Lutan Fyah has just released his tenth studio album Life Of A King. Combining roots reggae with conscious hip hop, gospel, rave music and rock, we think it’s one of the best of his career. Reggaeville spoke to Lutan and album producer Khabir “Grillaras” Bonner about the project and where it fits into their respective stories.
LUTAN FYAH
His Grandfather’s sound system
My yard was the ringleader yard in Spanish Town. Every youth in the community came there to play table tennis, scrimmage football, to play music, deejay or sing, play domino, bingo, or gamble. The sound system was there and I was the boy in the family that liked what was happening with the music. So they would always put me on a beer box to mix and be the warm up selector. I was about five or six years old.
My grandfather had a link with personal Coxsone. In those days when a song was released only special sounds got it before everybody else. I knew all songs that were made in Jamaica from mento, rocksteady, ska, everything. I buck up with this heartbeat of music.
At my yard we used to see Papa San, Lieutenant Stitchie, Major Worries, Lady G, General TK – artists that were in the community. When I was a little boy there was a day when they said Dennis Brown, Alton Ellis and King Jammys were there. The posters were up saying “Dennis Brown is coming tonight” but I never got to see him because I was gone in my bed. I used to squeeze out of my bed and come in the dance as a little baby! I got sent back to bed about forty different times!
Choosing music over football
It was an easy choice. In football after a certain age group you can’t make it again. This was Jamaica and my thoughts were so big. I didn’t want to limit myself to this island so when I saw me not playing in the Champions’ League I decided “No, football is not for me anymore”. At that time I had just started looking at the TV and seeing real football and I was wondering what I was doing all along. I needed to talk to forty or fifty thousand people at a time doing whatever it is I am doing.
Rastafari
It was my last year in high school. Through the study of the bible and mankind’s history I came to a realisation that Haile Selassie I is the Almighty. Then, through intuitive knowledge, we calculated what was happening around us – what was before, what is and what is to come. So we knew that vision of Haile Selassie is the new vision of Christ. That makes us Rastafari today.
Being a footballer that everybody pampered and treated like a baby and then suddenly a natty dread it was a big change in my life. It’s not that my friends became haters but they were doing their normal usual things and I had become a man among them doing and saying different things. So I had to create a different personality as a man, a Rastafari living a particular culture for the upliftment of my people and the balancing of humanity, so I became like a father figure among them. And we grew to do what we are today.
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