Chester Sam­bra­no

When it was all said and done, af­ter two days of Car­ni­val cel­e­bra­tions, Ian “Bun­ji Gar­lin” Al­varez emerged as the Road March win­ner with 135 plays for his run­away hit Hard Fete at judg­ing points through­out Trinidad and To­ba­go.

Nailah Black­man and Skin­ny Fab­u­lous’ Come Home was sec­ond with 106 plays, while Machel Mon­tano and Patrice Roberts’ Like Yuh­self was a dis­tant third with 50 plays.

The re­sults were re­leased by the Trin­ba­go Uni­fied Ca­lyp­so­ni­ans Or­gan­i­sa­tion (TU­CO) yes­ter­day. TU­CO al­so an­nounced that the Vis­it Trinidad Road March Cham­pi­on had won a grand prize of $250,000.

Con­tact­ed by Guardian Me­dia af­ter­wards, Al­varez said the vic­to­ry was “still sink­ing in.”

This is the sec­ond time he has won the ti­tle, the first be­ing in 2019 with Mon­tano and Skin­ny Fab­u­lous with their col­lab­o­ra­tion Famalay.

Al­varez con­fessed that when the song was re­leased, he and co-writer, Fay-Ann Lyons-Al­varez, his wife, did not view it as a Road March con­tender.

“Not at the be­gin­ning stage but some­time in be­tween we re­alised what was hap­pen­ing. From the drop we know when we had built it, we knew we had built a se­ri­ous beast of a song,” he said.

He said while they played mas on Car­ni­val Mon­day, they did not go close to any of the judg­ing points so he on­ly got feed­back on how the song was do­ing through so­cial me­dia posts.

Nev­er­the­less, it is an ho­n­our he em­braced.

“What it def­i­nite­ly means, it is an added ac­co­lade to my ca­reer as a con­trib­u­tor to the art­form of Trinidad and To­ba­go,” Al­varez said.

Al­varez said the song was de­signed as one for the peo­ple.

“Par­tic­u­lar­ly a set of peo­ple from a par­tic­u­lar era. What the song says is hard fete, every fete was like that. There was no dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion of up­town or down­town and if you were up here, you have to sing this slow ver­sion and down here...it was pow­er all the way through. The aim too was re­al­ly to bring the full fete vibes back in­to the Car­ni­val in Trinidad and To­ba­go be­cause we lost it for a very long time,” he said.

He added that he and his wife had al­so built a sol­id tour­ing cir­cuit in the Unit­ed States and Eu­rope and he felt Hard Fete “will work dy­nam­i­cal­ly with the tour this time around.”

He said, “We have to make new op­por­tu­ni­ties of it and re­al­ly max­imise our own and as much as we will part­ner with dif­fer­ent peo­ple from around the world, we have to start look­ing in to de­vel­op it to the next lev­el, what­ev­er lev­el that may be, but it is ours so we re­al­ly have to boost it from in­ter­nal­ly now.”

Al­varez and his wife have been in New York since Car­ni­val Tues­day, where they are be­ing recog­nised with the Caribbean Mu­sic En­ter­tain­ment Icon Award (So­ca and Ca­lyp­so) at the Young, Gift­ed and Black En­tre­pre­neur­ial Award Cer­e­mo­ny lat­er to­day.

On her In­sta­gram page mean­while, Black­man post­ed a pho­to of her­self with Al­varez.

She con­grat­u­lat­ed him on the vic­to­ry and said, “I’ve al­ways ad­mired you as an artiste, so from day one in this Road March race it has been noth­ing but love!”

She al­so thanked pa­trons and fans who “have shown Come Home so much love al­lows us to make a for­ev­er stamp in so­ca, Car­ni­val and the cul­ture.”

Mon­tano al­so took to so­cial me­dia to con­grat­u­late Al­varez.

“Nailah Black­man and Skin­ny Fab­u­lous, you def­i­nite­ly gave it a good run, con­grats to you both!!! Patrice Roberts, I am so glad we have an­oth­er clas­sic to add to our cat­a­logue!!!”