Machel Mon­tano and the One Show team is­sued a state­ment to the pub­lic this af­ter­noon, apol­o­gis­ing to pa­trons of the show who ex­pe­ri­enced var­i­ous chal­lenges get­ting in and en­joy­ing the show.

The fol­low­ing is the of­fi­cial state­ment they re­leased...

“On be­half of JayUp­Scale, Monk Mu­sic and Machel Mon­tano, col­lab­o­ra­tors of One Show at the Hase­ly Craw­ford Sta­di­um, we would like to sin­cere­ly apol­o­gize for the late start and the chal­lenges to get through the gates on Car­ni­val Fri­day!!! We know that you ex­pect the high­est stan­dards from us, and this fell short of what we have been do­ing over the years.

There are many chal­lenges prepar­ing a sta­di­um that was de­signed for sport to be ready to host con­certs of this mag­ni­tude. From the out­set, the safe­ty of our pa­trons is al­ways our first pri­or­i­ty! The sta­di­um is the on­ly venue that can ac­com­mo­date these num­bers, and we are grate­ful to SportTT for this ac­com­mo­da­tion in light of them work­ing on its re­fur­bish­ing. 

The sta­di­um con­trac­tors, the sport­ing fra­ter­ni­ty and all of the show ser­vice providers tried to de­liv­er our best while be­ing very cog­nizant of pro­tect­ing the prop­er­ty and pa­trons, but did not de­liv­er on time de­spite our great­est ef­forts.

We did not have the build-out time that we nor­mal­ly would have had due to a track event sev­en days be­fore, as a re­sult, at open­ing time there was a lot of heavy equip­ment around the perime­ter and some more work re­mained to com­plete the in­side floor. 

For this rea­son, the fire ser­vices did not al­low us to open at our ad­ver­tised time but we are grate­ful for their co­op­er­a­tion and guid­ance, which en­abled us to pro­vide an in­ci­dent free ex­pe­ri­ence. 

We are on our mis­sion to present So­ca to the globe and in­tro­duce artists to our cul­ture and unique Car­ni­val! Thank you to every­one from all over the world who came out and filled this sta­di­um!!! We are grate­ful and hum­bled by the sup­port from every­one who at­tend­ed, as well as the artists and per­form­ers who came to­geth­er for this show­case on car­ni­val week­end! Over 30 artists from the Caribbean and Africa touched this stage!

The show start­ed at 10 pm, an hour late, which in­ad­ver­tent­ly caused pro­gram re­arrange­ments and de­lays in change overs.  Thank you to every­one who ad­just­ed their sched­ules to en­sure the de­liv­ery of all of the artists as ad­ver­tised. 

Thank you to the po­lice ser­vice and fire de­part­ment for keep­ing us safe and sup­port­ing our vi­sion, and all who al­lowed us to take the show to 5am, giv­ing Machel the op­por­tu­ni­ty to per­form for 3 hours and 45 mins. We al­so thank our cor­po­rate part­ners, ser­vice providers and every­one who joined us to put on the event.  

Cul­ture needs its own venue of this size and as a na­tion we must un­der­stand this is our great­est nat­ur­al re­source. No­body in the world can cre­ate sto­ries this rich, pro­duce mu­sic this sweet and gath­er in har­mo­ny like this.”

—Team One Show