Kali­fa Clyne

Austin Lyons' (Su­perBlue) per­for­mance at the Caribbean Pres­tige Foun­da­tion's So­ca Monarch semi­fi­nal at the Ari­ma Velo­drome on Sun­day night left some pa­trons in tears, oth­ers breath­less and the rest beg­ging for more. His per­for­mance in po­si­tion num­ber 10 of the pow­er so­ca cat­e­go­ry was one that ef­fec­tive­ly demon­strat­ed just why he has six so­ca monarch ti­tles un­der his belt.

Even be­fore Lyons en­tered the event pa­trons made it clear who they were there to see, scream­ing the icons name dur­ing loud chants be­tween per­for­mances in the Groovy cat­e­go­ry. When he fi­nal­ly walked on stage at around 11 pm, it was to screams, cheers and a crowd filled with fre­net­ic en­er­gy, bounc­ing, jump­ing, wav­ing and scream­ing out the words to his song Fan­tas­tic Fri­day.

Lyons, with the vo­cal sup­port of so­ca band 3canal had the thou­sands of peo­ple in the velo­drome re­spond­ing in a way that no oth­er artiste had been able to ac­com­plish be­fore him. As he walked off stage, there were tears in the eyes of some fans as they chant­ed his name in a plea for his re­turn.

Back­stage, Lyons was the on­ly per­former to be vis­it­ed by CPF founder William Munro and Min­is­ter of Arts and Mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism Lin­coln Dou­glas, who con­grat­u­lat­ed him on his per­for­mance. On­ly two oth­er peo­ple came close to Lyons in terms of crowd re­ac­tion, Rod­ney Le Blanc (Ben­jai) who proved once again that he is the peo­ple's cham­pi­on with a per­for­mance of Feter dur­ing which he poured what ap­peared to be al­co­hol over his body and chut­ney so­ca artist Dru­patee Ram­goon­ai.

Ram­goon­ai was greet­ed with screams from fans be­fore she even walked on stage in a sil­ver and white se­quined out­fit. Dur­ing her per­for­mance, Ram­goon­ai asked the crowd if she would be get­ting their sup­port for the Chut­ney So­ca Monarch fi­nal on Sat­ur­day. They screamed yes.

The event be­gan at 6 pm with a few peo­ple hav­ing come ear­ly to view the show. By 8 pm the crowd had in­creased to a few thou­sand, in­creas­ing in size with each pass­ing hour. The show, which had new fea­tures like a fash­ion po­lice on­line live stream back­stage fin­ished short­ly af­ter 3 am.