The xtatik 5.0 album..we're taking it up a notch. It will be something again that people can partake. It will have additional performers, more antics, more tricks and lots more magic. We’re trying to get real experimental. We’re trying to take risks because we've already been on top. So the only place to go is back to the bottom for something higher so we're taking that chance. We wanted to come from the rock band point of view. Drums, guitar, bass, keys. Really come to play that music first as a group. Let's jam, get a tight groove, record it and then apply technology to it. We don’t always have the time because we are always on the road. We are still trying to find a way.

Machel Montano
Harlem, August 29th 2003.

You've probably seen a crowd of 10,000 people lose their minds when an entertainer walks on stage, but have you been blessed to witness the mayhem and insanity that occurs when Machel Montano appears? Or better, have you gotten soaked, powdered, and energized beyond description as one of the crowd? Machel, who's still very young, has been performing for us for twenty years now and continues to popularize and revolutionize soca and Caribbean entertainment. He is to soca what Coltrane is to jazz, Marley is to reggae, and Sparrow is to calypso. With a long long list of awards for best male soca musician, best album, best band, over 14 albums and recordings with artists like Shaggy, Sparrow, Calypso Rose, Red Rat, Beenie Man, and Drupatee, Machel at twenty eight is an icon and an inspiration. During carnival you'll find him on the road chipping, in a fete you'll see him at the side wining, and on stage you'll witness this bundle of sexual energy continue to entertain as women in the front readily grope all parts of his body. But beyond the party, the wine up, and the performance he's a musical brainchild who produces and arranges award winning music, and he's a businessman with his own production and publishing company, and recording studio and is the director of Xtatik Ltd.. With a schedule that never lets up during labor day in New York, and a voice that needed rest for the many performances, Machel Montano still dedicated some time to jouvay.com and promised that the interview would continue possibly at another carnival.

Jouvay.com: Mr. Machel Montano, how long have you been in this business?

Jouvay.com: Is that the reason behind the big show, the circus?

Machel Montano: No, the circus is separate. We have different things going on at different times. We have certain programs going on to celebrate twenty years. We are setting up a museum back in Trinidad. Lots of clothes that I wore in different shows back in 1984 and 1985..we have all of that, shoes, posters, different T-shirts and memorabilia, and magazine articles through the years. We have every newspaper article ever written on display. We have a museum for the kids and for people to know about the music business and what soca has done for me.

Jouvay.com: So, where’s this museum?

MM: Well, it will be something that we set up in different places. Probably public libraries, schools, different corporate places. We just want to have it moving and possibly do something on the internet and special places like art centers. Places accessible to everybody.

J: Right. So, it could travel overseas?

MM: Well it could go as far as it could go worldwide.

J: That would be cool for carnivals. So will you put your jouvay.com shirts in there too cause you're wearing em this year?

MM: Ha ha, Definitely, I'll sign it.

J: How did you start?

MM: Wow, we were young and my brother was actually a guitarist learning to play and he could not sing very well so he used to call me over and say, "look, sing this while I strum." And I started singing and my mother (Elizbeth Montano, Manager, Xtatik Ltd.) taught me and said she thought I had a good voice so she sent me over to the choir. In the choir they thought I was like a lil man so they wanted me to represent the school in the calypso competitions and I did that. And I just started winning from the get go.

J: Was that with "Too Young To Soca?"

Machel Montano: Actually that was before that. That was "The Letter", I am writing a letter. It was about the school teachers and the Minister of Education and stuff about school and the kids and the things we do and the things they punish us for. It kicked up alot of dust.

J: Really, you were a little upstart. You were in 1st form then?

MM: No, I was in primary school.

J: So, you must be around thirty?

MM: I'm 28. I'll be twenty nine this year.

J: So when you started, who was in your group? You don't have the original band anymore?

MM: Well, we have original members. My brother was one of the original members he’s now a pilot so he chilled out. We have people like Farmer Nappy who was there from the get go. People we met in Siparia. You know we wanted to start a little band to play in birthday parties (Pranasonic Express). We had three girls in the band at that time playing guitars, cuatros. And we had these brothers (Vincent and Joseph Rivers) playing cuatro and guitar and they stayed with the group. They went on to become the bass player and the guitarist. Nappy came on as a singer. But they just left after 18 years of being with the band. We still have one original member and myself. That's Farmer Nappy.

J: How come the band (XtatiK) split up?

Machel Montano : It never really split up. We were a band and were trying to get at the international market. In making those attempts we wanted to make some changes. We wanted to record and write as a band versus me just producing songs and the band just learning them. And it meant that we would have to be off the road for a little while and some of the guys really could not accommodate coming off the road because they had kids and they had things to do. So we had to change around the structure and we had to stay down for a couple of months to refocus and channel where we wanted to go because everything that we did as a band in Trinidad we did already. So, we had to stop for a while to recoil and reload.

J: What was the new stuff you wanted to do?

MM: We wanted to record music more from a live basis. We especially wanted to improve the musicianship. We wanted the musicians to become more professional. Alot of people went to school as sound engineers.

J: You guys sent them to school?

MM: Yeah we did, xtatik Ltd.. I was one of the first persons to receive that sort of scholarship from the band. Myself and the keyboardist at that time..Jack. We went to Ohio Recording Workshop. There's also a branch in California, but we went to the one in Ohio.

J: When was this?

MM: I think 1996. We really wanted to get more live music. We wanted to fuse some old time reggae beats with soca that's why we came up with things like "Mad Man" and "Carry On." We wanted to follow the rock format versus the club format for soca. There is so much ragga soca and dancehall soca, but we wanted to come from the reggae roots and show the connection between the two. Soca is more like double the time of the reggae so we could flip it back and forth. We also wanted to become better songwriters. So we all took ourselves (Peter C. Lewis, Ken Holder, Dean Williams, Rodney Daniel, and Machel Montano) to a retreat in the hills in Toco and we would jog every morning, meditate, pray and bond as bredren. Just figure out what to do with the music and how to write better songs and how to look at the international market.J: You had someone teaching you for this or it was just the band?

MM: We had a guitarist Dean Williams who is a professional musician. We would teach each other things. We bought alot of books, downloaded alot of information from the internet. We would seek help from other professional musicians like Roger Boothman, we also had a Latin player, a Venezuelan teaching us percussion (separate from the retreat). About four of us in the band took that course. He's the one who plays with us right now. Ernesto Gutierrez-Garcia.

J: How did you all find him?

MM: I think I met him one day in a music store and the guy there said we should hook up. And one day he invited me too see him live and he had this band and it was just phenomenal. I wanted to learn and tap in on that energy. Here was this guy from Venezuela in Trinidad playing his music onthe side of the street. You know we just took him and hired him to come and teach us and we developed a relationship. And as we were about to start the xtatik Circus we said, yo, seeing as we want to be so live let’s just bring him in for the carnival season. So he's really like an auxiliary player, but he tours with us constantly.

J: But the old xtatik had a big live band.

MM: We had a thirteen piece orchestra. We had a big unit.

J: So, what do you mean when you say you wanted to go more live?

Machel Montano: Well, soca music is more based on music produced in the studio like hip hop with drum machines, synthesizers, sometimes horns, sometimes live percussion. We wanted to try to write songs instead of a guy saying, "hey I have this great song, go produce it" and then the band having to sound exactly like the recording. We wanted to come from the rock band point of view. Drums, guitar, bass, keys. Really come to play that music first as a group. Let's jam. Get a tight groove, record it and then apply technology to it. We had to grow like that and practice like that. We don’t always have the time because we are always on the road. We are still trying to find a way. Sometimes we would work less and charge more so that we could get bigger shows and more down time. It's very hard. We might have to pull ourselves away from the scene just to get the time to do it.

J: You do that in Trinidad?

MM: We do that everywhere. We walk with laptops, microphones, everything and we just do it wherever we get the chance.

J: So, the new CD has alot of live stuff?

MM: Not really. The new CD was happening in parts and was very scattered. We were recording songs in Jamaica and Miami and Trinidad and on different rhythms, in Barbados (like Cock Back and Roll with Peter Coppin). We have so many projects right now that we have music just generating and we not really sure where we are going to place all of them as yet. We have a movie coming out with all of the top people in the soca industry. We will have a phenomenal soundtrack. The movie is based on the riddim riders concept.

J: Yeah, tell me about it.

MM: Well this is based on an idea originated at xtatik Ltd., with Peter C. Lewis and myself. Peter is into production, he has his own production company (Bread Boys Entertainment) which is part of xtatik Ltd.. We decided we wanted to do this movie and we wanted all of the top soca acts to do the movie. We came up with the concept of Riddim Riders because riddims are coming to be a very popular thing in the soca business. Everybody's riding a riddim, everybody's creating a riddim, everybody wants a riddim. We try to do this based on all of these soca artistes with different stories. I would be some sort of Machel Montano superstar going into another phase which I would not disclose (probably as some spiritual guru on a mountaintop), Bunji Garlin who is struggling as a bad man to be a soca artiste, then you have people like Benjai, Denise Belfon, Precious, KMC, Farmer Nappy, Peter C, Sparrow, Rose, Rikki Jai, Errol Fabien. The script is being done by Tony Hall who is a Trinidadian writer famous for his Jean and Dinah play all over the world.

J: That's playing now.

MM: Yeah, so we're working with him and Tony Maharaj will be the director. He's a Trinidadian that has been doing movies in Jamaica. We just want to try something new so we have music for that. We have the xtatik 5.0 album which will come attached to the new concept. The circus was one concept. We're taking it up a notch. It will be something again that people can partake. It will have additional performers, more antics, more tricks and lots more magic. We have all of this and with that concept we have a special type of music we are creating for it. We’re trying to get real experimental. We’re trying to take risks because we've already been on top. So the only place to go is back to the bottom of something higher so we're taking that chance.

J: How far along is the Riddim Riders project?

MM: We're still working on the script. We plan to start shooting in November down in Trinidad.

J: That's cool. You should check out Calypso Dreams which showcases all of the older calypsonians and opens in Trinidad in January. So what was up with Atlantic Records when they signed you? First of all, how did they find you?

MM: That’s a long story. I was in the studio and this guy came and liked our stuff and he said he had contacts and wanted to manage me internationally and get me signed. We gave him a year and we gave him a shot and he got me signed with Atlantic. Atlantic wanted to see what they could do with the soca. We went through the process of me having to separate myself form the band for the year. That was in 2001. The bandwent on performing and I went to many places, but my operation was in London with AR London. We went to Sweden, Norway, New York and we worked with about 55 producers, doing about 100 songs. It was difficult because none of the producers were really trying to do any soca music or do anything for soca. We on the otherhand did not have control of the deal to spend our money where we wanted. There were many differences with direction. We would spend loads of cash in Sweden and they’d be giving us pop songs. In the end there were alot of differences in direction so we decided to walk. And there are lots of rumors and scandal but that’s the intrinsic nature of my lifestyle. We made so many friends and got so many offers, and we are still tight with the AR people in London, we've been back in the studio together. We never stopped working.

J: What happened with all of the music?

Machel Montano: It’s still there.

J: Who does it belong to?

MM: Most of the music we own. We had to give up some of it to walk. It was tough because the songs were very experimental, and we were really trying to do raw soca. Shaggy had to do that crossover stuff where it was never really recognized as reggae for Sean Paul to come and buss in the raw format which is not really raw because it's still dressed up and pretty. It’s just a process, and I think it will still happen.

If there is anyone who can make soca happen, Machel is surely at the top of the list. Next carnival we'll find out about the ups and downs of being managed by his parents, the creation of the BBC soca show 1Xtra, his two daughters, and his plans for Los Angeles and Africa.