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[title]You might have seen them at Carnival, passing by in a burst of song – soca, calypso, nineties dance tracks – sunlight glinting off their metal instruments. At first, the notes cascade like water, pure and refreshing, but listen harder and you’ll hear complex harmonies bubbling under the surface. The playing looks so effortless, so spontaneous, you’d hardly guess that this weekend’s Notting Hill Carnival is the culmination of months of obsessive practising for London’s steel pan bands.
There are more than 40 steel bands across the UK. Some of the oldest and largest meet in school sports halls and community centres around London: people of all ages hammering steel pans until midnight or 1am, all fitting their passion around working, studying and caring responsibilities. ‘My partner thinks I’m crazy’, says Debi Gardner, who juggles an intense rehearsal schedule with Notting Hill’s Mangrove Steelband with a career on the frontline of London’s housing crisis. ‘He doesn’t understand why I might be awake until three o’clock in the morning then getting up at seven to go to work, for weeks on end.’
‘I have the song on repeat on my headphones wherever I go,’ says 14-year-old Ava, who’s given up her school summer holidays to rehearse with Tottenham’s Pan Nation, next to players old enough to be her parents and grandparents. ‘Perseverance breeds success,’ says visually impaired 68-year-old player Michael Toussaint, who’s used to this hectic pace of rehearsals after playing and teaching the instrument for six decades. He’s come out of retirement to play with Ealing’s UFO Steelband this year: ‘I’m getting to the twilight of my career, so this carnival may be last.’
Carnival is synonymous with the steel bands that have sent vibrations through Notting Hill’s streets each summer since 1966. But what is it about steel pan that exerts such a hold over its players?
Secondhand magic
Much of steel pan’s magic comes from its rich origin story. Toussaint grew up in Trinidad, where steel pan originated. ‘It’s the only [acoustic] musical instrument invented in the 20th century, way back in the forties in Trinidad,’ he says. ‘Just after the Second World War, the island had lots of steel drums lying around from when they would import oil, and people started to hammer them into instruments – it was miraculous. I always say recycling was invented in Trinidad.’
So much of steel pan’s beauty comes from the unlikeliness of these repurposed instruments. ‘There’s a bit on the Carnival route where you come round the corner onto Ladbroke Grove and you suddenly see everyone’s faces lighting up in amazement and awe at how we can make these beautiful sounds from these bits of metal we’re hitting,’ says 36-year-old Ziggy Grier, who is responsible as captain for marshalling Pan Nation’s 125-strong orchestra.
But the resourcefulness of this instrument’s inventors was the result of bitter necessity. ‘I did my research when I started learning pan,’ says Ava. ‘I found that it originated from enslaved Africans who were taken to the Caribbean. Their drums and instruments were taken away from them, so they’d take other things and carve and hammer them until they could play them.’
Steel pan made its UK debut in August 1951, when the Trinidad All Stars Percussion Orchestra (TAPSO) wowed audiences as part of The Festival of Britain at the then-newly opened Southbank complex. With the Windrush generation seizing onto this emblem of Caribbean culture, the joyful sound soon spread to more of the UK.
The steel pan is still seen very much as a novelty instrument, and it shouldn’t be
Trinidad-born musical legend Russ Henderson started London’s first steel band: his spontaneous decision to play down the streets at the first Notting Hill fayre in 1966 can be traced to the origin of today’s carnival parade. Today, instruments are specially made from high-quality steel and are played across the UK, as well as being widely taught in London’s schools. But unlike a recorder, they can’t be stashed in a rucksack, which makes for some logistical challenges as Carnival weekend looms.
‘On the Friday when schools break up, we drive around London picking up pans so we can start rehearsing,’ explains 41-year-old Dan Sadler, who oversees preparations for 125-strong band Pan Nation in a primary school hall in Tottenham. ‘Our hall can only fit 100 people in it so this year we’ve got people practising in cupboards and in corridors. We might even have to open the back doors and have people practising outside under an awning.’
Pan and prejudice
Steel pan is an art form with a rich history and culture. But where London’s classical music orchestras benefit from fine concert halls, government funding and corporate investment, steel pan bands are squeezed to the margins. It’s a tension that’s extra visible given that steel pan originated with London’s Caribbean communities, who are some of the hardest hit by the city’s cost-of-living crisis.
‘The steel pan is still seen very much as a novelty instrument, and it shouldn’t be,’ says Debi. ‘I've been a musician for 30 years, and had I had the opportunity to do this as a full time career, being paid for my music, I would have done it. But that’s never been afforded to me. I find it endlessly frustrating.’
Despite steel pan being one of the world’s newest instruments, Ava has been surprised by how few people at her school know about it. ‘I said to my teacher “I've got to go steel pan’’ and she said ‘‘what do you mean, what are these pans you're stealing?”,’ Ava says. ‘A lot of people have never heard of it. But when I show them they're impressed – steel pan really deserves more publicity, it’s such an amazing instrument.’
Toussaint has toured the world as a professional player, but he hasn’t always been treated with the respect that should accompany that. In 2006, he and three band members were escorted off a Ryanair flight at gunpoint by Italian police. ‘They thought we were terrorists and I was pretending to be blind,’ he says. ‘That was the worst thing that ever happened to me.’ A court case followed where they were each awarded just £800 in compensation: their lawyer suggested that given that they were the only Black passengers on the plane, the incident was likely to be racially motivated.
Steel bands have entertained royalty – Toussaint and Gardner have played in front of Queen Elizabeth II and the then-Prince Charles – but in day-to-day life, they don’t always get the red carpet treatment that’s given to historically white art forms like classical music. As Gardner explains, ‘other musicians don’t have the same challenges as us, and that creates inequality.’ Still, if funding is elusive, these musicians all speak of the less tangible things that drive them to keep going: ‘it’s the energy, the atmosphere, the feeling of community, the being part of something that’s much bigger than you,’ says Sadler.
Carnival and competition
Carnival is the one of the few times of year when steel pan is raised up and celebrated. But in recent decades, steel pan’s place within the weekend has shifted. ‘Carnival was originally a steel pan parade but now it’s been taken over by sound systems,’ says Sadler, who’s been playing there every year since 1998. ‘One year we got wedged in between two big sound systems, and it was so loud we couldn’t even hear ourselves playing.’
This shift towards amplified sound has meant that steel pan bands have a new focus: Panorama, a competition between bands from across the country that happens the Saturday night before. In the nineties, it was an informal gathering in a Notting Hill backstreet. Now, it’s a massive gathering of hundreds of players, where qualifying bands show off their skills in a continuous 10-minute virtuoso set: maybe it’ll be the latest soca track out of Trinidad, maybe it’ll be a nineties dance banger, maybe it’ll be an old calypso song hammered into something special. Ebony Steel Band – who are currently the defending champions – has even covered Kraftwerk. But what all these sets have in common is that they’re played entirely from memory.
Carnival was originally a steel pan parade but now it’s been taken over by sound systems – one year they were so loud we couldn’t even hear ourselves playing
‘I’ve noticed over the years that the children who play pan always go on to excel in their examinations, because it really develops their memories,’ says Toussaint, explaining that the instrument has relied on rote learning (a memorization technique based on repetition) right from its origins in Trinidad, where sheet music was scarce.
But maybe it’s not just the brain workout that helps young players thrive. Maybe it’s the caring community that surrounds them. ‘We’ve got players who have just done their A levels, and the whole band is worried about the results,’ says Gardner. ‘I always say that Mangrove is a family that I chose, rather than the family I was born into.’
Sadler agrees. ‘We may not be related by blood, but we help each other out in ways that go beyond learning the music,’ he says. ‘We deal with welfare issues, we help people that need financial assistance just to be able to come into practice every day. There’s so much going on in the pan yard every day and we get through it together.’
It’s becoming vanishingly rare to see a place where teenagers and retirees can show off their skills together as equals – tipsy wedding dancefloors, maybe. But steel pan bands are genuinely intergenerational, community spaces, bringing a proud musical tradition from the island of Trinidad to the streets of Notting Hill for one joyful weekend – and creating bonds that last all year long.