Entertainment

Basic survival skills

CONTINUING WITH Fantan's journey into the music business, the deejay says he not only developed his fishing skills while growing up in rural Jamaica. When he arrived in Kingston, he developed other talents as well.

"As a youth when we lef' country come a town fi come push we career, it's like when we reach a town we think seh a just so it go, but a never so," he explained.

"Mi used to work a Jacks Bakery because we have little baking skills; we know it like that."

Between bouts of hanging out at several Kingston studios, Fantan honed his baking skills, as well as tried other forms of income earning.

Stage show

"One of the time mi start keep a little stage show pon the gully bank mi used to live a Molynes Road. People start hear bout it and start come inna it every Monday night so till the man dem fight it out, and the stage show mash up now, and I was back in the street again."

This was in the early 1990s Fantan recalls, and he was determined never to return to St Elizabeth until he had made his name in Kingston.

"Inna 1998 we start keep a thing called gully work, because some rain did fall and mash up the gully so we decide fi clean it up back.

"Dem call me the human backhoe those times cause we come from country full a energy and strong; we know how fi dash sledge and pickaxe inna gully, and den a programme call 'Lift Up Jamaica' come in.

"Mi work with them and even now mi still have mi ID. Mi clean Molynes Road gully come straight inna Half-Way Tree. The struggling still a gwaan dem time deh, but mi seh studio a dweet."

(Tomorrow, his relationship with Kilamanjaro)