What do green fork-toting jab jabs, midnight robbers, men in crisp shirts and striped ties and secondary school students have in common? It might be their love for “big, bad, stink trucks,” on the road. Yesterday, Bunji Garlin (Ian Alvarez) Fay-Ann Lyons and the Asylum Vikings delivered a brilliant and high-energy performance at day one of bmobile’s annual lunchtime concert series, Soca in bSquare. The concert, scheduled to start at noon and end at 1 pm, began with DJs Kevin Linx and Kevin Baker as they played some of the more popular Carnival 2014 songs. At 12.13 pm the crowd in Woodford Square, erupted into screams as they waved rags on hearing the instrumental for Bunji Garlin’s new road march contender, Truck on D Road.
Garlin and Fay-Ann came on stage singing the words, “We have one big, bad, stink truck on the road,” causing fans to sing along and jump with hands raised. He followed up the song with the Major Lazer-produced It’s a Carnival, before free-styling for the excited crowd during his performance of Runaway. With a large amount of material to choose from, the duo entertained fans with their competitive cross-talk and a number of soca classics, including David Rudder’s Hammer and Soca Baptist by SuperBlue (Austin Lyons), father of Fay-Ann). They then invited calypsonian Explainer (Winston Henry) on stage. He performed his still-popular vintage hit Lorraine. At 12.30 Garlin told the crowd he would continue a recent Asylum Vikings performance trend by freestyling, while including specific members of the crowd in his verses.
After about five minutes of original material created on the spot and to the cheers of fans, Garlin launched into his post-Carnival 2013 release of Carnival Tabanca. At one point he stopped singing but let the instrumental play and the crowd still clapped and sang at the appropriate moments. This year bmobile included a lot of traditional Carnival characters in the event and patrons were invited to take advantage of a specified area to take photos of themselves (selfies) to upload to the internet with the hashtag “#startitcarnival.” People took photos with fancy Indians, dame lorraines, pierrot grenades and green jab jabs as women in green bikinis, beads and feathers gyrated on stage while distributing green bmobile bandannas. Patrons also stretched on their toes as moko jumbies on seven-foot stilts bent over to distribute rags.