Machel Montano presents Machel Montano and Xtatik: The band of the year. Photo: David Wears

Every Carnival season there are a handful of artistes who garner eager speculation over what their presentation will be for Carnival. Machel Montano has consistently been one of those to look for.

The Guardian’s Patricia James had a sit-down with the international soca star at his first official Carnival performance for 2006 at the January 13 Soca Blackout at Soca Broadway, to see what goodies he had in store this year.

PJ: What is the concept of the Alternative Concert this year?

MM: It is a little bit more of an international concert in the middle of Carnival, with a Carnival twist. So you’ll see various international artistes incorporated and integrated in a Carnival way (reggae artiste Mr Vegas among them).

The concept for us this year as a band is going to be Band of the Year.

I don’t want to let out too much things about what it will be or what exactly will be happening because we are still in the planning stages, actually we’re still in the studio finishing the album.

We were going to name the album All Together. We got a new crew called the A-T Crew (including Benjai, Tishal, Patrice Roberts, Peter C Lewis, Kernal Roberts) which is All Together. We might name the album Band of the Year.

Do you have a location in mind for the concert?

Yes, but we’re using that as a little surprise.

What about your international collaborations?

We have been working with Freddy McGreggor. We haven’t done any work with Janet Jackson. We’ve talked to her people (but) we haven’t done any work yet.

The collaboration thing is not something that I seek out, it always happens. And I have been doing work, I worked whole year, that’s why I didn’t have work among many international artistes.

We still have good contacts with people like Dougie Fresh and we looking to pull in a few others like him. It (the concert) is a work in progress still but we’re really promising that it will be phenomenal because our songs are so strong that we don’t want to put too many distractions to take away from the music. That was our concept from last year and it worked.

We’re taking a strip down from the antics and present the music and the message.

Will you be releasing any new songs tonight?

Tonight we’re doing Scandal. We releasing everything in dosages. Every weekend we’d be bringing in something new into the show. It’s kind of a late season and we didn’t really feel the jump off immediately. We just want to take our time and come out because a lot of the music is geared at playing after Carnival.

We have a lot of songs, a lot of hits. We’re going to do a lot of videos, we’re going to do a lot of promotion.

We have to take some time to establish some artistes as solo artistes. So all these are acts passing through, they’re not part of the band but they’re part of the stage performance. They hold solo careers but they play some nights, they might open some nights, they might close. It’s just a family.

We have Kernal on drums and as musical director and writing the songs.

What’s it like working with him?

Beautiful. Because he’s really, really talented.

He seems to be the hottest arranger.

Not only in the writing but he’s very talented musically with drums and melodies, so it’s a good addition. We’d been friends before, hanging out.

It’s a good feeling, he’s a great addition. The band sounds like a completely new band to me, which is real exciting to me. I like to be excited as much as the people (off) stage.

What is the inspiration for the album?

Life. I really live in the now. I don’t live back in the past. I just like to operate on how I am now. Something about my album is always a representation, a slice of my life at the time. The ideas would already be there, I just have to really sit back, meditate, think about it and really see what it is.

How has the UN Ambassadorship been?

Receiving the opportunity from Unicef to be an ambassador, the work was really done before. For most of the year I had been travelling with Unicef carrying on the message of the UN anti-crime, (safer societies for kids to grow up in.

What about MTV Tempo, how does that play into your whole agenda?

Wonderful. That is another project that I worked hard on all year. Meeting with the people involved, talking ideas, hearing their ideas, working together with them. I’d just been kinda really close with the people on the top. We map out what it would be like [and] try to keep Tempo like Frederick Morton’s dream, which was to keep it conscious.

We try to keep it that way all the time because we really want to show that this time is a time for the Caribbean to be in the spotlight. We want to show them the other side of us—the integrity, the genius, the work in the creativity—the culture, especially.

So far I’ve been watching Tempo and I’ve been very happy.

People have been commenting that they haven’t been seeing local videos on the station…

(People) don’t know the physics behind that. A lot of the Trinidad entertainers don’t take the time to do the paperwork to send their videos in. You have to have the paperwork to play on an international station. You have to make sure you don’t have any copyright infringement.

There was always the problem of us not getting our videos on MTV and BET because they’re not shot on film.

What are your plans for after Carnival?

Our modus operandi is to record whatever we could. We have three studios we travel with on tour. We have plans to go to Brazil to do some recording, go to Cuba. In Cuba we made some contacts and there is a song coming out with a Cuban group this year for Carnival, in Spanish.

Two big hits from last year’s releases are here again...

Dance With You is coming back around, which is now getting ready to be released internationally. And we have songs like We Not Giving Up (which) will be unplugged with just the guitars. It’s really a chance for us to reflect, take a little break, get people to listen.

The We Not Giving Up concept is just a concept of life and liberty. It’s anti-crime, it’s anti-quitting, it’s anti-failure. It’s just the kind of message that we want to encourage because people can see the living proof in us. We don’t give up, we always figure, “Well, okay, what next?”