By Mel Cooke, Freelance Writer
The FAME ladies show their stuff at the 'Montego Monster'.
WESTERN BUREAU:
WHEN THE parked cars extend from Pier 1 all the way to the roundabout between the Baywest and the LoJ Shopping Centres, a MoBay session is really big.
At 1 o'clock on Sunday morning the cars were squeezed into every nook and cranny along the stretch and still more were coming.
If FAME FM's 'Montego Monster' had got any bigger, chances are that some of the people Mix Master Marvin had 'rowing like a boat' at a few minutes past 3 a.m. would have had to choose between the sea, not the river and the bank a few minutes later, when the Elephant Man hit tore the house down.
The tune, which with three restarts had the most 'forwards' for the night, was the start of a string of Elephant Man dance-style songs, which had a forest of arms going to a Higher Level and feet kicking out to Online. When Elephant was instructing the ladies to 'wine like a gypsy', Paula-Ann Porter asked Marvin to take it down a bit. It was for a good cause, as three black-clad women with supple waistlines came on-stage to demonstrate exactly how it was done.
They had ample competition from the ladies in the audience, some of whom would have given a gig a very good run for the money.
The dancers were the last of three sets of guests to punctuate the music which flowed from the turntables, the first being the St. Bess models, who showed off FAME frat gear, and the other being deejays Chico and Baby Cham. The man from Sherlock Crescent, opening with Bad Mind and going back in time to snatches of Ghetto Pledge and Another Level, was a big hit with the crowd.
However, it was the FAME deejays manning the two-level turntable set-up whom the crowd came to see and they did not disappoint. With a minimum of talk and a maximum of music, Alric and Boyd, Mix Master Marvin and Marlon Young had the crowd, from the party pit directly in front of the stage to the 'cool crew' on the stone wall close to the sea, those near the palm trees, on the grass and on the parapet in between, in 'chune heaven'.
Those up front had the benefit of the smoke machine and burst or two of coloured strips of 'party paper', but the light show by Intec reached everyone.
At 1 a.m. Marlon 'The Gatekeeper' Young was in a hip-hop mood, but that soon changed as he got into Richie Stephens and Bounty Killer's remake of Maniac. He stayed in the dancehall semi-oldies mode for a while, dropping Spragga Benz's Funny Guy Ting, Bounty's Benz and Bimma and Beenie Man's Ol' Dawg. Baby Cham's Ghetto Pledge and his combination with Bounty Killer from a less fractious era, Another Level, preceded Spragga's Peace and the St. Bess models.
The FAME team played tunes, not 'riddims', all night, with the result that the juggling was not typically predictable. However, it was certainly not disjointed and, with the merciful absence of repetitive dancehall gimmicks to 'hol up yu han' if yu no...', the stage was set for dancing.
Dance they did at Pier I on Saturday night into Sunday morning, one young man in a black outfit enjoying the attention of two women with a combined height of about eight and a half feet.
Marlon Young injected 'No gal cyaan come siddung...' into Zumjay News and Pier I erupted, even as he continued with Wayne Marshall's Overcome.
With Francois St. Juste running the show, Alric, one-half of Alric and Boyd, changed the beat to a soca tempo, and the massive inside Pier I proceeded to Hol It Dung. "Ladies, it's time to go crazy. Grab the nearest man to you. I want to see some American dollar wine. Big bucks!" Alric said, playing Dollar Wine.
The FAME ladies, including Paula-Ann Porter and Denise Hunt, came up front to swing their engines, of varying CC ratings, and, after walking more than a mile and a half, a laughing Porter asked Francois for a break. He proved to be a hard taskmaster.
Colin Hines, seated upstairs the mixing tower, was introduced as a surprise and the crowd howled. Paula-Ann Porter took over to introduce Chico and Baby Cham, with Hines providing the tracks for them.
At 2:30 a.m., Boyd took over and he went on a hip-hop spree, dropping tunes like a remix of Sizzla's Karate into the mix. A touch of the 'clap song' had the palm smacking and when they eventually got it, the security guard supposedly keeping watch over backstage access used his baton as a dance partner. A dub, Elephant Man's exhortation to 'just do de wave' followed.
Boyd's hip-hop was sizzling, with more people than could have been possibly been born on that day answering 'it's your birthday'. It was on the turntable for a long time. "That song was just too good to cut," Boyd said.
Contagious, Hot In Here and Hey Sexy Lady kept the tempo going.
Mix Master Marvin, taking over at 3 a.m., opened up smoking with the anthem Love Punaany Bad, and then played Buddy Bye. He then dropped the mix of the night as, where the Johnny Osbourne classic 'wheels up', he played Bounty Killer's Lodge. Dropping snippets of Vybz Kartel's 'sample talk', 'up to the time' and 'good to go', Marvin played hot remixes of Spragga's We No Like and Buju's Stamina Daddy. He eventually got up to the present with Cobras Press Trigger, Marshall Town and New Millennium.
He handed over to Marlon Young, who expressed his feelings on burning issues in no uncertain manner.
With a cadre of the FAME team leaving in a five-car convoy at 4:40 a.m., the party was, for all intents and purposes, over and Alric ushered the remnants of the massive crowd out of Pier 1 with laid-back hip-hop.
The no re-entry policy was no problem, as those who came in seemed not to want to miss a minute of the 'Montego Monster'.
