Mixpak

Machel Montano was only officially crowned Soca Monarch for the first time in 2011, despite being the genre’s most celebrated and prolific artist since bouncing onto the scene at the tender age of 8 years old with ‘Too Young To Soca’. 30 years and as many albums on, Machel is still the artist constantly pushing soca and Caribbean music forward, known for his super-human energy on stage and in business. True to his ethos of ‘never say never’ Machel has just made a rare appearance on a dancehall riddim for Mixpak, the Loudspeaker Riddim produced by our own Dre Skull, and we spoke to him on the phone from his house/studio in Trinidad & Tobago; talking child stars, his show on 1xtra, soca as competition and his sex chair…

So I hear you were just on stage with Chaka Khan this week? How was that?

It was fabulous. We did ‘Ain’t Nobody’ together, it was her final song in a performance she did for Mother’s Day.

You must be used to sharing the stage with people since you’ve been doing it for so long now. I guess a lot of people over here know about how you’re running things in soca now, but perhaps they don’t know that you were so young when you started out – how did you end up being a star at the age of 9?

When I started, I wasn’t involved in music at all. My brother was learning the guitar, and he would have to play the guitar and sing for his homework and he would call me and take advantage of me and say ‘yo, come here and sing for me while I play’, cos he had no rhythm, so I would start singing his homework while he would try to play the chords on the guitar. I wasn’t very into it. But my mum thought I had a good voice so she decided to take me to vocal training and I started singing in calypso competitions in school. Then they asked me to represent them on a national level, so I went into the competition the first year at the age of 9 and won, and I became an instant phenomenon across the country because everyone was amazed that this young kid was singing like a big man and talking about school teachers being late and setting the wrong example; it was a bit controversial.

Then somebody came to my school and asked me to open for Mighty Sparrow and Lord Kitchener, who were the big calypsonian artists in those days. They asked me to open at Madison Square Gardens and took me to New York and then I went on to Paris and started going on tour to Europe. So I was pulled into that league very early. This in itself brought more controversy because there were no child stars in calypso or soca at that time, so they said ‘look, you’re too young to do this, you shouldn’t be singing or performing’. So we decided to do a record, our first record, and we decided to call it ‘Too Young To Soca’, that was when I was 10 going on 11. It became the biggest song in the country, it attracted a lot of attention and was signed by Eddy Grant and released across London and Europe by him. That put me in the recording business right then.

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