The British Blacklist
From the Streets of Trinidad to the World Stage
England, U.K. - Next week, Trinidad and Tobago celebrates the 75th anniversary of the steelpan, a landmark that honours not only the evolution of a musical instrument but also the ingenuity, resilience and cultural identity of a people.
....the Festival of Britain, staged to mark the centenary of the Great Exhibition of 1851, as an opportunity to demonstrate the legitimacy of pan on the largest stage available.
Players including Betancourt, Winston “Spree” Simon and Anthony Williams were drawn from bands that had spent years as rivals and moulded into an orchestra by Barbadian bandleader Lieutenant Joseph Griffith, whose own career had taken him through St Vincent, Grenada and Martinique.
On 6 July 1951, they sailed from Port of Spain aboard a banana boat, arriving in London via Bordeaux and Paris, their pans rusted by the sea air. When the Trinidad All Steel Percussion Orchestra took to the stage on London’s South Bank on 26 July, the audience’s first reaction was one of polite disbelief that these battered oil drums could produce music at all.
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