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Notting Hill Carnival: Alison Hinds ready to reign at Carnival

Last Updated: 12:01am BST 23/08/2007



Roll It Gal by Alison Hinds will be the song that rules this weekend’s Notting Hill Carnival. Angus Batey meets the Barbadian star

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Every year, one record beats the competition to become the theme song of the Notting Hill Carnival.


Alison Hinds (right) says her biggest hit has become an empowering anthem for women

While the sound systems and DJ stages sway to the slower, heavier beats of reggae, dancehall and hip hop, it’s the up-tempo bounce of soca that fuels the floats and gets Europe’s biggest street party started. And among the prime contenders to be the song that defines the 2007 carnival is a soca girl-power anthem from Barbados’s biggest star.

“Soca is very party-oriented music, very happy music,” says Alison Hinds, who has been a Caribbean A-lister since winning a Barbados song competition in 1996, and whose Roll It Gal promises to dominate this weekend’s festivities.

“You’re not supposed to lie down and listen to it, you’re supposed to get up and dance and move. But Roll It Gal is a woman-empowerment song, and many women have told me it’s an inspiration.They say, 'It makes me know that I can go out there, and I can do what I want to do. I can achieve anything’.”

As she eats at a restaturant on Barbados’s south coast, then stops off at a club in nearby St Lawrence Gap to watch a friend’s band, she is very much the celebrity, chatting to well-wishers and posing for pictures. Yet, over a decade ago, as lead vocalist of the band Square One, Hinds was on the same steep learning curve as most of the island’s jobbing musicians, playing to tourists, sunburned teens and loyal locals six nights a week.

Today, thanks to a steely determination, she is acknowledged throughout the West Indies as “the queen of soca”. She is on the cusp of translating her local superstardom into global pop success.

Born in London, Hinds grew up in Plaistow, but fell quickly in love with Barbados.

“We came here every summer for six weeks,” she recalls, “and every year I would tell my mum I wanted to stay. Then one year, she said, 'OK.’ ”

Hinds was 11, and her mother had decided to leave her father, a worker at Ford’s Dagenham plant. He did not speak to his daughter again until her mid-twenties, but the pair are now reconciled.

Hinds came to soca late in a musical education that encompassed everything from childhood violin lessons to rapping. After moving to Barbados, she joined the band Square One. The group’s wide repertoire kept them busy in the island’s hotels and clubs, but it was their take on soca, the party-centric hybrid of calypso and American soul music that came from Trinidad, which became their forte.

Soca may not be traditional Barbadian music, but Hinds feels that it is part of her birthright.

“I was born in England, and Barbados is my home, but there are times when I’m the only West Indian person, so at those points I’m representing the Caribbean,” she says.

“Soca music is West Indian music – our music. It belongs to us.”

Hinds hit the Barbados headlines in 1996 as the first female winner of an annual song competition, Road March. Road March is part of Barbados’s carnival at the beginning of August – the high point for the island’s musicians, as the parties, floats and stages bring the year’s hottest sounds to national and regional attention.

But international recognition took a little longer to come for the 36-year-old singer. Square One were signed to Eddy Grant’s label, Ice Records, but Hinds explains that didn’t translate into a record:

“He was willing to teach us, and we were obviously very inexperienced. But because he was an international star, he wasn’t too concerned with Barbados. We knew our music was hot, but we couldn’t even get a copy of a record to put on the radio. So, after that, we decided that we had to take our destiny in our own hands.”

The breakthrough came in 2005 when Hinds’s debut single as a solo artist, Roll It Gal, became the Caribbean hit of the summer, and this infectious celebration of female empowerment will finally hit UK record shops next month.

For soca, the delay is routine. Soca records tend to navigate their way around the world slowly, gradually building momentum. Hinds reckons St Vincent native Kevin Lyttle’s 2004 US and UK soca hit, Turn Me On, took three years to go global.

If Roll It Gal manages to make Hinds an international star, she will need to spend increasing time away from Barbados’s quintessential tropical paradise. She lives on a 600-acre farm managed by her husband, and the couple have a three-year-old daughter.

International recognition is probably appealing, but heading off to bring musical sunshine to the tail end of a grey British summer does not at first glance seem very appealing.

“There have been a couple of times at a cold show where I’ve been thinking, ’Which bright spark thought this should be outside?’ ” Hinds laughs as she contemplates impending promotional trips to Britain and the USA.

“But I’ve always said that any time this truly starts to feel like work, I need to stop.”

There are no signs of that happening any time soon.

Alison Hinds performs at Leeds Carnival (Sun, 5pm; broadcast on BBC 1Xtra) and on the Rampage stage at Notting Hill Carnival (Mon, midday). Roll It Gal is released on Sept 3, with the album, Soca Queen, later in the month. Both are on 17:20 Records

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The sound systems will be playing Come Around by Collie Buddz, Sticky by
Jah Cure and recent selections by both Mavado and Vegas in heavy
rotation.

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President Obama...Get Used To It!!!

i think alison hinds need to push this song some more. i love the remix with machel. i think both of them could push this song to the max and get huge recognition.