For the next six months, Chad Sir Ruel Bowen will be singing and performing in England.
Excited does not quite describe how the 28-year-old feels about living in the metropolitan country where he will be performing and honing his musical skills until October.
He chatted with Weekend Buzz after speaking to the Junior Calypso Monarch hopefuls about his years in the competition during a workshop they were attending at Queen’s Park Steel Shed.
“I’ll be performing in Nesta and Coventry and when I’m there I’ll be doing some other performances at hotels. It seems like one of those fairy tale things. I was awarded by the Barbados Labour Party last October and they . . . finally put me by this lady and everything just fell into place.
“She asked ‘Who are you?’ I said, ‘I’m Chad’. She asked if I was an awardee, I said, ‘Yes’. She asked, ‘How many awards do you have?, I said, ‘I probably have over 20 awards’, and she said ‘You look like 21’ . . . .
“We exchanged numbers and doors started to open. Now she [Eleanor Small] is my godmother. . . . . In London I will be singing in a show and I’ll be the headline act,” he said.
“I’m going to be missing Crop Over this year. It’s kind of emotional for me because I’ve never missed Crop Over but you have to take these opportunities because you never know when they’ll come again, and six months is a long, long, long time.
“I’m going to miss everybody but . . . I am looking forward to . . . bettering myself as an artiste because I’ll be seen by a different market . . . . I’ll be performing all genres of music and I’ll be releasing a music video very soon for the song I wrote – Super Star. It’s a fusion between reggae and pop. I will release and promote that in London.
Chad said he had the song idea in his head maybe seven years ago.
“Eleanor [Small] said to me, ‘Chad, I really want to enhance your career, so I would like to sponsor a song’. When she said that, the song just came into my head. I took it by Chris Allman, and then we just got a vibe,” he recalled.
“This is the beginning of my musical career which I started when I entered Junior Monarch. It is the realisation of a dream, and that’s why I always say speak things into existence and everything will come true because your tongue is a very powerful tool. Sometimes we defeat ourselves by saying we can’t do something, or we can’t accomplish something. I’ve always said that I’ll be performing overseas but I didn’t know that it was going to happen so soon.”
With Crop Over around the corner, Chad stated he would “miss entering the competitions, waiting on results, miss getting beat in the finals, miss the atmosphere and the House of Soca family.”
He also spoke about last year’s performance and how placing last in the Pic-O-De-Crop Finals where 11 people competed for the title impacted him.
“To be honest you learn from your mistakes. It was my fault because I changed the song, the best song I had in the competition, listening to other people saying that you need a contrast. Those same songs got me into the finals and they were saying I had two political songs and I needed to change one so I could have a balance . . . .” (GBM)