So many songs to choose from, so many beats to stamp to. In most circles, it’s being said that winner of  this road march race is too early to tell just yet, but there are a few songs that stand out from the pack. You know them, they are on everyone’s lips, hummed in taxis, sung along with on the radio and heard in most jingles advertising where the very artistes can be seen performing. But what do the artistes themselves think about their chances?

Fay-Ann Lyons

Fay-Ann Lyons is a favourite for the Road March title. If she pulls it off she will be only the third female to do so. (Calypso Rose was the first in 1977, “Tempo,” repeating in 1978, “Soca Jam” and Sanell Dempster’s “River” in 1999.) A victory for Fay-Ann will make her the youngest person ever to win the title, as well, she will be chalking up a family and national record as the first father and daughter to win the titles. Her father SuperBlue won eight times. Fay-Ann says she fears no one in the Road March race. And this is from one of the newest persons to the soca game, namely the Soca Monarch competitions and the upcoming Road March race. A serious contender in her own right, the pretty 22-year-old  front-line singer with Invazion has been heating up the airwaves with “Display”, a tune that she wrote with everyone in mind. “When I write a song I don’t try to channel anything,” she says. “I don’t picture the bands sweating it out on Carnival Tuesday, no images of jumping or waving crowds. You see, I never try to channel anything like that, you won’t get anything out of it. It’s like trying to channel a river and a couple of people may get washed away in the process, you know? So I don’t do it. All I want to do is pick up my pen and write.” She describes her song as something that all classes can identify with, no particular uptown or downtown posse. As she says, the kids can jump, the people can wave and pick up the beat, catching the natural momentum of the music. When asked who she considered a threat, she simply says, “God, I fear no man!” Then she breaks into laughter. Her father Austin Lyons (SuperBlue) is as proud as any doting papa, she admits. “He gives me advice on performance and showmanship.”

Destra Garcia

With her sexy on-stage moves and blatant sexuality, Destra Garcia makes soca delivery look frighteningly easy. Some may even think that she has a 2003 Road March victory on the brain, given her popular songs, “Carnival” and “Choo Choo”, which are literally “mashing up” de place. “Believe me, I’m not really thinking about the road march at all, Destra admits. “I not studying that… I just making the music for the people to enjoy. If it comes out to be a road march contender, all well and good.” Garcia already tasted some road march success when her song “Tremble it” placed third last year, but she feels no pressure, even after breaking away from Roy Cape and launching into a successful solo career. The songwriting team of Kernal Roberts and Machel Montano (they co-wrote “Carnival”) along with the sexy songstress generated its own creative formula. “Kernal came up with the verses and I came up with the chorus,” says Garcia. “I don’t really believe that there is a real ‘formula’ as such for writing a road march tune, because what happened with us, it was a vibe… everybody contributed a vibe of their own to the piece, so no real formula, because a road march is like an anthem. When you hear it, it makes you go crazy. It’s a song that can make you run, make you wave, make you march. It’s something sweet with a catchy hook…  you have to catch the soca jumbie.” Garcia, doesn’t see anyone else as a threat, or herself for that matter. In her eyes, it’s not about seeking prizes; she’s in it for the fun of it. “Right now I am thanking God for his many blessings and I can say that my plate is a full one. For me to want anything more at this point means I will be greedy, and I’m not. “With this road march race, there are so many people I want to wish the best, like Fay-Ann, KMC, Iwer, and Ronnie McIntosh, now that is a possible dark horse right there, because his song mashing up right now. “And ‘Madman’ Machel too, don’t leave him out either! (Laughs) I’m just concentrating on making it through the season, surviving Soca Monarch… Maybe one day it will be me to win a title, but I consider myself still at the bottom, but I’m climbing.”

Iwer George

Is all about me and Fay-Ann. I think my chances are as good as hers,” said 2000 Road March winner Iwer George. Logically, “Ah Home” is what the foreigners say when they hit the streets Monday and Tuesday for Carnival,” Iwer explained. “And when they reach the stage it’s just to ‘display’.” Whichever way it should go, “regardless who win, is love still,” he assured. “Ah trusting in God.” He wouldn’t be aboard a truck, though. Iwer confided: “I’ll be in a band wining on a woman,” he laughed, not wanting to reveal his “secret” band. Nevertheless, Iwer feels confident that everything will work out favourably. He described his season as “most relaxed”. Compared to last year, he said it was more work but “I feel like ah now starting to understand how to do it. This year I was able to space it out.” Iwer’s “Ah Home” which mirrors the true expression of a home-sick Trini is touted by many as a serious contender for Road March.

Scrunter

Scrunter’s (Irwin Johnson) “Jumbie—De Road Mix” is officially in the Road March race. Scrunter returned to the studios and together with producer Junior “Ibo” Joseph did a remix of “Jumbie” adding “more life into it”. But Scrunter couldn’t understand why the original version was never considered a Road March contender since it won road march titles at Miami, New York and Washington Carnivals. “I don’t know what is the problem. It has a nice beat and it puts the spirit into Carnival. It’s the same West Indians abroad listening to the music but here we get accustomed to the jumping, running and waving,” said Scrunter who was at the time tending to his garden in Sangre Grande. His Carnival season has been a very good one. “Jumbie”, which was released in April 2002 has been “doing well” especially in the US. “I just didn’t take part in any competition. Competition does stress yuh. If yuh doh have a good heart they’ll kill you.” He didn’t get many calls to perform locally which he attributed to “promoters trying to cut back on expenses. They’re hiring the bands which are playing the songs so it seems they don’t need the artistes.” Nevertheless, when the Carnival fever boils over, he looks forward to his annual Matura lime with friends and family from here and abroad.

Brian Honore has changed the Midnight Robber from boastful badjohn to social commentator. But although this mas is evolving he still thinks Carnival should retain its traditions, in at least two senses. He thinks the few, small ole time mas bands should not feel intimidated by large modern bands, and he also thinks modern mas has excluded the grassroots who had originally fought for its establishment.

This year Honore’s Mystery Raiders will present Ye Robbers of Marli Street, a lampoon of United States foreign policy including their impending war against Iraq and their embassy’s “occupation” of Marli Street, Port of Spain now blocked off to public traffic because of security concerns. Honore said: “There are robbers locking your neck and thieving your gold and silver. There are robbers locking your neck and raising bank rates. There are robbers locking your neck and raising the price of bread. But have you ever heard of a band of robbers stealing a whole street. “Somebody put up a police sign saying ‘No Entry’, which we expect means ‘No entry to Trinidadians’. Some of the main characters in the mas are Emperor George Bushmaster and General Colin Pierrot. We have put out a long line of mas with meaning including Vote for your Robber, Robbers for Democracy and Robbers of the Apocalypse, the latter protesting the paving of the Savannah in the dead of night.” Quipping that the band would seem to be 15,000 strong although its membership would be closer to 15, Honore invited: “Uncostumed revellers are welcome to join us. There’ll be no rope around our band.”

He jested: “We’ll have an all-inclusive section from the United States, or rather an all-exclusive section, depending on which side of the police barrier you are on. We will be having fun, making our voices heard. We are helping anyone who feels up to the task to help us steal the street.” Honore denied actually changing robber mas from a verbal badjohn into a social commentator, saying: “We are identifying the real badjohns. At my school I had students do robber productions where the villains were the voice of HIV and Aids, nuclear proliferation and the threat of war, and crime and corruption. We are just identifying the real badjohns on the face of the earth.” He explained: “The late Andrew ‘Puggy’ Joseph, known as ‘The Agent of Death Valley’ had told me: ‘You keep your speech contemporary, near to the concerns of the people’.” Recalling the massive funeral of his mentor in 1997 attended by all the ole time mas characters, Honore noted: “With our band we have a small art exhibition on the road which pays tribute to our fallen heroes of mas. This year we will remember Lady B, Theresa Montano, flagman Gerard Lewis and Preddie (Lord Pretender). And Rubadiri Victor is hard at work on a depiction of Marli Street.”

Honore recalled his own introduction to robber mas some 18 years ago when he met Puggy at a robber-talk competition at Burrokeets in Belmont. “He asked me ‘Why don’t you play in my robber band? I turned up on Carnival day and Puggy gave me one long robber speech. Then I asked him ‘Where is the band?’ He replied ‘This is the band, you and I’.” Honore laughed that robber bands tended to be small.  He was heartened that this year Rosary Boys RC School was bringing out a robber band “Robbers then and now” incorporating traditional robbers with modern rude-boys. So over his 18 years playing robber mas, how had the public’s reaction to the robber changed? Honore replied: “We have had experiences where the big bands are waiting to come on stage and the NCBA is hustling us off but people say ‘Let them talk. We want to hear them’. Although Poison is behind us, people demand that we continue. With all the bikini-and-beads bands, there are some beautiful little bands like the Paramin Blue Devils, Minstrels and Red Indians, which come across as a breath of fresh air. The Mystery Raiders has added to that. We never feel intimidated. In fact some people leave the bikini-and-beads bands and take a jump with the robbers.  “I’ve had some infuriating incidents but we stand our ground and demand our respect.

A lot of people who are lamenting the death of Carnival do not consider the contribution made by traditional masqueraders who are the people with access to the schoolchildren to talk to them about Carnival. Schools do traditional mas.” He said that despite poor people having historically fought to establish Carnival, today these people were marginalised from mas, instead celebrating through the steelband. He said: “The people who fought to preserve Carnival and the drum were from East Dry River and Laventille. The question of the marginalisation of young people from poorer areas could be to do with the ‘woodbrookisation’ of the Carnival. “Carnival has always been a battle between Candomble and Mardi Gras, a battle which will continue, not die. “All the sailor bands, jab jabs and midnight robber bands, which used to come from poor areas like East Dry River and Laventille, must now demand their space in the Carnival.” Noting that unlike Rio de Janeiro, our carnival was not to spectate but to participate, he said:  “Mas is so democratic, essentially someone getting up on Jouvert morning and getting out whatever little they have and putting on a mask and playing this and that. Do we want to lose that?”

Honore praised the authorities for helping ole time mas, saying: “Part of the renaissance in traditional mas has to be credited to the authorities, including regional bodies like Port-of-Spain City Council which has kept it going from even before I was born. Can you recall the days when you couldn’t see a single Moko Jumbie on the road? Today, Cocorite alone has three Moko Jumbie schools, and they also exist in places like San Fernando and Point Fortin. Much credit has to go to the authorities.”  Honore concluded: “We are inviting everybody who feels they could out-robber-talk us and steal a street, to join us for Carnival.”

In the PR Week magazine of June 21, 1999, one of the 40 Public Relations Stars under 40 was a Trinidadian Abenaa Hayes. She was just 27 years old, and at the time employed by Rowland Wang Healthcare as an account supervisor: “Not a very big firm”, says Abenaa, “about 25 people only, specialised in pharmaceutical PR.”

The daughter of the late Dr John Hayes, founder of the John Hayes Kidney Foundation, and the late Justice Cynthia Riley-Hayes, attended both Bishop Anstey Junior and High Schools before going to Mc Gill University in Montreal where she graduated with a first degree in English, with a concentration on film and communications. She then obtained a Master’s in broadcast journalism from the Aanenberg School of Communications at the University of Southern California. Abenaa started off wanting to be a television reporter, but while pursuing her degree realised that the course offered not only print and broadcast journalism but also a degree in public relations which she says is “one of those fields that journalists know they cannot live without PR people, but on the side make fun of them as they are not really considered true news people. But at the end of the day most journalists do acknowledge that if it were not for the people in PR they would not have half the stories they get, especially in the field I work in.”

What is Abenaa’s specialised field of Pharmaceutical Public Relations all about? “It is one in which publicity is given when different clinical trials or a new drug discovery gets published in the medical journals. We co-ordinate the publicity effort for print and broadcast media, which involves interviews with doctors and dissemination of all information.” The Trinidad-born PR practitioner was at the time of her nomination in PR Week, the only practitioner whom Mike Waldholz of the Wall Street Journal had ever complimented on her “helpfulness”. Waldholz, one of the top reporters focuses on health care and bio-technology, but, says Abenaa, “the thing he is most famous for is all the reporting done in the past 20 years on HIV and AIDS. He is one of those people who doesn’t always like PR people and is not always very nice to you on the phone when you call. “The reason I think I got along with him is that I believe you are always as good as your next story and when you deal with people like Mike Waldholz of the Wall Street Journal you have to know when to call them, what to give them and when to be persistent. When I worked with him, he called my client and congratulated them on having me as their PR person because he said if I were not persistent with the story he would never have written it, and he was glad that I was (persistent) because the product actually changed the way they treat HIV patients medically. That was the beginning of my working relationship with him.”

At the start of her career, Abenaa thought she could become a local television reporter in a place like New York or Los Angeles — two big media markets in the United States. “When you make it that is where you want to work. And that is what I wanted to do, but at the time the economy was as it is now in the States, not so good. Jobs were not so easy to come by so I thought how can I use my skills and still be able to carve out a career, and that is how I chose PR.” She considers herself lucky “because when I actually started looking for the job in PR, all the companies at the time were hiring former journalists or people who had journalism degrees because they saw that there was value in having  them on staff. “I had worked for about four months at a television station in Los Angeles and then my grandfather, the late Frank Hercules, a Trinidadian living in New York, called me and said why don’t you come to New York, it is the centre of the universe, we have all the media centres here. So I said I will go and try it for one year.” That year has stretched to almost nine years. Abenaa started off with the same firm with which she now works — Manning Selvage & Lee, a full service Public Relations company in Manhattan. “I was working in their travel PR group but really wanted to do health care, something that would help people since apart from all the direct publicity we also do a lot of patient education, could have been the family history of having a father as a doctor who started the Kidney Foundation in Trinidad and did a lot of grassroots work here. So I do a lot of health care PR, particularly with aids and cancer.”

Abenaa is considered something of a science guru as with no medical training whatever, she is able to read and think scientifically for her job. “It could also be part of having my father as a doctor and listening to all of his friends I was able to pick it up quite quickly.” In her spare time, she is a member of the Junior Committee of HELP USA — a volunteer group which provides shelter and does job training for the homeless. She has chosen “pilates”— a combination of yoga and strength training — a sport. Her one-week visit to Trinidad was to be mother-giver to her younger brother, Dr John Hayes, who married Camille Boodoo last Saturday at Holy Trinity Cathedral.