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Wearing rusty steelpans hewn from oil drums around their necks, Sterling Betancourt and his 10 bandmates faced a sceptical crowd as they stood outside the recently opened Royal Festival Hall in London in 1951. Jokes about “black magic” were heard. Then they began striking their pans with mallets and those watching were stunned by the beautiful music that emanated.
The Trinidadian musicians were playing at the Festival of Britain – the government-funded jamboree celebrating British and Commonwealth cultural excellence as the country shook off the trauma of war – and that day they introduced a mellifluous style of music to the UK that has since been passed down from generation to generation. When Betancourt died on 3 June, aged 96, there was little fanfare. As a musician, he was never “famous” in the sense of having hit records or headlining festivals. Yet this warm, humble nonagenarian – and MBE recipient – was among the last of the Windrush-era musicians who changed the DNA of British music. Later this month, his steelpan music will return to the Royal Festival Hall for Steel Scenes, a festival marking the 75th anniversary of the Trinidad All-Steel Percussion Orchestra (Taspo), the group he played with in 1951.
After wowing the Festival of Britain, Taspo undertook an extensive UK tour, performed on BBC TV and began a residency in Paris where they made Europe’s first commercially released steelpan band recordings. All the members of Taspo then headed back to Trinidad later that year – except Betancourt, who remained in London, building his own instruments from oil drums discarded in the city’s waste grounds.
He initially struggled to interest the public in pan. “He was quite distraught,” recalls his widow Beatrice, saying he had to learn jazz drumming to make a living. But he was no quitter – “Sterling didn’t procrastinate or feel down” – and Betancourt infiltrated the instrument into the Soho jazz scene, then across Britain and, from the 1970s on, into continental Europe and Asia.
“He was an incredible teacher,” says Beatrice. “He had so much patience. I’d watch him trying to teach a student who had no talent and I’d later say to him, ‘Why do you bother?’ And he would reply: ‘They will get there.’”
Betancourt was born in 1930 in Port of Spain, Trinidad, and as a child began beating out rhythms on empty tins. “I was about four years old,” he recalled in a recorded interview that Beatrice shares with me from earlier this century (she is unsure of the date). “I would be experimenting by playing on pots and milk tins, getting my rhythms going and singing, instead of going to school.”
The second world war brought the US navy to Trinidad and their empty oil drums were retooled into instruments. Betancourt mastered making them as a teenager and loved to play them on the street. This initially caused some parental concern as panmen were often regarded as gang-affiliated – steelpan bands represented poor neighbourhoods and brawls would break out at competitions. But the formation of the Steelbands Association of Trinidad and Tobago in 1949 professionalised the movement and reduced rivalries between bands. Funds were raised to send a steelpan band to the Festival of Britain, and 11 of the best pan musicians were selected as Taspo.
“We came over on a banana boat,” said Betancourt. “We stopped in Martinique and many students came on board, so we played for them every day: a very enjoyable journey.” But the arrival in London was a shock for the members of Taspo: having grown up idealising Britain’s capital, on arrival they found the city bleak and bomb damaged. “He recalled signs in windows stating ‘No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs’; and the teddy boys attacking Black people,” Beatrice says. “But he never got bitter and, being a musician, he attracted a great deal of goodwill.”
Initially staying with Bayswater’s Trinidadian community, Taspo’s bright, percussive music won over audiences and this made Betancourt determined to stay. Partnering with Russell Henderson, a gifted Trinidadian jazz pianist and panman, they played at Claudia Jones’s 1959 Caribbean carnival, and then, in 1966, led a steelpan walkabout around Notting Hill. These two events became the basis for Notting Hill carnival, which celebrates its 60th anniversary in August.
“Sterling was surprised at how carnival took off over here,” says Beatrice. “When he and Russell led the original walkabout with children, they had no idea it would develop into this huge event.”
Alongside carnival, Betancourt kept busy recording sessions with jazz, pop, reggae and soca musicians, while still building his own instruments. “In the 1970s he would go to the back of King’s Cross station, which was an industrial wasteland, and he would find an oil drum there and make himself a drum,” Beatrice says. “Cut it with a saw, heat it, then carefully hammer it to develop the different notes – he was strong and could do all these things. Sterling had perfect pitch and it would take him a good three days to make a pan.”
The rest of the 1970s were spent popularising pan worldwide. “The Swiss were amazed by steelpan,” says Beatrice. “He spent several weeks there and, later on, half the members of his Nostalgia Steelband ended up being Swiss and German. He also performed in Singapore, Dubai, Oman, Abu Dubai, Spain, France, Germany, Holland – I remember him playing on barges in the river.”
Sterling continued making new music, in 2018 recording Brexit Bacchanal Story, a calypso-flavoured lament about the folly of the UK leaving the EU. “Sterling was aghast at Brexit,” says Beatrice. “He loved playing pan all over Europe and believed in bringing people together, not pushing them apart.”
Southbank Centre’s Steel Scenes festival will trace pan’s global popularity back to its west African roots and Trinidadian heritage, and also point to its future. Five hundred pan musicians will perform across the weekend, while an array of contemporary British musicians (including Blue Lab Beats, Nabihah Iqbal, Delphina James and Soweto Kinch) have composed new music for pan to be performed by Kinetika Bloco and Ezra Collective.
The event’s producer, Deborah Yewande Bankole, commissioned Betancourt, then the last surviving member of the original 11-strong Taspo lineup, to write a melody line, which the young bands will develop into work of their own. Not that this was simple: Sterling had suffered a major stroke in 2024 and had not played pan since. Determined, he rose to the occasion. “Apparently he put his mallet to his pan and said, ‘one last time’, and played the melody line while a friend recorded it,” says Bankole.
Beatrice says Betancourt was “happy to know Steel Scenes was honouring Taspo’s original concert, but he was very frail and kept saying to our son and I: ‘I’m not going to make it.’ We humoured him, and thought he was being dramatic, but he was right.”
Right until his death, Sterling was proud of his achievements yet remained humble. “He said to me: ‘My role is not enormous but I’m very proud of what I’ve achieved,’” Beatrice says. “When people would praise him as the pan pioneer he would just say: ‘Many people were involved.’”
