Ian Wa­son

Trin­ba­go Uni­fied Ca­lyp­so­ni­ans’ Or­gan­i­sa­tion (TU­CO) pres­i­dent Ains­ley King is clar­i­fy­ing in­for­ma­tion now be­ing cir­cu­lat­ed via a voice note on so­cial me­dia, which ap­pears to sug­gest he is sup­port­ing a par­tic­u­lar ca­lyp­son­ian in the Na­tion­al Ca­lyp­so Monarch fi­nal. He says the voice note is a cou­ple of years old and had noth­ing to do with this year’s com­pe­ti­tion.

On­ly a few days ahead of the Ca­lyp­so Monarch fi­nal, the voice note sur­faced with King voic­ing his sup­port for a ca­lyp­son­ian who is a com­peti­tor in Sun­day’s fi­nal.

Dur­ing the draw for po­si­tions in the fi­nal at the Radis­son Ho­tel, Port-of-Spain, yes­ter­day, he re­vealed that the voice note was in­deed his but said the con­text in which it is be­ing used is to­tal­ly mis­lead­ing.

“That was on a plane three years or two years ago,” King clar­i­fied.

“That was me be­ing con­cerned, com­ing to Trinidad to take up the pres­i­dent (of TU­CO) role and was ac­tu­al­ly hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with one of my close core mem­bers as to who we could con­sid­er sup­port­ing to be the pres­i­dent or the chair­man of the To­ba­go zone. That has noth­ing to do with our com­pe­ti­tion to­day,” King said.

King re­tort­ed that his de­trac­tors were just com­plain­ing be­cause this year’s re­sults didn’t go their way.

There have been con­cerns that the Gov­ern­ment was pres­sur­ing TU­CO to muz­zle po­lit­i­cal ca­lyp­soes from the com­pe­ti­tion, some­thing that is against the fab­ric of ca­lyp­so.

These con­cerns were height­ened when De­von Seale and Chuck Gor­don, who were con­sid­ered ear­ly fron­trun­ners with their po­lit­i­cal com­men­taries aimed at the Gov­ern­ment, did not make it to the fi­nal. Mista Shak, an­oth­er ear­ly fron­trun­ner with an­oth­er hard-hit­ting po­lit­i­cal com­men­tary, al­so did not make it to Ca­lyp­so Fi­es­ta, the semi­fi­nal at Skin­ner Park last Sat­ur­day.

But King re­fut­ed these claims of Gov­ern­ment in­ter­fer­ence.

“If the Gov­ern­ment was pres­sur­ing me, why is it that Or­lan­do Oc­tave and the oth­er peo­ple who are iden­ti­fied as ac­tivists for them (gov­ern­ment) are out (of the fi­nals)?” King asked.

He added, “The monarch (Helon Fran­cis) that is de­fend­ing his crown, he won with a po­lit­i­cal com­men­tary and sec­ond place last year (Kurt Allen) was al­so a po­lit­i­cal com­men­tary.”

King then iden­ti­fied where the con­cerns and al­le­ga­tions are re­al­ly com­ing from. “Com­pe­ti­tion brings that kind of spir­it, con­fus­ing des­per­ate spir­it. What peo­ple don’t know is the judg­ing process, they would have judged over 200 (ca­lyp­soes) and prob­a­bly about 62 peo­ple to se­lect 40 peo­ple and that any­one will un­der­stand that will be a very dif­fi­cult task for judges.”

The Ca­lyp­so Monarch will be crowned on Sun­day, with the 12 ca­lyp­so­ni­ans singing to the North Stand for the first time in 20 years.