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Wrusted metal with oil drums around their necks, Sterling Betancourt and 10 bandmates faced a skeptical crowd as they stood outside London’s newly opened Royal Festival Hall in 1951. Jokes about “black magic” were heard. Then they started hitting their drums with bullets and those who were watching were surprised by the beautiful music that was coming out.
Trinidadian musicians were playing at the Festival of Britain – a government-sponsored party to celebrate the cultural achievements of Britain and the Commonwealth when the world was shaken by the horrors of war – and that day they introduced the best music in the UK that has been handed down from generation to generation. When Betancourt died on June 3, aged 96, there was little to celebrate. As a musician, he was not “popular” in the sense of having hits or headlining festivals. However, the warm, humble non-nagenarian – and MBE recipient – was among the last of the Windrush-era musicians who changed the DNA of British music. Later this month, his steel music will return to the Royal Festival Hall for Steel Scenes, a celebration of the 75th anniversary of the Trinidad All-Steel Percussion Orchestra (Taspo), the group he played with in 1951.
After impressing at the British Festival, Taspo toured the UK extensively, performed on BBC TV and began a residency in Paris where he created Europe’s first metal band release. All the members of Taspo returned to Trinidad at the end of that year – except for Betancourt, who remained in London, building his equipment from oil drums discarded in the city’s garbage.
At first he struggled to please people on the pan. “He was devastated,” recalls his widow Beatrice, saying he had to learn to play jazz drums to make ends meet. But he didn’t give up – “Sterling didn’t hesitate or get discouraged” – and Betancourt introduced the instrument to the jazz scene of Soho, then to Britain and, from the 1970s to Europe and Asia.
Beatrice said: “He was a very good teacher. “He was very patient. And he used to say: ‘He will get there.'”
Betancourt was born in 1930 in Port of Spain, Trinidad, and as a child he started playing with bare wings. “I was about four years old,” he recalled in a recorded interview that Beatrice told me from the turn of the century (she doesn’t know the date). “I try playing with pots and milk cans, and start singing and singing, instead of going to school.”
World War II brought the US Navy to Trinidad and their oil-free drums were turned into weapons. Betancourt managed to make them as a teenager and used to play with them in the street. This initially caused concern for parents as panmen were often seen as gangs – metal bands represented poor areas and conflicts broke out at competitions. But the creation of the Steelbands Association of Trinidad and Tobago in 1949 he worked professionally and reduced the conflicts between the groups. Funds were raised to send a metal band to the Festival of Britain, and the top 11 musicians were selected as Taspo.
“We came on a banana boat,” Betancourt said. “We stopped in Martinique and many students went on board, so we played for them every day: a very interesting trip.” But arriving in London was a surprise for the members of Taspo: having grown up thinking of the British capital, when they arrived they found the city dirty and bomb-ravaged. “He remembered the signs in the windows saying ‘No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs’; and teddy boys attacking black people,” says Beatrice. “But he was not disappointed and, being a musician, he attracted a lot of attention.”
Originally with Bayswater’s Trinidadian band, Taspo’s melodious music caught the attention of the crowd and this made Betancourt determined to stay. In collaboration with Russell Henderson, the Trinidadian jazz pianist and panman, he played on Claudia Jones’s 1959 album. Caribbean carnival, and then, in 1966, he led a marching band around Notting Hill. The two events formed the basis of the Notting Hill carnival, which celebrates its 60th anniversary in August.
Beatrice said: “Sterling was amazed at how the carnival took off. “When he and Russell led the first trip with the children, they had no idea it was going to be such a big event.”
Along with the carnival, Betancourt was busy recording with jazz, pop, reggae and soca musicians, while making his own instruments. “In the 1970s he would go behind King’s Cross station, which was an industrial wasteland, and find an oil drum and make his own drums,” says Beatrice. “Cut it with a saw, heat it up, then hit it hard to make different notes – he was strong and he could do it all. Sterling had a great voice and it would take him three days to make a pan.”
The rest of the 1970s were used to spread pot around the world. Beatrice said: “The Swiss people were very surprised by the steel band. “He stayed there for a few weeks and, after that, half of the members of his Nostalgia Steelband became Swiss and German. He also performed in Singapore, Dubai, Oman, Abu Dubai, Spain, France, Germany, Holland – I remember playing on boats in the river.”
Sterling continued to make new music, in 2018 recording Brexit Bacchanal Story, a sweet calypso lament about the folly of the UK leaving the EU. “Sterling was panicked by Brexit,” says Beatrice. “He loved playing pans all over Europe and believed in bringing people together, not tearing them apart.”
Southbank Centre Steel Scenes Festival it will trace its global popularity to its West African roots and Trinidadian heritage, and point to its future. Over 500 musicians will perform over the weekend, while a number of contemporary British artists (including Blue Lab Beats, Nabihah Iqbal, Delphina James and Soweto Kinch) will create new music to perform.
The organizer of the event, Deborah Yewande Bankole, commissioned Betancourt, who was the last member of Taspo’s original 11-strong group, to write a song, which the young groups will make their own. Not that this was easy: Sterling suffered a stroke in 2024 and has not played since. Determined, he persisted. “It seems that he put his bullet on his plate and said, ‘finally’, and played this song while his friend recorded it,” says Bankole.
Beatrice says Betancourt “was happy to know that Steel Scenes was honoring Taspo’s original concert, but she was very weak and was saying to our son and me: ‘I can’t make it.’ We laughed at him, I thought he was weird, but he was right. “
Until his death, Sterling was proud of his accomplishments but remained humble. “He told me: ‘My role is not great but I am very proud of what I have achieved,'” said Beatrice. “When people praised him as a pioneer, they said: ‘Many people had it.’
