Festivals Commission defends FLEX in face of T-shirt Mas’ fiasco

The Festivals Commission has come out in defence of a T-shirt Mas’ band under fire from patrons who say they were sorely disappointed with not being able to enjoy Tshirt Mas’ over the weekend.
Public Relations Manager of the Festivals Commission Roger Perry told OBSERVER media that a number of the 20 bands experienced technical difficulties on the road on Saturday.
Yesterday, FLEX released an official statement on their Facebook page alleging that they had been sabotaged.
“FLEX humbly and sincerely apologises to you— our members—for the technical difficulties we experienced during T-shirt mas on Saturday. What happened appears to be the result of sabotage, and we intend to take up the matter legally.”
The band had offered a wide range of entertainment such as Asa Banton out of Dominica, Linky First from Jamaica and St. Lucia’s Freezy, singer of “Split In De Middle”.
Perry said that although all of these artistes were flown in, circumstances prevented them from performing on the road.
According to him, “FLEX was not the only one who had issues. Let me clarify that because ICONS had problems and, I think, DumzTree had problems and a few others had issues. The issue that FLEX had from what I gathered was a generator problem.”
He revealed that many of the issues experienced were caused, by among other things, a lack of available generators needed to power the sound systems on the trucks.
“This year, we had a shortage of generators for Tshirt Mas’. People had to be taking generators from businesses. That’s how bad it was. You can plan properly yes and then on the day of the activity you have a problem. They had a generator problem with load shedding from what I gathered,” Perry said.
“It’s not that FLEX was not prepared because all the artistes were in Antigua, the truck was parked up there since the day before so it’s not like FLEX didn’t have things in place.”
(More in today’s Daily Observer)