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Music Life: Notting Hill Carnival with General Levy, Lady Banton, Mikey Dread and Alicai Harley

Music

Notting Hill Carnival with General Levy, Lady Banton, Mikey Dread and Alicai Harley

28/08/2021 GMT

BBC World Service - Music Life, Notting Hill Carnival with General Levy, Lady Banton, Mikey Dread and Alicai Harley

Four Carnival stars share their love of Europe's largest street festival

General Levy, Lady Banton, Mikey Dread and Alicai Harley share their love of the Notting Hill Carnival, Europe's largest street festival.

As the world famous Notting Hill Carnival isn’t taking place this year, we thought we’d have a party of our own, Caribbean style. 

Ragga artist and MC General Levy leads the charge. His parents were Trinidadian, and from an early age he started to write lyrics and form sound systems. If you don’t recognise the name, then you’ll definitely know the voice; Incredible, his ’94 track with M-Beat, changed the changed the sound of jungle and drum & bass forever. 

Joining him is carnival royalty, the selector Lady Banton. She set up the first all-female soundsystem in the UK, the Mellotone Sound System, in 1989, and became a Carnival favourite soon after. 

Mikey Dread is a founding member and chief selector of one of the UK’s best known and most loved sound systems, the Channel One Soundsystem, who have played at the Carnival every year since 1983. Named after the famous studio in Kingston, Jamaica, they bring the reggae, the dubplates, and the “hot steppas”. 

And finally, breathing new life into the festival is Alicai Harley. Born in Jamaica, she caused a stir releasing a string of singles and EPs, before working with the likes of Stefflon Don, Kamille, Stonebwoy, Aluna, and Kojo Funds. She released her debut album The Red Room Intro earlier this year and is the self-proclaimed “yard gyal inna Britain”. 

Together the group discuss all things Carnival: the cost of those costumes, when and how they got started, why you need the rain to cool you down, you parents not letting you go, and the importance of talent over hype.

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