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Tony Matterhorn - Club Zen - Trinidad - April 5 2006

Even as clubbers bounced to the music in the Zen Nightclub on Wednesday the shock and horror of the brutal slaying of six-year-old Sean Luke Lum Fai echoed in frontal lobes. The night's featured selector, Tony Matterhorn of Jamaica mentioned the tragedy in the opening minutes of his performance and the crowd moaned in unison, several of them near the stage expressing unabashed anger.

"As soon as I step off the plane, I read of the killing of the child in the papers. Stop killing de little pickney dem. Meh son a nine-year-old, if a man ramp with him, Mi kill him," Matterhorn said as the patrons shouted in agreement with their hands pumping in the air. In fact Jamaica too has been plagued with the killing of young children and Matterhorn passionately called for this to stop.

At thirty-four-years-old, Matterhorn is one of the top dancehall selectors/mic men in the world having been spinning discs on the turntables since his teens. A selector is the person in a DJ sound system who plays the music, while a mic man is the person who hypes up the crowd with witty banter.

Matterhorn is known for lacing his speech with sexual innuendos and spewing profanity liberally, which was exactly what he did on Wednesday, much to the delight of his fans. He punctuated the tracks with compliments to the women and gave advice on sexual matters to the men, most of these little gems being laced with expletives and descriptively graphic.

Zen was on that night, as they say in modern lingo, ram, as hundreds of young people flocked to the club to party hearty at the pre-holiday event. The uninitiated may not understand the fascination of seeing a DJ centre stage, but it can be very entertaining and Matterhorn makes it a thrill as he juggles from song to song while effortlessly switching from mixer to microphone and back. This was clearly a first-time experience for many of the patrons on the night, but they seemed to get the hang of it quickly.

Along with his lyrical wizardry and dexterous movements on the turntables and CD mixers, Matterhorn also had many hot dub plates from top Jamaican, hip-hop and even local artistes. A dub plate is a personalised recording of a song made by an artiste for a sound system, most times warning other sounds that they will get "killed" should they come up against that particular system.

During his near two-hour long stint Matterhorn ran plates from the likes of Gyptian, G-Unit, Sizzla, Richie Spice, Chuck Fender, Capleton, Beenie Man, Bounty Killa and many others including some tracks that have not even yet been released for commercial airplay. Also on his play list was Baby Cham who performs with full band at Zen on Wednesday.

While he proved to be a hero for the men from the first plate he spun, Matterhorn won the ladies' hearts with his charm as well as with statements such as, "Any man who reach 25-years-old and doh have a son or daughter yet, something wrong with he. Especially if you in Trinidad where it have so many beautiful women."