Sterling Betancourt, a sprightly septuagenarian who needs little encouragement to demonstrate his steel pan virtuosity, is thinking back to 29 July 1951. He was a member of the Trinidad All Steel Percussion Orchestra (T.A.S.P.O.), who had been brought over to open the inaugural concert of the Royal Festival Hall. Set proudly on the south bank of the Thames, the new hall was the centrepiece of the Festival of Britain, a national morale-booster designed to show that Britain was bouncing back after the Luftwaffe had done its worst. Focussed especially on architecture and new buildings, the Festival featured arts, crafts, exhibitions and cultural events from all around the country and the Commonwealth.
Initial audience scepticism was encouraged by the fact that the band’s instruments had rusted badly on the three-week Atlantic crossing. As the musicians emerged from the gleaming new building, the pans looked like so much scrap iron. That was, Sterling laughingly explains, all part of the plan:
‘Of course we’d tuned them, but we didn’t clean them because we decided to really give the audience a good surprise – they would never have seen a steel band before, and then they would be amazed when the beautiful music started coming out of these rusty-looking objects.
‘It worked too, because they were looking at us as we set up and we’re doing run-throughs, then when the captain calls us to order and we start to play the first tune, a mambo called “Mambo Jambo”, these people watching are astonished. They just staring at us. Then when we play Brahm’s “Lullaby”, the “Blue Danube Waltz”, and Toscelli’s “Serenade”, they definitely can’t believe what they are hearing!’
Newspaper reports the next day ran out of superlatives, hailing the performance with such praise as ‘virtuoso jazz’, ‘wonderfully skilled’ and ‘first-class playing’. Next, Edric Connor, the Trinidadian singer, actor and radio presenter who had been instrumental in persuading the Festival organisers to bring over a steel band, used his influence at the BBC to get them on the radio, and Britain’s affection for steel bands began. That said, it might have fizzled out just as quickly, had the 21-year-old Sterling not made a life-changing decision and opted to stay in London. With his steel drum:
‘We toured Britain for three weeks, it was great, and I made my mind up to stay here. I was the only one who remained in London, because things happen that just make me see it all a certain way. When we were in Paris and we were waiting to go back home, we have some time off, and we’re young guys, been away from home for a long time all cooped up together, and a lot of frustration was happening between the boys. There was a bit of a misunderstanding with two guys, they had a fight and all of that, and one of the chaps got stabbed in his hand. I decided to myself “Listen, I’m not going back to that sort of thing in Trinidad again.”
‘I know in those days they used to have a lot of riots and things between the different bands, because they take the rivalry so seriously, and I was thinking to go back home with this sort of thing happening … it just wasn’t on. I said I’d rather take my chances back in England. I figured that after that tour I could continue the steel band form in England, so I took my steel drum and my passport and returned to England from Paris. The next day the band took the train to Bordeaux and the boat to Trinidad without me.
‘Although I was told by the rest of the boys that I would suffer if I go back to London, I said “No”. Before I had left I remember talking to my brother and telling him I would be a fool to come back to Trinidad, so I think I knew what I was going to do even back then. The incident in Paris just showed me that it was the right thing to do. Yes, it was hard to leave my home country, and I made the decision with tears in my eyes, but I don’t regret it. It turned out very good for me.’
When Sterling talks about riots in the steel band world, he’s not exaggerating. The whole purpose of T.A.S.P.O. was to cool inter-band rivalry. Like the sound systems in Jamaica, steel bands were born in the ghetto, and many of the first pan men were gang members who carried those affiliations into the bands. With some seventy orchestras in and around Port of Spain, each attracting its own passionate supporters, bloody armed conflict and the breaking up of each other’s dances was commonplace. T.A.S.P.O. was an initiative sponsored by the government of Trinidad & Tobago, drawing one member from each of the island’s top twelve bands in the hope that bringing them together would stop the violence. They travelled under the watchful eye of Nathaniel Griffiths, a no-nonsense police lieutenant who ruled the volatile young men with a rod of iron. Being invited to London was a timely bonus, as the government saw it as a way to elevate steel pan music into what it saw as a bona fide art form. At the time, it was more or less standard for the middle and upper classes in Britain’s Caribbean colonies to sneer at ghetto culture until it was successful abroad – witness ska and reggae.
SINCE STEEL PAN BEGAN IN THE 1930s, the Trinidadian establishment had not considered it proper music, while pannists themselves were known as ‘badjohns’, local slang for hooligans or ne’er-do-wells. The change in attitude came about when calypso achieved international acclaim, and the government saw immediate benefits in promoting another exportable, tourist-friendly and identifiably Trinidadian form. Steel pan, however, had to travel a long way to get uptown, as it progressively expanded beyond the island’s poorest communities after bamboo orchestras were banned during World War II as part of the official suspension of Carnival.
The bamboo orchestras, or ‘tamboo bamboo’ – adapted from ‘tambour’, the French for drum – originated in the slums of Laventville, on the eastern side of Trinidad’s capital Port of Spain. Money for instruments was non-existent there, but invention and innovation were in abundance: these entirely percussive but surprisingly melodic ensembles consisted solely of bamboo poles. For tuning purposes, the bamboos ranged from roughly 1.5m long and 12cm across for the lowest bass to 63cm by 3cm for the sopranos, with differing numbers of holes bored in the sides to further vary the pitch. The smaller poles were supported on the player’s shoulder and struck with a piece of hard wood, while the larger ones were banged on the ground; the angle at which the pole hit the floor would also affect the note, just as the force could alter the volume. With the bamboos concentrating on melodies, rhythms were supplemented by bottle-and-spoon players.
Sterling was in a bamboo orchestra as a kid, and remembers going out at night to select and cut poles – bamboo cut in sunlight is said to be more susceptible to fungus.
‘We used to go way up to Trou Macaque [a rural area to the east of Trinidad’s capital] and look for what we needed. It could take a week to properly dry out a good bamboo.’
When the tamboo bamboos were banned, the musicians simply explored the percussion possibilities of the scrap metal that could be found on any rubbish tip – paint cans, food tins and automobile brake hubs were favourites – supplemented with everyday domestic items like pots, pans, dustbins and buckets. Players swiftly realised that stretching surfaces, and forming different indentations through persistent beating, produced varying notes, and thus a formal tuning process could be instigated.
The switch to adapting oil drums into the steel pans we know today came about because so many such drums were discarded on the island by the US military during World War II, and they offered the perfect raw material. It is, claims Sterling, impossible to pin down the time or the individual responsible for the steel pan:
‘Everybody was innovating, there wasn’t just one man who did it. Everybody see what was happening and start trying themselves, all at the same time, to produce better sounds and a greater range of notes.’
Which they certainly did, very quickly too, as during the 1940s steel pans evolved into around a dozen different instruments, from soprano to bass, enabling orchestras to play anything from folk songs to jazz, dance music, calypso or the classics.
Amazingly enough, such musicianship failed to impress the island’s calypsonians, who shared the stance that because it came from the ghetto, it must be of no value. With the notable exception of Lord Kitchener, who
loved melody and saw the steel drum as an important Trinidadian cultural statement, the calypsonians all but ignored these new orchestras. As a result, steel band music rarely made it onto the radio or into the recording studios; much like Jamaican sound systems, it remained in the ghetto, for the ghetto, and completely of the ghetto. Again like the early sound systems, the violence that went on around steel bands, and the ferocity with which supporters and players protected their outfits, had a great deal to do with the fact that this was pretty much all many people had to get excited about. It was totally theirs, and they were going to guard it.
Young Sterling Betancourt poses with his instrument.
To a great extent, the government strategy worked. T.A.S.P.O.’s success in Britain resonated back in Trinidad in the form of radio interest and acknowledgement by the tourist trade. In London, however, the music was having a much more immediate effect on the upper classes.
WHEN STERLING BETANCOURT RETURNED to London in 1951, he wasn’t the city’s first-ever steel pan player. That distinction went to Boscoe Holder, a Caribbean renaissance man who reached the capital from Trinidad, via New York, in 1950. As musician, dancer, choreographer and producer of large-scale folk-based shows, Holder made it his mission to take his island’s culture around the globe. Later, as a renowned painter, he’s also credited with introducing African Caribbean art to the world.
Along with his wife, dancer/singer Sheila Clarke, Holder set up a dance troupe, Boscoe Holder and his Caribbean Dancers, which was an immediate hit in London theatres. In 1950, the couple had a radio series on the BBC Home Service – the predecessor of Radio Four – built around his piano playing and her singing, and called Caribbean Carnival. He also showed off limbo dancing and the steel drum to the viewing public with the televised music and dance extravaganza Bal Creole, broadcast live from Alexandra Palace in June and August. The show was such a success that the troupe was recalled for a repeat performance in August. As the 1950s progressed, Holder’s company became BBC favourites. Besides appearances on shows ranging from Tonight to Six-Five Special and Kaleidoscope, they were regulars on the black variety series Caribbean Cabaret. They also found support at Buckingham Palace: Boscoe Holder and his Caribbean Dancers performed on a barge on the Thames as part of the flotilla marking Queen Elizabeth’s coronation in 1953; Holder and his wife took part in a Royal Command Performance in 1955, and the following year they were among a select party of eighteen invited to dinner with the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh at Claridges.
Although Holder’s pan playing never reached Sterling Betancourt’s standard, he was the first to give the instrument a wide audience, and his high-class connections through the art and dance worlds gave it a profile in London society. Holder also became a part-owner of a swish nightclub in Mayfair’s Hay Hill, where he made sure the Caribbean quota in the entertainment remained high.
Meanwhile Sterling, the city’s only specialist pan player, could only do so much by himself. He played solo in mainly West Indian-patronised venues, like Sunday or Saturday lunchtimes or Friday evenings at such pubs as the Colherne and the Colville Hotel in Ladbroke Grove. He also performed spots during the orchestra breaks at dancehalls like the Paramount, and cabaret sets at a few Soho clubs. It was in one of these that he met fellow-countryman Russell Henderson, who quickly realised they could help each other. Russ still enjoys talking about those early days in the West End:
‘I got to know Sterling at the Sunset Club in Carnaby Street, where he would do steel drum at the late cabaret. I used to go there after the job I had at the nearby La Ronde finished. I wanted to incorporate more steel drum into the conventional jazz thing I was doing here, both to reference Trinidad and because not many others were doing it. This was in 1952, when there might have been a couple of other steel drum players in London, but Sterling was the most prominent.
‘We got together to record a couple of tunes I had written – “Ping Pong Samba” was one of them. This was for Melodisc, and we had a bassist and a guitar, with Sterling on tenor pan and me playing piano. It sounded good and we looked to develop the sound. But mostly for club gigs it would be more conventional jazz or show tunes. Me on the piano, Sterling on drums, a bass player and a guitarist, and sometimes a chap on the accordion or a trumpeter. We had a few residencies at clubs, the Sunset was one of them, and we played music for dancing with a bit of our own calypsos stirred in. Sterling was playing the drums, because as a steel pan player back then you had to do something else or you couldn’t earn enough money. He’d had a few lessons, and somebody had given him some drums.’
Sterling remembers how, after those recordings with Russ, they developed the notion of steel pan in London, but with music tailored to that environment:
‘What we did on those recordings sounded good, and we knew there was an audience for steel band in London not only among the West Indian community who knew it, but the English people who usually liked it when they heard it. So we thought we’d go for it and go further in that direction. We wanted to create a small steel band out of the music [jazz] band, so we could do both styles to the same audience. Because the steel band would have elements of the jazz in it, we figured it would go down easier.
Half a century later, and Sterling has hardly changed.
‘We needed more than one pan, so I sent to Trinidad for two drums, steel drums. One was for Russell Henderson to play, so I taught him what to do on the drum so he could play second pan. Of course it wasn’t hard for him to catch on, because he’s a musician, and we add a guitar and we could start to do a three-piece thing. But by now there’s other guys who can play pan in London, so we could use three pans together. The band became a quartet, with three steel drums and a guitar, or a music band with piano, guitar, bass and me playing drums. I had booked ten drum lessons in London, but stopped after five because I was doing OK! Then we would go into clubs and cabarets playing music then changing over to steel drum – our first gig was the Sunset Club. We were the only band that could do this, and we did quite a few recordings too, up until about 1955.
‘Why the steel band was called the Russell Henderson Steel Band, even though I was the lead pan player and the original pan player in it, is because it was with the music band and that was Russell Henderson’s band. He was well known, so had the reputation to get the gigs. I was happy for him to call it the Russell Henderson Steel Band because he was the elder one and he was the boss of the band. I learned an awful lot from him, musically, and he learned the steel drum from me, so it was like a marriage. It was very, very good.’
The most immediate effect of this uniquely London-styled steel band was on English high society. Whether it was a result of the royal patronage, or perhaps thanks to the prestigious gig T.A.S.P.O. played at the Savoy Hotel in 1951, the aristocracy couldn’t get enough of the sound. While the Russell Henderson Steel Band played pub gigs, West Indian social club dances and even house parties, there were just as many hunt balls, Oxbridge events and debutante parties. Russ describes their apparently polarised popularity:
‘We used to play West Indian gigs all the time. Sometimes they were in town halls – St Pancras Town Hall was always popular – but really it was anywhere that would hire out to West Indians. There was a guy called Hugh Scotland, who I think was Jamaican and had been in the RAF, and he used to put on West Indian functions somewhere every holiday, like on Boxing Day or at Easter. Then they might just be West Indian parties like a wedding or a christening or somebody’s birthday. And of course there were the pubs we’d play in, usually on a Sunday lunchtime, that’s where you’d hear about the other gigs because people that wanted to book you knew where to find you.
‘Then there were the society balls. How that started was somebody from Cambridge University had come to the Sunset Club and seen us playing steel band, and asked us to come up and do a Cambridge ball. We did that and they asked us back, then Oxford wanted a steel band too, so then we did that, and now Oxford or Cambridge can’t have a ball without getting us up t
here to play. Of course, that spread to other universities and the students would take the idea home, so we were playing all sorts of society balls and parties in big houses and hotels all over the country.
‘Most of the time at those society parties, they’d have three or four bands. Although you might think that, just after the war, this was a very austere time, they were rich people and they wanted to enjoy themselves, so a party would have plenty of bands. There would be a West Indian band, you could dress up in a costume and play Latin American music and Caribbean music like we played steel pan. What they really liked about it was, when we weren’t on stage playing dance music, we could put the pans around our necks and be there to greet the people arriving, or we could walk through the crowds playing. If it was an outdoor event that could be wonderful.
‘I think what appealed to them about our music was, here they were with their stiff upper lips, and here they saw people ready to smile and jump up and shout and say what we want – uninhibited. And I think that made the difference. They saw West Indians and they thought “Well here’s somebody who can speak, at least, when there’s the Englishman who is quiet and wouldn’t say anything at all!” [Russ chuckles greatly at this idea] I think that is the difference – we’re more open. That’s the only way I can think to put it, the openness of the Caribbean people was appealing to the English people, and that was coming through the steel band music, because it’s a very appealing, infectious sound.’
However, Sterling remembers the guests at those society balls having one particular problem with steel band music. He laughs as hard as Russell as he recalls it:
‘We used to play for royalty and at the deb parties and the universities and so on, and it caught on so quickly. They took to it immediately, they loved it. At first it was the novelty of the steel band, then they started to really enjoy it. But the one trouble was when we play steel band at first, English people didn’t know how to dance to it. They used to foxtrot! I remember in the very early days when our steel band was playing in the Lyceum, we were playing a kind of jazz calypso thing, and they were moving so stiffly around the floor, holding on to each other and foxtrotting around the floor! Eventually they saw how the West Indians would dance to it and were shaking, and they soon follow. Then they really get to enjoy the steel band because it loosened them up a bit. They fall into the groove of the calypso rhythm, and they start dancing a bit more carefree. I think it helped many of them understand we West Indians a bit better.’
Sounds Like London Page 6