happened at emancipation, the carnival changed radically. Prior to

Rope, Class, And The Right To The Road

SPEAKER_00 17:50

the emancipation, it was the French Creole people celebrating in the way that they did, which was fetting. You had my plantation better than your plantation. I'm gonna put on the best show and make sure we have the best drinks and everything else. So ironically, I say we come right back to the Mardi Gras and we've pushed in the Cambulet away. But in the moment of Camboule, those people they retreated and they say, Oh no, this is crazy. These people have come to burn down town and whatnot and whatnot, and they kept it themselves and then they started inching back out. And that's where they started to say, Well, we'll come back out, but we'll put a little rope around us, or we'll come on a lorry and whatnot. And people like them on a lorry, laughing, and you know, we laughed at out of town. So I think it's important that you locate yourself in the history, or as I like to say, the story, because if you just read history as dates and and facts, you wouldn't get the real essence of the thing.

Corie 18:42

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's like this movie I had to look at, right? Um, I want to say the name of it is prisoner or something. The idea or the premise behind the movie was a social experiment, and they put a bunch of people in a jail, uh abandoned jail, they just take maybe a hundred of us and put us there. And they literally randomly select one, two, one, two. Use a prisoner and as a prisoner.

SPEAKER_00 19:03

Right, yeah.

Corie 19:03

Boy, bad, bad movie. Bad and it it speaks to where you're talking about it.

SPEAKER_00 19:06

It's actually based on a real experiment.

Corie 19:08

It was a real experiment.

SPEAKER_00 19:10

Once the guards got some power, yeah.

Corie 19:14

They had to stop it because they beat somebody after that. They deny people medication, of course, the prisoners' revolt, and that even that is a likeness to you talking about this the the way you do, because it's like we I like how you put it, uh, and let me talk about myself, just placing myself in history. You have to.

SPEAKER_00 19:29

I like call it booming up history, right? So when the history like I grew up at the corner of Belmont in the corner of Myler and Pelham Street in Belmont. Now I knew Pelham was some kind of English governor.

Corie 19:41

Okay, not the goddess.

SPEAKER_00 19:44

I didn't know who Myler was. You know who Myler was? Eugene Myler was his name. He was the champion stick fighter at the time, he was one of the most feared men, you know, and then the champion stick fight crew in that zone was called the Maribone after the Maribunters. It was dread, right? And even there was a time too when we were doing the history of Lord Harris Square, after the thief Lord Harris, and the mayor the time was studying if to put back Lord Harris, and when we started to do some research, realize that was the major guy in tongue. That's where all these stick fighters from all the different arenas would come and gather and fight. So it's like, no, don't put back Lord Harris, make it a guy, a cultural guy, right? Like we have it as a gathering ground for people from environs. Belmont, Oxford Street, Kobotong, all them, all them different groups had gangs, you know. Yeah, right. So at time when it's in COVID 2, I was doing a deep dive on Trinibad. I was trying to figure out what's this thing. And then I start to realize that a big part of Trinidad is repping for your community. You know, Clots, Marval, all these different fellas that were emerging, they were very much repping for their communities. Same time I read in Bridget Braton History of Tri and Tobago and reading the chapter on the gangs of Port of Spain, and it's 18 something, it's like, but it's the same story. It's the same change. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We've been fighting, we've been you know, getting people upset for a long time, you know, and um it's been a it's been that contestation, a fight for space, a fight for legitimacy, a fight for the ability to express yourself in your way. That that's what led to the whole emergence of what they call the jamette culture. Because I think our history is so fascinating because Trinidad and Tobago, when it was discovered by Columbus in 14, wherever, for 298 years after that, it was just a province of Spain governed by Venezuela. 290 something years, yeah. And then when the French Revolution and all those things started happening, they made um Rome de Sailor came from, I think it was Grenada or one of them places and made petition to the governor at the time and said, Listen, we're good Catholics and we will pledge allegiance to the to the King of Spain if he give us a space to operate. And eventually they conceded. And these French planters came with the and the French Creole, they didn't come from France. They came from the Caribbean islands. And they came with the people that they had enslaved who already creolized and settled into the French Afro-Creole construct, right? And they came with their carnival. That's the only reason we have a carnival today. If it was English from Jumping, we wouldn't have no carnival. And all them who feel that Trend hadn't made carnival. No, we ain't make no carnival. I always say, look on look at Grenada. You see that job? We are nothing like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I and we they come we come from Grenada and Martinique and Guadeloupe and Haiti and all these places, and they came with their culture intact. And within the space of 14 years, literally, a thriving French Afro-Craole culture was in place, and the Carnival was already part of that. When the English came in 1797 and the fire one shot and Chacon said take the place, it took them a long, long time to anglicize the place. We weren't speaking English, we didn't care about English, they didn't like the carnival. They tried to stop the carnival. I still think somebody one of the first attempts by the English to stop the carnival, you know who rise up against them the strongest? The French Creoles. Because they are the French Creole sided with the black masses and say, hey, don't touch that. There's we thing, right? And the ever since then, the British have been, or the English at the time were trying to figure out how we could control this space. Right? So they ban things. And of course, you know, when you ban something, what's happened? Something else happened, spring up by so, by so, by so. Eventually, you know, they were able to get a lock on it. They were able to it's competition. Because competitions have rules. And if you want to compete, you have to abide by the rules. So one of the first things they did to get rid of what was called then the jamette carnival because it was a face expression. Peace and lead and all horrible, nasty, beautiful things. Yeah. Like sposing themselves and doing all kinds of things, which they're still doing um New Orleans, for instance, right? Yeah, yeah. Because there's the same that comes from the same route, right? And if we don't understand that carnival is ancient, is universal, but not everywhere has carnival been retained. And part of the ancient universal rites of Carnival is inversion, upsetting the order, flipping things on its head. So, you know, there's what they call the Dionysian Carnival, the Greek carnival where the women would go crazy, run through the streets, strip off their clothes, and if they happen to see a man, they will literally rip him to shreds. Thank God we've come.

Corie 24:58

But that's what we're saying.

SPEAKER_00 25:01

Well, yeah, the rules was what they eventually was able to kind of keep things in a context. So especially when they'd move the move it from downtown to uptown to the savannah, and they'll be able to say no whining. So if you're if your band whining too much, we ain't getting you no prize. You can't battle the governor. If you're singing a song, you have to sing a song and leave the governor out of your thing. But we didn't take on them rules. The Jammans didn't, at least. The people who wish to assimilate and move forward in society, they are the ones who took those rules to heart. And eventually, over time, you know, we have what we have now. But at its core, it was very much an affront. At its core, it was very much meant to challenge, it was very much meant to upset. And that's some of the ancient roots of the carnival that we can't forget. Well Lovelace says that carnival inherently is about rebellion.

Corie 25:52

Yeah, I heard you talking about that and talking about those influences as well. And the first um, the first three canal show that I went to in Queen's Hall, uh uh, where do we call it a musical? How are you refer to it?

SPEAKER_00 26:03

Yeah, carnival extravaganza. It you see, that's the thing, right? We come from theater, we come from mass, we start to make music, we got on the scene, we had a hit, we didn't know what a hit was, we didn't know what a hit would do to you, but it literally changed our

Carnival’s History: From Camboulay To Control

SPEAKER_00 26:20

lives. Blue, we go paint the tongue blue, turn the whole world upside down. It turned our world upside down. We made the song and went back to the mass camp to work, and it would come on in the radio, and everybody would stop work and jump up and dance and whatnot. But that was it. We didn't have we didn't have a plan for it, and then people start to call. They want to book us, book us to do what singing. So the first time we sing in a fet was in Vinnie Maj. And it was four we and they gave me four chord mic. And by the time we finished sing, it was a baller spaghetti. Did that machine stick? We had to sing a cappella, and then we say, Oh, them fellas could sing because the music cut out and we sing a cappella. We we had it was a steep learning curve, and we literally, you know, the phone kept ringing, and we had management at the time, and they were like, Well, what all you gonna do? And we we decided we were gonna follow it. Yeah, you know, we we we didn't unpack our bags for like the first five years of our musical life, you know, and we was in every carnival running in every backyard in Brooklyn and Miami and London and Toronto and whatnot. And eventually you fall in where Marshall will learn your band would learn your song so you could run in with the band so you don't have to sing on tracks and you're feeling like something. Yeah, but you only have your one song, you know, and then the next year we come in, but man, they say, Oh, we have two songs now, and everybody says we could sing the two songs. But after a while, it's like, you know, there's not really me seen. I decided yet. And we always had in mind well, maybe we could do our own show one day, but we didn't have the confidence to do it. And after that, we got a chance to sing in the tent. The last, what I would call the last of the tent, the last of spectacular, where they still had thousands of people ramming that hall on Henry Street. It was amazing, you know? And we became the utility guys. They we could open the show, close the first act, open the second act. One time Super Blue wasn't late, so they put me to close the show. Whatever they tell me to do, we're doing. We didn't know, and we was glad we were learning. But um, we did that for a couple of years, and then that folded, and it was like, Well, what are we gonna do now? And then we said, All right, let me do the show. That was 2003, and we decided in 2004 the year of Good Morning, which was another big song. Well, maybe it's time to do your own show, and we approached the little carib, and by then the little carib was in serious disrepair, and they were like, Yeah, have it. I mean, we literally had the place for like two months, and we ran 21 shows. Could you imagine that? These days we run in three shows, 21 shows. You seen people in the there was a fella that used to come in the rehearsals, he was living close by, and I guess he was making noise, so he came and he watched everything, and he was there all the way, all the way, and we didn't know if we would have run two nights, much less 21 nights back then. You know, as I say, we didn't have a plan. We learned everything as we went along, but we already experienced en masse, we already experienced in theater, we experienced traveling, we were going all over the world with Mitchell. So it wasn't that part of it wasn't new.

Corie 29:26

The Sony music part was the new part. The music part was the new part. So even in that first show, it was it was a mass experience, it was a kind of an experience, or you're just performing your songs like if I burn up as like a concert or a floor.

SPEAKER_00 29:37

No, well, we from early we decided we had to have a little mass in it and a little theater, but it didn't have no big production values. We had a little crew called the scientist crew, then was we dancers, and then was hip-hop dancers. So wherever the hip hop, we play we song and the hip hop down the place, and then we had um three actors, Cecilia Um Salazar, who was with us from jumps, um, Tonya Evans, who's now our stage manager, and Dion McNichol, who was in the yard with Fate and whatnot. They were the actresses, they were the three jammits because we were in Woodbrook, and so they were the ladies of the night that infiltrated the show. And so we're trying to make all kinds of commentary inside there. We didn't have a rhyme or reason or plan, but something in the show we had was a little um piece of the stage in front that we had on wheels, and at a certain point of the show, we got on that and some fellas pushed us across the stage. And so it was a song called Down the Road by Shell Shock. And while we were doing that, the audience, the the people on stage going so and we going so. So it looked like we were you know traveling down the road. And Michelle came to the show and he said it was the best piece of theater design he had ever seen in Trendad. And I'm talking about real bare bones, but just that one little element, a couple of little elements, we we we were onto something. We didn't quite know what that was. And this, we're now getting ready for our this was how many shows it is 20 something show. 2004, 24. This will be our 21st show coming up now. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But we never thought once again that the show was gonna last two years, much less 21 years.

Corie 31:18

Oh you know, oh you know. I the first one I came to that was in Queenswell happened to be uh the the core of the show was the whole bacon revolution and all that.

SPEAKER_00 31:28

And that's when I really went into because by then we had been doing the show for a while. So I had the confidence to really try and tell this story. And a lot of people came to me afterwards and said that show was very, very eye-opening as to some of the things that helped shape the carnival. Yeah. And for me, humor is a big part of it, you know, like to use Pinny and Kimmy and all of them to tell the story in a very rambunctious way. Because we ain't come to lecture, you know, it's carnival, you know, it'd have to have a little something in it, you know. So I always think it's important to provide some kind of teaching element, but also keep you engaged and entertained. And um, yeah, we just found that way of doing it over the years.

Corie 32:11

Yeah, it definitely did it because I leave the thinking, because if you leave me to read books like you all day, we ain't reading nothing exactly on a page. A lot of people are reading, so it puts it in a way where and and I always get this parallel back to my school days. I was like, so what they really teach me, you know, I was always questioning this like, how come they teach it like this?

SPEAKER_00 32:28

Why did they? And that's what I mean by booming up history, because all that, all everything there came out of a book with just dry facts. This done did this, and that one did that, and the other one did that. And it's like, okay, fellas. And somehow I didn't know that I could have written a story around these things, but because I was so immersed in the thing, the story started to present itself, and it's like you have these crazy characters. What is this one gonna say to that one? And know what happened historically, like that one is where they thief the man head and and run away, and they were in the cemetery to work obey and all that kind of thing. You can't make that up, you can't make that shit up. It's like, you know, Pitty Bell Lily and the fighting over Hannibal and Papi Mommy, who they call the first uh you know notorious homosexual in tongue, nobody could have messed with Papi Mommy, you know, cut you and slash you and kill you. So Papi Mommy was part of the story, yeah. And to find put all these characters together and tell a story all these years later, and for people to come afterwards and say, Boy, I learned so much from that. For me, that is that is what it's all about. Yeah, they see a teacher, right? Yeah, well, you know, teacher and a storyteller, and I settled for a long time on the fact that as whether it's mass, music, theatre, the stories you're telling, and stories have a way of touching people. You know, one of my gurus is a guy named Joseph Campbell, and he he he does this thing about mythology and comparing mythologies, myths from all over the world and showing the common threads, right? So no matter what, whether you're from India, Africa, I think we have certain common stories. And you say if you want to really impact someone, you don't give them facts, you tell them a story. People remember stories, you know, that's why movies are so big, and we we are humans are hardwired to respond to stories. And if we if we can't take the raw facts of our history and find the story in it, we will be missing out.

Corie 34:28

I think so. Even when you said in the beginning, like

Rebellion, Inversion, And Women’s Agency

Corie 34:30

just growing up in Belmont, is it's your father's stories, your mother, this one, and that's what we kind of traditionally, you know, our ancestry, the the stories.

SPEAKER_00 34:38

My father was a real storyteller too. So as I said, the food the full I hear I grew up hearing all these stories, but I wanted none shall escape was something he used to say. And that came from a Juve band that they played all those years ago, the glory that was Greece, right? You know, and fellas covered on in lad on a Juve mode, yeah, and building None Shall Escape was a whole takeoff on the Nazi concentration camps and building because in those days that historical portrayals was a big thing, you know. And just hearing his stories, and so that when we went in the booth to sing blue, none shall escape wasn't written down anywhere. Is it none shall escape just fly out of my mouth? I didn't plan to say none shall escape. That's come out, you know. I was telling a fella last night he came with a song as like a big part of uh the real sweetness of a song is not what you write sometimes, you know. You see the intro and the outro where you're just doing your thing, that's for me, right? Where the real sweetness is.

Corie 35:34

Yeah, I was watching you and Attila. So Attila, Attila was here last week. Uh and I want to talk about them songs a little about on that thing, right? Because again, I always feel I could predict this thing, you know. I'm going to talk to Wendell, we're going to talk this that when I see that and I see seven songs this man pick. Yeah, see something now, right here. I'd find out more about that. But you said noise, and we it it is a current issue now where it but the steel band in particular, it'd be uh some of the things being described as noise and what they do in the community. It's not the first time we hear that. Uh the fets on the venues being moved because they say it's noise. You grew up in Belmont, I grew up in St. James. I'm not sure. We grew up in noise.

SPEAKER_00 36:12

Yeah, with noise. Yeah, we grew up in noise, and there are times when we make accommodation for the noise. You know, I found it so interesting that when they approach the Woodbrook residents who complain about noise a lot, and I'm a Woodbrook resident, and I'm subject to a lot of noise. A lot of noise. And we we have to make a distinction between good noise and bad noise, right? The Woodbrook residents at the time say, listen, carnival is a time, carnival is a season. We expect that there will be an increase in the volume of the music and the volume of activity, right? We cater for it, it built it built in. I always tell people I will pay them money to come in my house on a carnival Monday or Tuesday when them big truck passes.

Corie 36:48

Yeah, they don't know.

SPEAKER_00 36:48

You'll jump out just.

Corie 36:49

Yeah, people don't know.

SPEAKER_00 36:50

People don't know. I know my neighbors think jump out the the housing, you know. But after carnival, you just had a look and see which new one you cracks. The windows, yeah, everything. People who don't live there might know. But we make allowance for it culturally, right? So there's a certain amount of sensitivity we have to have around the whole idea of noise. As I say, from the beginning, they called in noise what was for many a source of joy, a source of pleasure, freedom from pain. They had to suffer again and again. That's a song we plan to make or sing in the show. We didn't record it, we go sing it live. Right, right. There's a song called Bring Down the Noise. That was my response to the notion of noise, yeah? Because it's something that it if you read the early reports of the carnival, one of the most consistent describers of what they saw was noise, noisy, a rabble, a mob, audioistic, you know, devilish, fiendish, ghoulish, howling, you know. Uh it all the categorizations were not flattering. Oh, with you, I would you not not remotely flattering. So we had to understand that that's how it was from the beginning. So if if all these years later, that's the best they could come with.

Corie 38:06

And then come again. Yeah. Come again. And and the idea of carnival being stupid. The same thing with the origin stories, this rebellion and so on. Absolutely. So you see the notion that there will not be a carnival. Uh, I'm not sure what that means. Again, as somebody who's born and grown, I don't know what it means when you say you don't have a carnival. I didn't know it meant during COVID either. What do you think?

SPEAKER_00 38:27

Well, you see, for me, like maybe because I get bigger and get a little more sense, I thought, okay, COVID is what we would call a public health emergency. So if it is that too many people around, maybe we might infect each other and whatnot. So I could have I could have seen with COVID. But beyond that, you know, you had to come real good to say it having no carnival, you know. You had to come real good. And I you see the thing is, I don't know if this current generation that invested, but I think they are. They they love the fat, they love the disc.

SPEAKER_03 38:56

I think so.

SPEAKER_00 38:56

Give them that. That's what they do, right? I always tell people I never developed a FET habit because I make in mass since age 19. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So while Fed going on ID mass camp, we used to run away and go panorama by studying in panorama, you still have this to make and bad to make. So after a while, I stopped going panorama. And uh and we good to go. If you're playing pan, you're playing pan. You know, if you if if you pursue a certain aspect of the carnival and you're devoted to it, that's what you do. Yeah, yeah. Not everybody is a fetter, not everybody has to subscribe to the notion that if you don't fetch something wrong with you.

Corie 39:30

Yeah, the carnival is also spacious, you know, it's very, very broader than that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 39:34

So one of the things that I challenge as well as the tropes of the carnival is like, you know, this sort of carnival is bacchanal, carnival is woman, carnival is colour, carnival is banalities. You know, those are all at some point in time, something that somebody uttered towards a certain end. Like Carnival is color was actually a slogan for Kodak film when they were trying to sell Technicolor film, right? So all of a sudden Carnival is we we just take that and we run with it. You know, I remember when that fellow saying Carnival is woman, the Bakanal in the Bam Bam. That was one of the first articulations that Carnival was woman, because prior to that, in the Bailey days and whatnot, in the early days of the mass, it was heavily male, you know, and the women, they were women, but it wasn't like what it is now. Yeah, yeah. So the mere fact that we have arrived at this place, well, I'm intrigued by that. It's like, okay, this is because the carnival is what whatever we need to express as a society, we express in the carnival. So if the women have a need to assert themselves in a particular way, it will come true. That's what it is. You don't have to like it, yeah. You have to observe it and try to understand what that means. And if is it that they don't have that sense of self and agency for the rest of the 360-something days of the year, so that come this time, this their spirit of rebellion takes over and they say, look, we and all we pulkitudedness, muchness and beauty and whatnot, you know, fancy outside, everything outside, nothing is left to the imagination. But remember, I tell you back in the Dionyson days, the women

Three Canal: Hits, Tents, And The First Shows

SPEAKER_00 41:10

used to strip up the cruelty.

Corie 41:11

This might be soft compared to that.

SPEAKER_00 41:12

Well, maybe we're going back to that. Maybe whatever impulses in the in the society driving us to that so that when this time of year comes around, this is what we feel the need to express. Yeah, it's an interesting way to look at it.

Corie 41:25

And again, go to go back to that rope again. You see, the if if we look at it as we and them, is that is a tricky thing. I always use Hussey as my my reference. We live next to Hussey and so I I I never know who say is noise. I just know this beat drum this hour. You go thing, you have a newborn, you adjust around them little babies. My son used to sleep through and drum beat. And the first time he hears a boom, the way he jumps up all the things, I say he go beat drum. Yeah, yeah, and then you fall right back to sleep. And so the weavers is them could could I could take up that approach and say them fellas making noise. That dies not culture. It's just it's just a weird way to look at it.

SPEAKER_00 42:02

It is because here you use a good example there. You you're part of a community, and Hose is part of the ritual. And when I say ritual, it happens annually. You learn to expect it. And it goes back to my point that the Woodbrook residents are saying this is something we know is happening every year, and we accustomed to it, we adjust to it. And once we it's not abused, we will live with it. Yeah, but for the rest of the year, please could you control the noise that the people, the Spanish people opposite by meeters we're making until 5:30 in the morning. When they captured Meduro the other day, I couldn't sleep.

Corie 42:35

Yeah. Celebration or party.

SPEAKER_00 42:38

I'm party till 5-30 in the morning.

Corie 42:40

But even that too, like that sense of community we missing because even if let me say who say I'd overdo it. I know Japan, my it's not like I have to call police. Yeah, just go and talk to them. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 42:52

And we we kind of work things out. So and we need to be able to do that, right? To work things out and not just get on our high horses and say, Right, people, these people, yes, the we and them thing, them people and them making too much noise, call the police. Yeah, you're getting too yanky, man. Losing we essence.

Corie 43:08

Yeah, as if we ain't gonna make noise at some point in time. We are with rituals and we culture and we think so, and we go once accommodation.

SPEAKER_00 43:14

You see why white mark on this thing? Culture a bit a big trendy thing in the middle there, right? That have a value, and I didn't appreciate that it had a value because you grow up at a certain point in time. All them things I talk about now, I was taken for granted, you know. You grew up as a teenager, you just want to get out of here. You just want to like, why why this place? It do I have enough of this, or you do have enough of that. And and you started travel, and it was through travel. It was one of the first trips I made was with the Trinidad Tent Theatre, and we got a chance to go to London to teach workshops and perform at the at the um Commonwealth Institute at the time. And somebody had hooked up school tours for us to do. With all these schools up and down, right? And in doing so is when I come to realize, hey, but we had things. We have things that are unique to us, that's specific to us. You know, I when I joined the tent, I had to learn the difference between a robber and a Piero and a jab jab and a jab molassy because some people can't tell the difference between them things and what is a damn Lorraine and all these things and why we have them and where they come from and learn a set of folk songs. And then you go and you're teaching these kids and they're asking you questions that you never even thought about. So why do you throw away the mask at the end? It's like, but you know, I never think about that. But then you realize, but wait, it's a kind of thing where we trust that more will come. You know, we're not keeping what are you keeping the masks for?

Corie 44:42

Yeah, the mask will come.

SPEAKER_00 44:44

But you never you don't have to think about it until it's it's like presented to you and it's like that's kind of odd.

SPEAKER_03 44:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 44:50

And but then also in that you start realizing, but we have things, we have, and we have an essence that reverberates. How come Trinidad Carnival is the one carnival that has spawned 300 and something carnival according to Ruby Derry around the world? Truly diaspora. How come our carnival has done that and not real Carnival? Yeah, from the world's carnival, this one little place, and it hasn't been done by official dictator, it hasn't been done by no agency or entity saying, Let's export Carnival. It's done by three, four drunk trainees in a place and it's cool and they fed up, and Carnival fever hit them, and they say, You see me? I go in any road, and then a few of them they lock up. They're willing to take a lock up, but before you know it, you ever been to Nottinghill?

Corie 45:38

People on the road knows David and Mr. What's a million people on the road?

SPEAKER_00 45:41

You went to Notting Hill, yeah. Right? And and and Labor Day. It's like Bowie. Now this is not about the mass, this is about the Caribbean flags on display. Yes, diasporic pride. You know, and I say the year we had blue, we were on the truck with Ichibaba, famous Ichibaba from Marshall's Big Truck song. I was my partner Benton Christian, who I worked with for a while. I didn't even, you know. Behind us was Barbados, Allison Hines and Square One. Behind them was Beanie Man and somebody on a truck, and behind them was Wycliffe and them on the ocean truck. So we don't do that here. That is New York. When I went to um Notting Hill for the first time, me ain't see no mass. I see Burning Spear. Yeah. Under the intent in Portobello Road. Burning Spear. I drink two tennis lag, I get so high I didn't realize I had this super strong beer. How are you so drunk? I just drink two beer. Yeah. And millions of people, millions, millions of people. Yeah. From we start that. How come?

Corie 46:50

It's the same thing you say about that notion that we are enough, and there's a discovery. I think you know, it is one of my difficulties with the rhetoric about Trinity Biden thing, too. As if again, the we them thing, you know, these youth singing violence.

SPEAKER_00 47:03

It's like yes, because that's what the reality is, and we continue to condemn them to a life of violence and meanness. So they're expressing themselves. It's the same with the pan, same with the kaiso in the early days, same with all of our expression. It was denigrated because it didn't, our expression did not come from on high. Most of our innovation, everything that that feeds us today didn't come from no high society people, it came from the masses, it came from the

Theatre In The Music: Crafting Live Performance

SPEAKER_00 47:30

people. And it was objective, objectionable to the to the people who are in authority. Right? So that's something we need to understand about us. Where does this thing come from? And that's why we're saying, how come we we can't get our grip on pan? Because we can't get a grip on pan because the geniuses of pan, these 16, 17, 18-year-old hard-head black boys from these communities that don't have no degree or nothing. We're not prepared to give them that respect. Yeah, yeah. These innovators, these imagineers, we're not giving them that respect because we're still full of shit as a society. And we need to challenge all these asshole notions. As you say, I'm starting to get hot and shit. Yeah, in the right place.

Corie 48:14

So let me tell you why, Wendell. That is why the culture thing is more important for me than even I wear that more than my own logo for the podcast. Because I feel as though culture have a way of doing what I was doing with the rope. We we say culture as if culture is what these people is this little thing. As if the business thing is not culture or the religions are part of our culture. Or somebody I plan to have some conversations that will make people real uncomfortable because they have some ways of our behavior in terms of the wolf, the way women treated, or the way people treat. That's part of our culture too.

SPEAKER_00 48:46

Yes, and that's why I'm saying we have a lot to reckon with in our culture, and our history will help us understand that our history is not no pretty pretty history, is a history of oppression, is a history of violence, is a history of trauma, is a history of denigration, is a history of you're black and stupid, or all the Indian and them stay by so, and you know, and when you read the history of indenture, I mean, it was rough. If you didn't have your if you didn't have your pass, they throw you in a jail, right? We've been through real shit. Yeah, and we're gonna do that. So how are we gonna heal from that? Been through and going through and continue to go through because nobody don't want to talk about it. We're not taking it on board in a real way. I always said we need uh, you remember when South Africa was coming out of a part time, they had a truth on reconciliation commission. Yes, yes. We need the equivalent of that, yeah, yeah, yeah. We need to face certain harsh truths because guess what? It's coming to confront us in the here and the now, and we're not prepared for it. No, but it is impacting us in ways that I don't think is going to be positive if we don't really face it head on. Yeah, yeah. People have a lot of like uh Wade Mark has a thing, say he's toting feelings. A lot of people toting feelings, a lot of people have uh a hurt, a grievance, you know. If you have in any public thing you have and people come out to talk, the first thing they do is grouse. Yeah. I don't even what are we talking about? Why are we talking about cutting the the grass on the side of the road? A man gonna be grousing about wherever his grouse is, and then somebody grouse back. That's why I feel we need to make the space, that reconciliation. And we get in, and we all we do is just grouse and grouse, and we're not getting it's not being addressed.

Corie 50:21

I like the way Chappelle had put it about that. Uh, when you're talking about in South Africa, Chappelle said with when Mandela came out, he said it should have been a bloodbath by any measure. Absolutely. He said, but that pause to say, listen, I want you to see how you feel, and then there's no consequences. And I go say why I feel and it's because that just understanding one another.

SPEAKER_00 50:40

So you use that moment. What about our emancipation movement? The people who were formerly enslaving the people, they were very afraid of a bloodbath. They were very afraid that these people that they're treated so badly would rise up and burn down the place, right? And guess what? They didn't, you know what they did? They processed, they beat drums. That's what I'm saying. What do you understand? We chose a ritual over mayhem. You understand? And in those days, the little stick fight thing is two, three men getting the head bust in a ritual way, is not mayhem and violence and bloodshed on a grand scale. It's ritual bloodshed, and it's about warriorship, right? A man who's been suppressed for a long time. How is he going to assert himself as a man? Right? They they they would challenge each other, drink some rum and bust two, three heads, and move on, right? But now it's become well, everybody have a gun now, or like I my own sense of self is so diminished that I just gonna take it out on anybody that watch me a kind of way, you know. I'm a lot of murders is because somebody diss somebody. Yeah, and as a feeling, you disrespect

Noise, Community, And Accommodation

SPEAKER_00 52:00

me. Yeah, yeah. I go kill you for that.

Corie 52:03

Yeah, it's one of those things where when I see the way, even like um, we David and I, we always arguing about who we're gonna put out next, who we're gonna recall it next. And we always trying to make sure that we have different generations, different stories, different backgrounds, really just so that this table is a starting point for our conversation and not it don't finish here. Yeah, which this already is one of them episodes where it's the discussion important. And I've found that and you know, is the same thing you're saying about telling the story of the Campbell riots and Queenshold and people coming and telling it because it's easy for but at least for me to think that I think what I know everybody knows. I feel I have is common knowledge, it's usually not the case, right?

SPEAKER_00 52:43

It's usually not the case, and I do I don't assume that I think if I find out something, it's like I want to share this with and I want to share it in a way that when I find out somebody last to know.

Corie 52:55

I was like, what? Everybody knows this I know I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 52:58

You don't want to do like Donald Trump, and when you find out something is like nobody's known about it, you know. Yeah, he invented, he invented it. He invented for sure. No, no, no. It have things out there that if we were to take time, and and working with fellows like Tony Hall over the years, too, like in those early days to get the confidence to tell some of those stories, Tony Hall was very instructive in encouraging you. Tony had a way of encouraging you, man. Yeah, man, you're doing the thing, continue doing the thing, but Tony ain't so sure about this, you know. And you know, he's he will come. When we were working on the black jab thing, he was very instrumental in coming and helping um Marvin, especially because Marvin was struggling with some of the stuff I was getting him to do, you know. And that's where they hold the rope, the rope. Of course, yeah. First time we use that the rope thing, you know. And that and sometimes, you know, things come to you is like, wow, the grandson of the Midnight Robber is now holding rope. Think about that. Yeah, and serving drinks, pushing cards on the road. The first time I passed by Hearts post-carnival and saw about three hundred strapping black men waiting outside the campus, like what going on there? And realizing that these fellas who were pushing the cards and holding the rope was waiting to get the little little change, little pittance, you know. Yeah, and I thought, wow, this is um this is quite a phenomenon.

Corie 54:24

Yeah, you've seen it in feds now too. Yeah, I think it's part of the fed culture.

SPEAKER_00 54:28

And uh when I'm you know work with some youths through the Tallman Foundation, some some brothers from Lavantee, and one of them, you know, is like, so what do you do for carnival? You say, Why is hold rope and wind up on them bronchial and them damn right? And I was like, okay, then well, I think this will be the last time you're gonna be doing that if you're if you're around me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because holding rope and something, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because after you teep that little wine, that same bronchial didn't want to look at you, right?

Corie 54:56

It said openly now too. You know, people say it. So and placing yourself in history is history that so going back to that time, you're going into that mass camp, my uh Minchel, and I was surprised that at it because when I heard you talk about you, your first experience or your first uh really latching on to the carnival was the mass more than anything else. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it was how all the theater part came about.

SPEAKER_00 55:17

It was just because of the way that I was involved in theater before through Helen Camp's, but all we but Helen Camp's theater at the time was Carnival Theater. You know, that's why I say I was learning about um learning all them old kitchen and sparrow songs and whatnot, even though I'd known them, but actually learning them, learning spoiler, talking backwards. And you know, suppose every woman could have a thought as a long man, learn how to talk backwards instead of saying to me, backward is me. Instead of saying no there, backward is there. And when we talk so them, poor man won't understand. Then only woman would have advantage on man if a woman wants to leave she man, she go talk it. He can't understand instead of saying Johnny, I go leave the man, she goes say Mary and I go leave and bring her quattro, yeah. But you know, to enter into the mind of a spoiler, I bung the prophet Benjamin. Well, I'm moving the thing back. Very good. I bungsa Benjamin in the savannah the other night, and I listened to him. I said, But this man reminded me of spoiler. So afterwards I went to him. I said, You know, spoiler? He said, No. I said, You need to go and listen to spoiler because you're the closest thing to a spoiler I see in this rounds. He said, Well, my hero is Zandali. I say, Ah, that makes sense. I say that makes sense. It makes sense because he was singing that famous song, Stop, Stop, Jumping. Stop, you walk in, and I'm like, How would he ask you to sing a song like that? And then brilliant. You know what I mean? So people respond to it. It's brilliant. People respond to that up to today. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. But you have to have a particular imagination to craft a song like that. And I have this thing that I've hit upon over time is that we have a specific imagination. It's called the carnival imagination. Like how we have a carnival. So every year we know we have a carnival. So we have our imagination is kicking to say, how I going to what master playing this year? Even if as a sailor, I look in, how am I gonna add to what I'm doing or improve on what I doing? So here we have a sailor that went from a parody of drunk white sailors to a fancy sailor. That didn't happen in a one, it happened over time. It happened as a process of employing your imagination till new forms emerge, right? And what I find is not happening is that that carnival imagination is not being employed as much as it used to, because we could just go online and order something now. You know, so back to that mass camp experience with Minchill.

Diaspora Carnivals And Trinidad’s Imprint

SPEAKER_00 57:40

In those days, it had about 20 mass camps in Woodbrook. That was just Minchill alone. Before the mass camp pub was the mass camp pub, it was a mass camp. That's how it came to be called the mass camp pubs, right? And it didn't have no central location, it was a set of families and this down so making the wings and over so making the this, and it was all made right here. A bunch of seamstresses, right? And a set of men would leave the family and come in the mass camp two months before carnival, and you ain't seen them home again until people wife go come and drop food for them and all kinds of things. What why? Why we why would we do that? Yeah, yeah. Something about that have a value, and other people might say, Oh, that's a carnival mentality. What is a carnival mentality? Boy, there's the most hyperactive time. I was up booking until whatever hour the morning, light on my bed, can't sleep because my brain processing all kinds of thing, and I know I have to do this today, and I have to, you know, that's why I keep my shades on, you know what I mean. When is this what you all what you are part of when you which you were operating with the children of Noble Douglas? Absolutely. Yeah, but by the time I got to the chance to teach at Lilliput Theatre, remember I I I got invited through John Isaacs, who had a section in Minchel Band, and Noble Douglas also had a section in Minchel Band. So what we all had in common was working in the Minchel mass camp. So when I got the chance to come on board and start teaching, and then in two twos, John left, and it was up to me to figure out well, what I'm gonna do. One of the things I started doing naturally was just saying, you know what, we could just use this space to help develop more and more awareness of who we are and what our stories are and how to tell our stories and invest in us, right? So, I mean, you you know, that time with my girl, you know. And I yeah, I I love the fact that you know I was learning from them, you know. Them was challenging me, I was challenging them. I I mean go nowhere to learn how to teach. You learn it as you go. I learn as I go, and I learn from the best, I would like to think. Yeah. And I just apply what I learned and then use my imagination after that. Like when I decided, everybody needs to have a journal, so you just write whatever in your brain, and then we go work on it in class, and then after that, we will make a show. And you know, that actually Lilliput is what gave me the confidence to do a three-canal show. And I was able to draw on the Lilliput resources because it does get older. So when they come of age, it's like, all right, Tonya, you're in the show now. All right, nice. You know, bam, Tonya is the stage manager after X amount of years and whatnot, you know. And I I I have a way of saying, all right, we're doing this and pulling in and training, and you find your feet because it was done to me.

Corie 1:00:30

Yeah, and you do it, right? Yeah, you do it. So, in that because you're only legends, uh the gate, really. I'm an act, you know, who have an eye for colour. Hell of a question.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:40

What a question coming from Belmont. I didn't even know what an artist was, if you know what I mean. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I even thought that an artist was a thing I could be because that was not what I was conditioned to be. Now, growing up on Pelant Street, we just had a theater down the road. But we were told stay away from there. That was Lennox Raphael and them theater, pressed up in there. And then doing Dracula, and it had a cemetery next door and Pinaropia, and any cemetery, and my mother and them stay away from there. Now we had to pass there to go to the cinema. And we used to be allowed to go to the cinema to see we kick up until the way back up, everybody kicking up one another until they reach home. Right?

Corie 1:01:21

Because I grew up in the cover, kick up the little.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:26

I grew up in an extended family at one point, you know. At one point, when after Simeon, after my mom separated from my dad, she went back to the family home in Belmont. But it looked like plenty of the sisters were separating from the husband at the same time. So plenty aunties and plenty cousins, you know. So we were surrounded by it. It was always full of life and full of energy and full of vibes and whatnot. But theater and art and thing, no, that was really mixed. And it was expected that having passed with St. Mary's College, you will take your education and you'll get a nice job, and we are Thai, and eventually

Respecting Pan, Youth, And Innovation

SPEAKER_00 1:02:00

you will settle down. And so when I did it, very tight. I wear it Thai for about two years. They used to write me up in the bank, they'll say, you know, how I dressing, you know. And then after a while, I was like, you know, I good. Yeah, fully. I real good. Yeah, yeah. But I'm glad I went through that though, you know, because I didn't know what I want to do. I was by a process of elimination, elimination, it's like, nah, I ain't want to do that. I didn't want to do that. Yeah. So when the opportunity to do what I'm doing now came up, it it just felt organic. It would, it didn't, it wasn't premeditated or anything like that.

Corie 1:02:36

Yeah, and I mean all experiences pay off in their own way, you know. I mean, just once you commit. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:42

You know, and and that's the thing too. In those early days, we were very committed. We were passionate about it. We found a space where we could just express ourselves in the tent. It was a bunch of young people. There were people who were there before that I was admiring that I never imagined I'd get the chance to work with Raymond Chukong, was a big influence. Godfrey Seeley, Wilvin DeGosh, Christine Johnson, they were like the batch before us. Right. And um when when Helen had gone off to study, what she later um invited me to participate in, which was something called psychosynthesis, which is a whole next story. Um, when we joined, you know, we had to audition. And I remember Dave Williams and myself walking in on the same day and auditioning, not realizing that once you show up, you get picked. Oh, yeah. It didn't matter if you could sing, dance, whatever. Inside. You're inside. But we committed to it and we got that chance to go on the tour, and we had now joined. And people who was there before was like, how would them get picked? And they're like, um, Helen was like, yo, theater is not about that. It's not about you was here before, then fellas good. I choose them, right? You know, and you start to realize, all right, people seeing things in you, and then Helen later on gave me an opportunity to go further through the psychosynthesis program. Um, and I thought I was going to a theater camp, but it turned out I was going to a whole meaning how to describe it now. It was like in you know, in the what they call new age, free hugging and soul searching, and that's like what do you have to do?

Corie 1:04:18

They call it um white light therapy. That's what the massy man was the white light ticket.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:22

Yeah, and uh we went to a place called Findhorn up in the top of Scotland near Lochness, and it was freezing cold in the summer, sleeping in a tent. I used to that's when I started wearing Timberland boots because my little Nike shoes wasn't wasn't able in the frostbite loaded, yeah. And you're sleeping in everything you have in a sleeping bag in a tent, and you get to go inside the house to do certain things and whatnot. And I thought, as I say, it was it was a it was a group of young people, handpicked from all over the world, who somebody decided were future leaders or potential future leaders. And they put us all there together to kind of do some soul searching and discover what our power was. And one of the things they would say to me at the time was claim your power. I was like, What do you ask these people about? Claim your power, claim your power what power is that they're talking about. You know, um, I did that for two years because they invited me back, which was rare. And um went to Switzerland all over the place. It was crazy, it was totally life-changing, radically life-altering. Then I got the opportunity to do the training, but then I was like, Me want to do the training, I will just use whatever techniques I was exposed to in the theater and like working with Dullip, working with that kind of thing. I was able to integrate a lot of those things. But I realized it was really about, you know, basic questions you ask in in performance, in acting. They say there are six questions, right? Who, what, where, why. So who am I, where am I, why am I here? Those first three questions are crucial. Anybody for anytime you ask why am I here, you're in trouble. Because it means you're you you're you're curious, you want more. You're not just settling for. Right? So I try to introduce like who are you? Who are? Do you know who you are? You know, Shakespeare have a quote, say, Lord, we know what we are, but not what we may be. Right? And those things, one thing leads to the next. Where am I? I always tell people, where are you? Understand where you are, where you're operating. Understand the conditions on the ground. So you could tell your expectations. A lot of people just be here and expecting things that from another place.

Corie 1:06:29

I suppose, I suppose.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:31

So they were always.

Corie 1:06:32

You're setting yourself up.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:33

You're setting yourself up. And we have things, we have things we're lacking in certain things, but we have things that other places don't have. And the ability to say, well, yeah, we we have we things, you know, we we couldn't lime and at a drop of a hat, and that might sound, you know, like what's the value of that? But it has a value. Of course, of course, of course. But if that's all we do, then we devalue it.

Corie 1:06:54

Well, I met a guy, he was from Kazakhstan. Right. So he said, when he was he was talking about common entrance, right? He led me as old. He said, But when I was 11, my exam was disassembling and reassembling at AK for speed. Right and grenade training exactly. So he said, and I would I was lecturing at the time and he was telling me, he said, um, Trinidadians have the best respect for time he's ever seen anywhere anywhere he lives. I said, Well, something ain't right. I prefer him to go and lecture the next morning about culture, right? I said, not here. And he said, no, he says not so much you had to watch the time if they reach the work eight or if they leave this time. He said, he said, when you get a Trinidad in a deadline, he said the whole, the whole world is changed. He said, a man rather sleep in the office the night before. He said, so you forget them. You give them the deadline, then you forget about them. They're not gonna show up to that meeting, fumbling. They're gonna do whatever it takes to reach that morning with that presentation.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:48

If you're tied back to the carnival, that's one of the things that the kind of like mass must come. Working with Minchel, it was down to the wire. Even if we had to go back in the mass camp

Healing, Truth, And Cultural Reckoning

SPEAKER_00 1:08:00

on a Monday evening to finish off, the mass must come. We're gonna get it done. And we do work best under that pressure. If you give me until wherever to do it, well, I go like that. Yeah, it's trouble. So you have to understand that about us and not devalue it by by saying how in other places they just do that. Well, that's other places. They have other conditions on the ground there. The places where it's cold and it's dark and it this and it's that. Where you are, understanding. And how you could get the most out of, you know, like I would say, working on a show, is a lot of people involved, a lot of egos involved, a lot of you know, people with their own sense of who they are involved. How do I work to get the best out of everybody? How do I there's a quote that I've I I often say is how do I manage the many egos to ensure that, you know, we're all working towards a certain end, you know? And that that's our challenge, you know, because we we we're strong individuals and we don't want somebody to just come and tell we do this, do that. We want to have some say in the matter, and we have to respect that a little bit. But at the end of the day, because working in theater, noble always said theater is not a democracy.

Corie 1:09:18

Yeah, somebody will be in trust. Somebody will make the call at the end of the day. Yeah, yeah, and teacher all about society, yeah. Yeah, it's a good prepare and growing. So I'd ask you along that way, when it became music, music was something you always wanted to do.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:30

Always loved music, always loved music, but I love music to the point where you're afraid to mess with it, you know, because it's just so music just so special. I was always I grew up in a house full of music, people singing, dancing, you know. I see my nephew, I say all you know, dance. Like I say, I grew up with my mother dancing, my father dancing, my sister and I go hold on and dance and spin around and sing and whatnot. It was just natural. Um, my brother, my cousins and I back in the day, at you know, we music was just part of the vibe, but I never thought of music as a serious thing, as a possibility. But getting into the tent, having to sing the old calypsos, getting into the theatre workshop, having to sing the Joker Civil songtrack, you know, work with with Walcott, work with Gaulk McDumart to get to play the devil in teacher and sing Andrew Tanker songs and them kind of thing. So by that's actually.

Corie 1:10:26

Tent theater, sorry.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:27

Tent theater, got it, got it. So that's where we learn the road, make the walk and all them songs, right? You know, in theater world. Yes. So singing was a natural extension of performing for me. And I also that's another thing about us. Ours our performance style is not it's 360, it's it's folk, best village, if at its core, it incorporates all the disciplines. So it's natural for a Trinidadian to sing, dance, act and make the costumes.

Corie 1:10:57

Yeah, I suppose.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:59

It's natural. We take all that on board. We don't we didn't have any fancy institutions where you could afford to specialize. You know, that's a part of our strength. Yeah, and um, as a matter of fact, since we've created academies to teach people that you're an actor, you're this or that, it has kind of weakened the the pool. Oh, I see. Put it in to specialize, yeah. That's sort of hyper-specialization, and not only that, it it's taken away from one of the things that happened naturally is that you would team up, you'd work in in a batch, you know. Um, now everybody is being trained to be their own brand. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Corie 1:11:38

Everybody is the sharing kind of.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:40

Yeah, sharing is difficult right now. I see a lot of our young ones struggling to come together and just do like what we did, you know, three, four we come together 30 years ago and decide to do this thing because we were already working in the mass camp and working in the world.

Corie 1:11:55

So all of y'all were in theater before.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:56

All of y'all, oh so you met there. Yeah. Um, well, Roger, I met in school in Saints, but he had taken off and gone to another school in the form six kind of thing. But still, we maintained contact. But it was through choir and performance and stuff that we kept in touch. John was ahead of us. John was already established as an actor on TV and whatnot. He was living in the States and whatnot, but through the mass camp. And then Stanton, who's actually 10 years younger, he came into town. He always says to buy our boots and end up falling in with um bag ass company and working on sets and things like that. He's like the handiest handyman you could you could imagine. And through that, he got into the mass camp. And through that, I don't even know how the two we connect in that sense, where clearly he was always chanting and tinging and tinging. And around that same time, I was starting to explore writing and expressing. So the two of us really hooked up very early as kind of writing partners, even though we had that discrepancy in age and exposure and environments and whatnot. You know, I had mad respect for what he was doing with his chanting skills and whatnot. And um, John and Roger were the ones who could sing and would sweeten the whole thing and make it hang together between my. I always say I my job is to lay down the thesis of the song in my voice that will cut through anything. That is not the prettiest voice, but it you can't deny it. And then Stanton is the Jap, the Jack Spaniard that come to ning you, and Roger and John is the ones that were smoothing it out with the harmonies and all that.

Corie 1:13:28

Also, they planned this assault on the people as well.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:31

We didn't plan it in the least. We had to discover it. Beavis who helped us understand, okay. You you sing this, and that's we just did, it was just organic. It was really organic.

Corie 1:13:42

Yeah, I heard you say that um it wasn't called Rapso either.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:46

You say Brother Resistance is who who hear it and say, Yes, it was Brother Resistance, saw something that I had written to help promote our first Juve band, which in those days was about 30 people. It was just rag tag squad of people. That's a long way we came. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he was like, You write this? I was like, Yeah, he said, but but it's Rapso. It's like, okay. But by then I was I had already um digested the entire Brother Resistance catalogue, yeah. I mean, just on my own, and now starting to discover Lancelot. And before that, I was also a real Andrew Tanker Pion. So and Mandela, who was always there rolling with Resistance, was like, yeah, and you're here, you tone, he had

Lilliput, Teaching, And Building Ensembles

SPEAKER_00 1:14:30

a tone, he had a rapster tone. So from earlier I was encouraged by the two of them. But I got involved with the rapster movement as a teacher, as helping them with their performance. Oh, but while I helping them with their performance, I was helped, they were helping me with my sense of being able to write and articulate, you know. And then discovering Ataclan as a cousin, as a big man. You know, you know when your grandfather did you realize you have a cousin that you didn't know because all naturally so to discover that Ata Klan was my cousin and we hit it off, and he would come around and he would be like, cuz listen this, listen this, and he would think, think, think, think, think. All while he's doing that, I was like, Yeah, I I emulated what he was doing, you know. He was already in the game through home front, and yeah, kissing it. So just it's amazing how things kind of came together, and then we got the opportunity to go in the studio with Graham, but not to do our own thing, to sing backups for Ruby Drive Shantwell had a song um back in the day. Claire the way for the dam to jam, clear the way, dumba dumb to dampa dam. And we sang on that, and then Resistance pulled us in to sing a couple backgrounds for him and whatnot. And then um Jean-Michel, Jibe and uh Lauren O'Connor, they had uh recently returned from France to Trendad, and they were setting up something called rituals, and but for I don't even know how he came to be one of the people that played Juvet with us in the Hillies. And he started bringing a little crew from France, and somewhere in 96 got the idea that we should sing a song. I was like, Why? He's like, Well, you guys have you have something, you have a loop think ting think. But that was also the year of the Atlanta Olympics, and I was off working in Atlanta for four months, so didn't really take him seriously. But when we came back, that was in September, he was very persistent, yeah, very, very persistent, and then uh we said, All right, all right, let me humor Jean-Michel, let me come up with a song or something. And by then, we you know, the bug had bitten us because we were recording with Graham. We were familiar with Graham, so and Signal was my good partner, Signal to Noise, because he's the man I have to credit, right? All the time I was doing all these corporate ads because everybody's like, You have a good voice, you have a good voice. And um actually, and he was the man who pushed me to do like them big thing international, them big concert. You sell real tickets in this country, Lud. Oh, yes, youth when we hear that. Uh banned them fellas was like, I ain't doing nothing without your voice, but yeah, I couldn't. I was just doing it, I was just exploring. I was like, you know, and um I forget what I was saying before that.

Corie 1:17:27

You're talking about them early days when you were selling your writer, so right. So Jean Michel, right.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:31

So we write a song, and I call signal, I say, Siggy, we have a song here, boy. What do you think? And it was um bitty, baby, bid, biddi, bam, bam, bad, being bidim, be blue as the you that surrounds me, and you as blue as the sky, and the sky is true. Blue, blue, my world is blue. And we took it, we auditioned it, and he's like, it's nice, but it's carnival. I mean, yeah, why all of those sing you need to sing something else harder?

SPEAKER_03 1:17:57

Right.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:57

And um Jean Michel is like, but you do juve, why don't you sing about juve? So I went back to the bass and I say, fellas, good news and bad news. Um they like the song, but they don't think it's appropriate for now. And why we don't sing about juve? And Stanton immediately went and pulled the Oxford dictionary, open it, blue, a color of pigment. Oh Jesus Christ. Serious, and the rest is history. And I I I I had the notion of painting the tongue blue, turning the whole world upside down. I knew the phrase was paint the tongue red, which means to go out and have a time. But the idea of painting the tongue blue and turning it upside down was was was crucial. And the prime time you say blue, a color pigment, trick and all, making a statement. That was it, and we were on the way. Now, when we went back to Graham now, he said, Well, yeah, but you have 16 bars here and 17 and a half bars here. So we need to fix that, and then the middle is like trick and I'll come down. He's like, How that coming in? I was like, I don't know, but hearing that Graham trick and I'll come down. So we fit that T in and like up to today, right? The third verse in that song have some odd bars in it. So, like proper musicians is be like, What going on here? That's some strange, it's an odd construction, but we did just naive, really, about vibe.

Corie 1:19:26

Spoiler used to do all the time. It's in a verse, something changed, and you hold on to one bar long enough. It's happening, it's happened often. So, did you vape come before the the blue?

SPEAKER_00 1:19:35

Yes, we did. Three years, three years, and then the music was at the instigation of Jean-Michel. We we did blue, and as I say, after that, everything turned upside down.

Corie 1:19:45

So you say he was in a no way prepared for that, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:48

We didn't know what a hit song was, and I keep telling people we get something that people life for. Oh, get it in a one.

Corie 1:19:57

I'm gonna strike the dictionary. Well, mother's always looking at the dictionary, but I didn't realize it's song that that's crazy. Blue was the cube based song. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:06

I was there, it was a disaster. It was a beautiful oh my god, it was horrible. It was, I mean, it was out of our we had no control, no control. It was the scariest thing ever. I see my partner get stabbed. I see all see all kinds of things.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:24

You're pulling your whole laundry girl.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:26

Oh my god. Well, the mistake was we woke with Lord Vida here and he came from Boy Scouts. So the whole boy, but I meet people up to today that tell me they was in blue. I was like, okay, well, I have to believe you because we took the entire morning to go from Queens Hall, that roundabout there, to KRC roundabout. The entire Juve morning, and people were the road was thick, and equal the amount of people in the savannah, and everywhere you go, people were still coming and coming. And in the blue again? 97. 97. Yeah, that's the same year as Big Truck. I always say that is the year the music change, you know. You get through.

Corie 1:21:06

Well, clearly, yeah, phenomenal in terms of the response. And I like the fact that you said the music change because even that 90s, that that year with James

The Carnival Imagination And Making Mas

Corie 1:21:20

again, you just tear jumping with so much. So the the the the idea that paint the song blue and everything, and plenty happened that yeah with music.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:27

That was the uh flambeau, that was the uh um agala, tired of the running running, yeah, bring down the rhythm. There was a a change in the sound of the music, and that happens from time to time. Yeah, it's like they have these 10-year cycles before that was 86 with Rudder. Oh, yeah, where Ruddha came on and swept everything with Bahia, Gil, and whatnot. Yeah, that's true. So we just happened to be part of that change, and you know, I mean, I always say that yeah was when Marshall became was the beginnings of what Marshall has become now.

Corie 1:21:55

Even when you're talking about laundry and that whole Boy Scouts experience and Juve is I mean, I don't know if you could do that now. That might be the beginning of the end of seeing people on the road like that too, because it used to be them when they leave Boy Scouts. I was cute to get wrong with Savannah. Same same problem by cure C people coming out. But at that point in time, your Juve band is not you say it's a small band. You're doing two people and that kind of thing.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:18

You know, well, because we had this song, we catered for a thousand, but unfortunately, I said ten thousand would have been coming down. Yeah, so be careful what you asked for. You just might get it. And that that that yeah, put it out there. And that yeah, the juve end up in Bacchanal first, you know, it had washed and I had a gun in my face and uh a big stone in my throat. I couldn't talk. You know, we were attacked by a mob of just a random thing. Uh Roger was hospitalized. He ran away from the hospital to go and play Mass in Minchel the next day. And I was leading Minchel band back here talk. It was it was so that that was the pity devil element. They always say, you know, careful where you you play with certain things in the mass, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The following year, the mud man we police stop the truck and lock me up. For what? They say we kill a man. It's like, what come we ain't kill nobody? I ain't this is Juventus happening, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The truck, uh, one of our trucks ran over somebody's foot. Right. And the man was hospitalized, but they would vent that he got killed. So it's a lover. And it wasn't even our truck, it was the next truck. Right. But I had to be in St. Clair police station covered on in mud and not having a good time.

Corie 1:23:32

That's sad sight.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:32

Yeah, I was like, this is terrible. This is no way to end your juve. Yeah, people don't know you're not seeing what you're doing. Yeah, I mean, meant men passing you from your man. Yeah, they keep it there for a while and they say, Oh, they go all the way, go all the way. He must be talking.

Corie 1:23:51

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But even that, like, when you look at juve and that experience you described where the savannah was full, like that Dimash Gras thing, the people in the savannah waiting to see a truck pass and singing is is different. I'd ask about Juve then to know before I go further with that. Like that shift to the juve.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:08

I mean, you talk about Dimash Gras. Yeah. Look at Dimash Gras then. Look at look at Dimash Gras when Stalin was singing Bundem. Yeah. All right. Look at the cauldron of people. Or even go back to any of them um semis in Skinner Park back in the day compared to now. It's a totally different level of engagement. Even when Panorama, when when they say the whole hill come down, it's not the same now. It's just not, they don't get that. I mean, I I performed with Sandra for Dimash Girl, peace be upon her, uh the year before she passed away. Because I'd done one time where I say I won a soak uh calypso mono. Of course, congrats. It yeah, because I was part of the performance. Yes. And then that year I say I could record the voice because I had juvenile. She said, No, I need you there. So I was there. And I stand up and I watch in this place. I say, but I have nobody here compared to what I grew up seeing on TV. It's nobody there. And how we reach here and we have to look at that. A lot of these official events, they did in terms of audience participation, and we're just propping it up. Yeah, yeah. And you know, some carnival is an organic thing. If things have to fall away and other things take their place, sometimes we have to come to terms with that. But it's hard to watch. But you see, once again, you see the impact of competition on judges. Judges, that's why Shadow wanted to dig out the liver and put in a coconut shell. You understand? And have them jump in non-stop. And when you start writing things for the judges, so be it. The whole thing is gonna suffer.

Corie 1:25:47

Yeah, maybe if blue written for the judges, it ain't work. There were many songs, many of them. It would have failed. So, Limax, yeah, that's traumatic. You're talking about your first two years when it's really huge. And the security issues, at no point in time, your mindset is like what we're talking about with we need security for the band party. We're thinking at the time, okay.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:10

Out of control, just how do you control how to bring some control, and we learned how to control it. The year of Toro Toro in that they be passing um Green Corner in them days. Now, Green Corner was our flashpoint, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the DJ at the time got it in his head to play Toro Toro, right? I realized no, that is a bad idea. Because that is the power of the music, right? So one of the things we learned about the juve is the music that you play in a juve, the way that you what you program will inform what you get, right? I'm not playing violent music, aggressive music in a zone like that. Because it's it we saw it, we saw it happening, we saw that people was about to die, right? So you had to pull back from that. I mean, I've seen going along Harapita Avenue and the crowd tick, tick, tick, tick, and you look out the truck and you've seen a hatchet. What is a man doing with a hatchet in the barn on a juve morning? Now, we had over time had to hire security, but our security was regiment men who move in real discreet.

J’Ouvert Risk, Programming Music, And Care

SPEAKER_00 1:27:30

And when at the end of Juventude come in and show you the cachet of things that they confiscate. Or you learn, you tell your people just don't go too far to the back of the bag. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, let me put it this way, right? When I started playing Juve, it had a point in time, and I'm talking about in the earliest before we even dream of bringing a juve band. When you're reaching tongue, there was a point in tongue when you thought you were gonna dead. And if you make it past that point, it's like woof, you get through. It juve has a dark and dangerous element to it. And I'm not at all Catholic about it. I you know, I I accept that. It's just how do you mitigate that? How do you control that? And it's just learning how do you bring things in place to ensure that the vibration don't run away from you. So, like we never used to sing our own songs on a Juve morning, but with over time we got the confidence to sing our own songs. Yeah, we just, you know, play it. Play wherever. Let the DJ play wherever, but then realize no, we can't do that. This is our band. And our people, by then, you know, we had enough songs anyway. And our people come expecting to hear our music. And if you have a problem with the fact that we sing in for 45 minutes at the start of the band and setting the tone and setting the pace, get out the band. And I've said it. I've get the fuck out of the band. Me afraid to say that. Yeah. Right? But that's confidence that you acquire over time. Yeah. And I've seen, you know, over the years, you people, you're passing other bands and people watching you with a sense of what are you doing there compared to them? And then you know what made it worse is seeing people injuve with rope.

Corie 1:29:08

Yeah, it's all right.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:10

And then you start to see that orange fencing, that construction fencing.

Corie 1:29:14

You know, I never saw it. I hear you talk about it, but I never see it. The rope, I know, but that's scary. It's like, what is this?

SPEAKER_00 1:29:22

This is this not making no sense. And you're watching people looking at you like, yeah. And invariably, we became became like pied pipers because by the time we reach the savannah, it's certainly not we we pick up people along the way.

Corie 1:29:35

And yeah, my first experience was by the savannah, you know. Yeah, I saw it and we leave home. We live in St. Augustine time. We want to play at Juve. Same thing we're talking about. No, I don't pay for no ban. And to put in context for younger people who listen, no, Juve started when the match got done. When it's exactly literally. So it's not four o'clock in the morning, and it's have plenty of darkness to face for Juve, which is a big thing. I got you. I got you. And um we we did the same thing, I believe that was yeah, Sandra with a one and another is saying that we were waiting for the match guard results by the savannah, and we they're known Sandra, we're trying to find somebody, and the Boy Scouts thing was a little too wild for we and then we see them say pipe pie pumps.

SPEAKER_00 1:30:13

You know, they're coming up the run and say we go falling in the trick. And one of the reasons we even started our own Juve initiative was because we get put out of a juve band. Yeah, he reached the storm, and we didn't get a COVID to say we kill that is masked. I I make allowance for that. I remember having a big thing back and forth with somebody in blue, right? And telling me, put the people out of the band. I said, What do you mean put people out of the band? I do even look at thousands of people. How are I doing that? I gotta call them the American Armed Forces, not even the regiment that be able to put people out of the band.

Corie 1:30:45

Boy, end up on his stage, and it was the same thing. I didn't know. So my first thought was we this is the same song. The men singing this, like it's almost trans-like. That's how I felt. And boy, we went on that stage. Because trans-like for me, I can't leave. I don't understand what it says.

SPEAKER_00 1:31:00

Like confused and I need to be in this. And that whole thing of hitting the stage, too, was like we that was something we decided we're gonna do. We will be the first people to cross the stage. You didn't used to go at all. And then after a while, they they used to block me and try to block me. And it's like, where is Captain Baker? Come again. So I mean it became a whole ritual, ceremonial thing, but it was it used to take a toll because I'd have come up front from wherever and play big and bad, and yeah, that's all that we pass, let me pass. And you know, in the meantime, we follow us ball and heave, heave, and pushing down the gate. And I say, All right, we get through. Yeah, I see a policeman reach for a gun, and I say to myself, but this man serious? But I'll stand up strong, eh? I but I say, But this man actually shadowing as if he's gonna pull a gun to shoot me or something. And we get through, and I just went to the edge of the savannah and said, nah, boy, this is this is too much. It's gonna be too much. And you reach on the stage, and in them days they was doing the demarchground, leaving all the infrastructure, so you can't cross the stage, and it just became a whole thing as like these people not even understanding, they don't care, you know. But then, you know, it's like juve. So if you had a fight to get through and do it, yeah, do it, became part of it.

Corie 1:32:15

I remember you're talking about the bands going west when everybody, you know, the that that ritual too.

SPEAKER_00 1:32:20

We didn't get our memo, you know, that everybody was heading away from the sun. We're going into the rising sun. It is like the metaphor. You leave in the darkness and you're heading into the light. So by the time we hit head to the savannah, the sun now coming up. And by the time we hit that stage, the sun hanging over you. There's a very famous photograph. Photograph? Yeah. Very famous photograph. When I saw that photograph with the big trendy flag and the sunshine, it's like, wow, that is wee boy. Because there are times when you know I'm amazed, they sit down that top of your truck and you look back, it's like, whoo, papa, look, people. You can imagine what it looks like to you. Yeah, good for your ego. Yeah. But you know, them people ain't paying no money, but that's part of it for me.

Corie 1:33:05

So to you, you went into it as a because I I would think if anybody comes and tell me they want to sort of do it, but I know my first thoughts would be a little to make money. That was not on your mind when you said.

SPEAKER_00 1:33:19

But they did a thing talking about their new breakfast rollout, think thing, thing, and I get hungry one time. I really I was like, okay, I feel into it. All them things they offered me there. But I ain't hear nothing body mass up to now, you know?

Corie 1:33:33

No, no, no, no.

SPEAKER_00 1:33:34

I ain't nothing but seemed very nothing about what color they play in, but they having lots of options in terms of food on a juve morning. Now we had to concede and get people a little coffee and doubles down in the end. Oh, you did. You had to go any times, but we wasn't definitely going with no rope.

Corie 1:33:53

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Last year I played with um, I think the band is Strive. And I just, you know, the comparison in my mind between that experience crossing the stage, because you couldn't move when you cross the stage at all, yeah. That one shot man makes some space every now and again, but that was it.

SPEAKER_03 1:34:07

Yeah, yeah.

Corie 1:34:08

You can't move to compared to last year, and I started realize, boy, Juve. Juve is a replacement now for people who can't spend the thousands and thousands of dollars to play money at the time. Because we hear party and carry it whole morning. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:34:22

And for me, that's not that's not juve. Yeah, yeah. You know me? But as I say, you know, that year when Andre Tanker died and we started playing Sayamanga. Woo papa. You know, there was a year when there's a young lady that I saw in the band, and her mother had just died. And she was blowing a kind of

Setting Tone: Singing Your Own Catalogue

SPEAKER_00 1:34:40

fire, and I was like, I understand what's going on with her there. You know, she was doing her little ritual for the passage of her mother, and we were playing the kind of music that afforded a kind of spiritual vibration to take place, you know. So it's a big void. I mean, we get people up every single day, every you know.

Corie 1:34:59

Wave phone was like the day you make the announcement where when they say and going back, it must have been terrible.

SPEAKER_00 1:35:05

I tell you that I I kind of stayed inside for a while, actually, because I couldn't go anywhere with without people demanding, actually. Some people get vexed with you, real vexed that people like, why gonna do people what they were too? And if ever I felt like bringing back out a JV band, it was definitely this year with all this talk about war and all that stuff. For me, that is our perfect opportunity to rebellion. But the knees, the knees, yeah.

Corie 1:35:29

I'm blaming it on the knees. I don't blame it on the knees. I hear you. It's up music now. Again, are you talking about Attila and them leading the band and the toes and priceless?

SPEAKER_00 1:35:40

And that's it. Everybody over time, certain people have emerged in certain roles. You know, if if I don't see Tilla in the front of the band doing thing, you know, and we have this. She's just one. There are about 12 women that do that, you know. Yeah, which takes us back to that tradition of the flag woman, it's a tradition. Uh flag woman in them days was our baddest. Yeah, you know, she's the one who comes into point and hold the point, and then the rest of the band come into meetup, you know. So Tillon then represented that, you know, and that was a powerful thing that these women were front in the band. Then they had laventy. You cannot discount the impact of the laventy rhythm section on the vibrations. They were there from with us from the beginning. One of the first songs we ever sing on was Lavanti Rhythm Section, Juve, Bambadeoy. Oh, that's the one to the point where people think it was our song. It was not our song, that was Laventy Rhythm Section. Really? Yeah, I see. And the chance to meet a Keith Smith, you know, and and and interact with a character like that. And that that was a major endorsement for us to work with a potent force like Laverty and Mr. Morgan and all them fellas who represent that tradition of playing a real hardcore mask. That yeah, when we play war, Mr. Morgan had helmet with bush and telephone and you know, them playing masks and playing the music all day.

Corie 1:37:00

You know, um, maybe there's another part missing, the idea that okay, so even when you're the expectation now is you buy a mask in a package, like a box. It's not like if you're add or you, you know, not a long much people make their own. No, no, make your own mass.

SPEAKER_00 1:37:14

And for me, that was one of the joys of the trick and all. And to our credit from early, because when we started, we say we're not selling costume, we're selling concept. It's up to you to use your imagination and interpret that concept. Now we go provide the basics, the basics being the pigment. As far as I concern, Jove is a time to strip down, get nearly as naked as you dare to be, and then cover yourself in weather pigment. Now, based on whatever the theme is, you could then add to that. So I remember 2000 when we did the year of the dragon. That's when I really started to see people come in with all kinds of dragon head and this and that and all kinds of things. And over the years that started developing where people will just take your theme, interpret it, and come with an ass. And that just made it richer.

Corie 1:37:58

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course, of course. So imagine me trying to watch you now, and I'll tell I'll tell you we have seven songs to cover. I've never heard of different mix of songs. I never hear it's unpredictable. I hear singing Sandro, yeah, Lancelot Leyden, Brother Resistance, Andre Tanko, and it's summary. It's like this.

SPEAKER_00 1:38:21

And for me, them songs, that's that's not strange. Those songs belong to one another because I just pull some real weird music and make some strange never when I play in my players for my trainer.

SPEAKER_01 1:38:32

She's like, How this song comes to the song is like connect, it makes sense for me.

SPEAKER_00 1:38:37

No, but those songs, I mean, I had to think along and how about how do you choose seven to all these songs, right? So let me say good citizens. Sparrow has so many songs, but for me, good citizens is a song that is timeless because we're still dealing with the notion of these good citizens, the melody in that song, the way it was sung, you know, singing Sandra for me is like one of the ultimates. You know, that Rajina Jim for me is the addish the quality of singing on that, the quality of the melody, the bounce, everything about it. Yeah, yeah. And then you think they just I went to India. We had the privilege of going to India, seven cities, and I appreciate Trinidad so much more for that experience in India. I say now I understand why the Eastern Main Road look the way it does. And it's sort of some of it look like it nice, some look like it fallen down. So that's what India was like. Everything happening one time except multiply by millions and millions and millions, you know, but uh energy, uh vibrance, hecticness, uh craziness, and um you grow up watching an Indian movie, it in your blood.

Corie 1:39:50

Yeah, every Sunday evening your car is just part of it.

SPEAKER_00 1:39:52

It in your blood, you know. I mean, I take pride in that. That that is part of who we are. Of course. So I always would that's like the other night for old years. I I decided I gonna have we're gonna have a little playlist party, right? And when that song came on, I had to play it like three times. Such people react, it can't it can't help it viscerally, come and ask for it again because they hadn't heard it for a while, you know. It's like they wasn't expecting it either. Yeah, for me, that's part of it.

Corie 1:40:20

So when you're coming up with music and coming up with so because after blue, there are some songs my father go kill me if I talk to you or talk your talk to talk your talk, shell shock, boy.

SPEAKER_00 1:40:29

We have to credit

Songcraft: Talk Your Talk, Salt, And Shock

SPEAKER_00 1:40:30

Shell Shock. We after Blue Rituals reached out to Shock to ask him if he would work with us, and he said, Yes, but he needed to meet with us first to see if he liked us. So we flew to New York, he was he was in New York at the time, and fortunately he liked us. Easy 679th. Right, and um one of the first things he did was give me a cassette with that beat. And I sat down, I listened to this thing, I said, but it's sounding like I'm Mexican, he can beep beep. And one of the things I had in mind too is like I was relling to scrunter, I was relling to how scrunters do what he's doing, boy. And I die was an attempt at doing something scrunter-esque, right? And that was like a goal mine because that is the counterpoint to the dreadness of the song, you know, the talk you talk and the aggression of that, and ah, yeah, the group done set up that way, right? Right? So for me, talk your talk was was one of my proudest moments as a songwriter, and also because it gave us the opportunity to forge that relationship with Shock. So, like by the following year, when he had come back to Trendad now and was based with rituals, and one day rituals decided to set up a studio in the in the little yard, and walking into the studio, and he was working on salt, the beat for salt. Oh I said, Shocky, why is that, but you say you want it? I say yes, yeah, I say yes, and we knew that we were going to do a follow-up in the vein of talk, not literally, we wanted a similar element, kind of like how Marshall come with the uncle now. And for me, that's fine. If conceptually, if you want to push the statement you're making a little further, and we actually went the following year and came with watch them again. Oh so in those days, I keep saying we were just experimenting. We we didn't have to study nothing, we didn't have the pressure that I see so many soaker men on the being having that hit. Because if you do have that hit, I see Ricky Jai talking about it on a on a thing the other day. Yeah, so that is the only music industry where you will walk non-stop the year you have a hit and then salt the following year. Nothing for you. Bud was the biggest example of that for me. Man a bad man. Remember that? Remember that? Man a bad man all over the place, and then the following year. I see Bud sign up on the backstage, and nobody's like that, bud, you know. Crazy. You know, I've seen it. It's terrible. That does not even experience you in the bamboo with your business with you. Yeah, terrible. You could have repertoire, and that's one of the reasons why we do our show because we have repertoire. And we sing old songs, and people is like, oh, I like that new one. Boy, that song about 15 years old, boy.

Corie 1:43:32

But that's nice though. I saw it in Kaiso Blue. David, what was with you went in Kaiso Blues the other day? I think it was Aussie. Merrick was doing that show. Yeah. Listen, well, number one. Well, you have a group of fans, they brother, that know every song. Whether I feel it new or I feel they know every song word for word. So even salt, when it comes on, the reaction to that performance.

SPEAKER_00 1:43:54

Yeah. There are two young ladies, they're twins. We were doing a show in central bank, and I look out, I see these two beautiful young ladies. Their meme look like there's 20, right? When salt came on, I almost forget I was singing the song because I was so intrigued by them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there I was totally intrigued by them. And I mean, I don't know what to say. That's I just had to give thanks for that. That the songs could transcend generations that you know, that people could come all these years later and say, you know, that song had this impact on me, or this song affected me this way. Even some of our more obscure songs, like we have songs like Illuminata and Over the Mountain. You know, the people I bounced up a young man the other day. He's an MMA fighter, and you're telling me his favorite song is Illuminata. It's like, okay, make it make sense. Well, after you done kick dumb people, you say we're not afraid to walk in the light.

Corie 1:44:54

Well, you can't say nothing. When I hear the seven songs you pick, you can't people listen to music, but I don't find that so hard.

SPEAKER_00 1:45:00

I find them semi songs real connected.

Corie 1:45:02

I was like, what I was intrigued just to hear like what coming next. But we talk it talking, then it's all with little prang side. You know, we have a side. But when I say parang, it's Kai So is player. Right. And I remember us playing a bar in South Boy, younger people, and we playing uh Baron. Uh me and this girl from Toronto, me and this girl from Toronto, and we just people fighting and have enough time. But somewhere else in the blue, a basement was played to you, it's a little nully. And he said, ah da da da da da da da da. Can we just end up stuck in the first two chords for a while, just jamming? And I say I stumbling talk because that's when I see people's reaction to that.

SPEAKER_00 1:45:42

What is this? No, that that wore my heart because I tell you, I was trying to emulate what Skrunto was doing with that. We didn't even think it would impact in Carnival. We thought that, you know, that didn't. I felt that it was making that little too Christmassy, but I know the rest of it was really hard. But what really pushed the song over the top was when they threatened to ban it for the use of the word friggin. One of the best things that could happen to you is they threatened to ban your soul.

Corie 1:46:06

That's the Holy Grail back. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:46:08

It happened with Soka Baptist, right? Right. We wake up one morning and realize, oh, it has a control C around the song. And people calling it as like, well, to comment on the use of the word friggin' is like, well, oh, they call it Yeah.

Corie 1:46:21

But it makes the song harder.

SPEAKER_00 1:46:23

Well, that's the intention. I mean, you want to bust some head, yeah, yeah, yeah. You want to land some blows, you know what I'm saying? I would say at Carnival Time politicians should be very afraid, you know. They had to understand that this is not their time, you know. And that's why they was trying to license me out from sincerely King Radio. Yeah, saying about it since 1939. It had a time when Californians had to show up in the police station every day with the songbook. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the police coming down in the tent. You know, and then that's why they didn't want me to sing in Patwa because they couldn't understand.

Corie 1:46:53

You seen it this year. I see men saying now that government I hear a whole song made about people was quiet for the last 10 years, and now they're talking and things

Collaborations: Tanka, Superblue, And Monarch

Corie 1:47:00

as if they shouldn't talk. You know, talk it talk. Hello? Powerful, powerful, powerful. The role of the Calypsoan. Yeah. So that's why these seven songs so eclectic to me because that song is so aggressive and so smooth at the same time. That when I hear the Land Slot, is it juxtaposition? Another one of them songs for me, and when I heard about the way you talk about Andre Tanker, I want to ask what it felt like doing Ben Lyon. How it came about?

SPEAKER_00 1:47:23

How it came about, Andre Tanker was a hero. We actually got our start doing anything singing loud in front of Rudder stage and Andre Tanker stage. Loud and obnoxious until As fans. Yes, as fans. Deepak Kipalani gave us a he used to do a thing down Moon over Bourbon Street, the small Moon over Bourbon Street. Yeah, that's David Small. It's David Place. And David Rudder, and they used to do a Christmas night thing. And we used to just attend and sing so loud that they say, all right, well, you come and do a little opening, something. And in those days, it was Myron Ali, all kinds of people. It wasn't in trick and all then. We just went and sing versions of Christmas carols in our style. And then Andre had a big launch in Normandy when he had the album, and we was in front of the stage singing so loud, we ended up on the stage singing with him. Then we had the good fortune to work with Andre on T Sha and sing those songs that he wrote for T Sha and his brothers. And um, so by by the time, and I would start having conversations with him about wanting to do stuff, and he was very encouraging. And but remember, Andre was off the scene in terms of popularity. If you know, you know, was kind of thing that he wasn't in the carnival arena or anything like that. So he got a bee in his bonnet and he had just learned to use Fruity Loops. And he made a little Fruity Loops beat, and he did a demo and he brought it by us because we were real good with the label, and he figured if we kind of you know presented it, it might get through because they weren't looking at him as a carnival artist. And the day that he brought it and we were playing it, Shell Shock happened to be passing by to go in the studio because we had our little office right here, and the studio was right there. And Shock said, Why is that? And he said, Well, Andre this is Andre like he was now meeting Andre kind of thing, and he's like, Um I want part of that. So Andre was over the moons, and once Shock sanctioned that he wanted to do the day, and we sanctioned that we wanted to be a part of it, you know. Andre was happy like Papi, and the song just happened like that, you know. Um he he wrote it for the most part. I wrote my little uh couple lines, nothing to talk about, you know. But um the whole structure, everything was was Andre with shock, yeah, yeah, yeah. Tweaking the beat as he as he liked to say, and us just getting a chance to sing with a hero.

Corie 1:49:58

I mean, you can't be that. Yeah, I remember again coming outside T Fini a little runway for Juvie. And it's just the beat and there's an infectiousness to it as soon as it comes.

SPEAKER_00 1:50:08

And to think that Andre programmed that on He Fruity Loops. And then Shock just made it tougher. That touched it. Yeah. Those are priceless moments in our career that we really care. Because to think after that, it was like we ended we entered Soka Monarch with that song. We entered Soka Monarch with Talk Your Talk against our will. We didn't really want to be competing. And but we were in finals. Oh nice. And we actually we came second in the Ragasoka Tebanji.

Corie 1:50:39

Oh, yeah, it's true. It's like Ragasoka for taking the place.

SPEAKER_00 1:50:43

So all that is just, you know, for the CV. Yeah, it's for the experience. You can't beat that experience. You can't wait to just sing in front of that kind of crowd and then come years later and sing with Super and win.

SPEAKER_03 1:50:55

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:50:56

The win.

Corie 1:50:57

Um was the story there? Well he decided all he wanted to do that, or because again, for fun, yeah, the rag storm was it, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:51:03

No, the one we did with Super was um it was the Soka Matrix album. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 1:51:08

Way beyond ranger.

SPEAKER_00 1:51:10

Oh, that's a good one. And so it was our job was to sing, Way Bianca Rum. And when Super came on that stage, on the it was in the oval, and Super take the stage. So before Super even says anything, we have literally I've never experienced this ever in my life, before or since. A vortex opened, honestly, you know, and the uh a wave of energy, the whole crowd was like a wave of energy. Super, and then he stuck by the time he climbed the the thing, it was all over. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, and I'd never tell you then we got the chance to do it again with Fantastic Friday, right? And then I got a chance to craft a performance for Ola where he won the um the soccer monarch. So I got my vicarious thrills. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. I just, you know, to say I work with Sandra twice and win a Calypso Monarch to work with Super, to sing on stage with Super and win soccer monarch twice to work with Rolla and win soccer monarch. Yeah, you know, these things that I could take a certain pride in, even though I'm not in the competition arena. Yeah, you know, but if we go in, we're going in hard, you know what I'm saying? We ain't going in halfway.

Corie 1:52:29

Yeah, yeah. Your fans appreciate it too, you know. I mean, just to see uh all kinds of thoughts about competition, but nice to see the people here back in.

SPEAKER_00 1:52:37

Okay, because it's important to them. So

Voice Work, Ads, And Craft

SPEAKER_00 1:52:40

we on board with them. You have a song with super, I hope it comes out this year, you know, because I hope so.

Corie 1:52:45

It's not the kind of album birthday is not that is another one. No, no, no, it's an extra day. I had to say before you go, the voice, because when you talk about your entry into the thing being somebody like Minchel asking about colour and what Minchel's voice meant, as I was just voicing things. Uh, your voice ended up being that for us in the clash time, and you sell real dance hall, concert tickets, fet tickets, all those different things. That was something you wanted to do. People just tell you you had a good voice in you.

SPEAKER_00 1:53:12

I didn't know anything about that. I actually the first inclination of it was a day in literature class where we had to get up and read. Right? Richard Pierre was my literature teacher at the time. And wherever it was we were asked to read, I got up and I read it, and he was like, You could you're you could read. You're a good reader and you have a good voice and you have a good intonation. I didn't study that. Then I got into acting, and one day I a guy just appeared in front of me. I was working in the bank, doing my little cashing at the NCB Trust, and a guy walked in and said, Um, I want to put you in an ad. I was like, What? And he's like, Yeah, I want to put you in an ad. So that was David Gomez from Mackay and Ericsson, and he put me in an ad. And that was it. And then as I say later on, I was doing like real corporate, you know, corporate stuff, speaking properly. As my mother insisted that I speak properly, I didn't get a chance to talk like the rest of my cousins on them and say, look, Nigel BNA bad. I could do it now, but I didn't, I was that with a um, so I I I appreciate the time she took to make sure that I spoke properly, but I also was able to just speak normal. You know, and by the time um I was aware that I had a voice and signal is who as I say pushed me in that direction to do them real high pads. And that was in days when you know it had real concerts, real, real concerts. So I was busy in demand, you know. I'd have people showing up by my gate and they want me to do this voice and that voice. And I was just doing, you know, and and by the time Insomnia come around because somebody says that's like insomnia, it's like half the time, sometimes when you do them, ad you're sweating, you know. Yeah, you're just like, oof, people don't even realize how much work it is. Yeah, yeah. And um, and over over the years I've actually tried to pull back from that. Yeah. Get back from that, get come down from there. I remember when the when Hoppy and them started running me down for the 45 shop clock and Umba and them for the Matt's roots and culture promotions present, you know, Matt's and Miller song.

Corie 1:55:21

Yeah, it's some fetalized going no way of voices, clear the entrance. Yeah, I wonder if it's so called boy. They have this grand entrance and it's we hearing talking, it's just hype up the thing from the beginning. So, I mean, I hope they pay for it. I hope I'm saying feel so fine now.

SPEAKER_00 1:55:36

Residuals might apply. Yeah, yeah. I've had people teeth my voice and use it in all kinds of ways too. I'm a little wary about that right now, and then you had to watch out for the AI. Pretty soon there'll be the AI.

Corie 1:55:48

Of course, yeah. Imagine that, right? Look where we come to.

SPEAKER_00 1:55:51

Look where we come to. But you know, part of doing that voice thing, I have to say, I I deliberately listened to people who were doing stuff before me. The Glenn Antoines, you know, Ian the Goose Elegon. I take a little bit from everybody and try to, and then I always thought people say, How to do an ad? I said, pick up the papers, find an ad and read it. I I spent time just doing that, you know? Yeah, practicing your intonation, practicing your inflection, practicing all them things, you know.

Corie 1:56:20

Perfect. Well, David, we learned some things today. We learned that you could pick up the papers and learn to read ads like Wendell, and you could pick up the dictionary and make it songs. Just read all the first lines. Just find the right word. I just find the right word. Yeah, for sure, for sure. A brother, thanks a million. Is that dream come true for me?

SPEAKER_00 1:56:37

Special, special, special, special moment. I appreciate it. I've been waiting on this moment, so you know, thank you. Thank you for what you're doing. Thank you for what you're doing. Thank everybody for affording us to tell our stories because through our stories, we get to appreciate our length and depth and breadth. And I don't take that for granted.

Corie 1:56:56

Our pleasure, our pleasure, all pleasure. You do it so we can do it. I appreciate that. Oh, we do.