Extempo King: God was with me

BRIAN London believes divine intervention was the reason he won the national extempo monarch title at the Kaisorama show at the Queen's Park Savannah on Thursday night.

Speaking after the show, London took a page from his nephew Ronaldo's book. When he won the Young Kings title last week, Ronaldo said the victory was for his grandmother.

Brian said, "If you look at my pocket before I went on, as I pulled my number for extempo, I wrote this behind my number seven when I won." He said before performing in the first round of the extempo competition, he wrote an inscription on his slip. "I wrote this on it, 'love my mother Emmanuel. God is with us. God is with me tonight and she is with us'."

He said the occasion was doubly special for him as Ronaldo won the calypso monarch crown. London said it was "crazy" that so many people from one family could win as many titles as the London family has this Carnival. "Only God, God is good," he declared.

He had nothing but " hearty congratulations and love" for all the participants at Kaisorama and promised to "continue to put down as much work as possible for many other youths." London won the extempo crown in a free flowing war with Phillip Murray (Black Sage).

After Murray claimed Brian was on the sex offenders' registry, he boasted he had seven children. London had the crowd in stitches when he countered that none of Murray's children's were his own. During his performance, London predicted both he and Ronaldo would be winners at Kaisorama.

During the extempo preliminaries, London took some potshots at National Carnival Commission (NCC) chairman Winston "Gypsy" Peters over there being no North Stand at the Savannah this year and asked where the money for the North Stand had gone.

This left some spectactors wondering whether Brian and Peters would square off in the finals.

Peters gave a good performance in the preliminaries, singing about his birthplace of Mayaro in Country Life is the Best."But he and defending champion Myron B failed to qualify from the semi-finals, after singing about: Trump is a trap.

There was one glitch in the extempo preliminaries as Kevan Calliste's microphone failed during his song Port of Spain in a Mess. Some people in the crowd objected to the judges' decision that Calliste should pick a new topic and start over.

Calliste did not advance past the preliminaries.