The Malta Music Awards 2020 included a Career in Music Recognition Award for me, acknowledging my long years of working in broadcasting and music promotion.
I am very grateful to the organisers (particularly Noel Magri and Carlo Borg Bonaci) for this accolade. Although I have never been a great fan of awards, this sort of non-competitive recognition is rather touching.
In my award acceptance speech, I thanked my parents from bringing me into this world and my beloved Kekina for keeping me going. The recent passing of Freddie Mizzi reminded me of all the great people in Malta who have had an impact on my career, making it worthy of this sort of recognition. I picked 25 names as this is the 25th anniversary of the MMAs (shown here in the order I mentioned them):
- Frank Ganado
- JJ Tellus
- Roland Friggieri
- Carmen Carbonaro
- Żep Camilleri
- Charles Arrigo
- Lino Cassar
- Charles Clews
- Victor Galdes
- Joan Azzopardi
- Joe Grima
- Antoine Camilleri
- Remo Mifsud
- Manwel Borg
- Maggie Borg
- Charlie Cutajar ic-Chalkie
- Mario Ellul
- Louis Naudi
- Philip Serracino Inglott
- Ruth Davies
- Lito
- Julian Manduca
- Dennis Vella
- Joe Bartolo s-Sloopy
- Jean Zaleski
There are others I’d have included in this list if it was longer than 25 names, of course.
I am also grateful to many people who are still alive, who have also had a great impact on my career. In most cases, I’m still able to thank anyone who’s alive in person.
Most of the links above take you to pages on the M3P wiki, formerly known as the Malta Music Memory Project now operated by the Malta Media Memory Preservation Foundation. Where the pages are scant, we need to do more to ensure that our memories of these great people does not fade away too quickly in time.