Sterling Betancourt died on 3 June aged 96, but his steelpan music will return to the Royal Festival Hall later this month for Steel Scenes, a festival marking the 75th anniversary of the Trinidad All-Steel Percussion Orchestra, or Taspo, the group he played with in 1951. The Trinidadian musician and MBE recipient moved to the UK in the 1950s after helping introduce steelpan music to Britain at the Festival of Britain in 1951, when he and his 10 bandmates stood outside the recently opened Royal Festival Hall in London wearing rusty steelpans hewn from oil drums around their necks. Jokes about "black magic" were heard before they began striking their pans with mallets. The crowd was stunned by the music that followed.
Taspo played at the government-funded Festival of Britain, which celebrated British and Commonwealth cultural excellence as the country shook off the trauma of war. After that performance, Taspo undertook an extensive UK tour, appeared 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 returned to Trinidad later that year except Betancourt, who stayed in London and built his own instruments from oil drums discarded in the city's waste grounds.
From Port of Spain to London's Jazz Scene
Betancourt was born in 1930 in Port of Spain, Trinidad. As a child, he began beating out rhythms on empty tins. In a recorded interview shared by his widow, Beatrice, he said: "I was about four years old. 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.
Beatrice said panmen were often regarded as gang-affiliated and that steelpan bands represented poor neighbourhoods, with brawls breaking out at competitions. She said 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.
Betancourt initially struggled to interest the public in pan. Beatrice said he was "quite distraught" and had to learn jazz drumming to make a living. She said: "Sterling didn't procrastinate or feel down." He later infiltrated the instrument into the Soho jazz scene, then across Britain and, from the 1970s on, into continental Europe and Asia. Beatrice said: "He was an incredible teacher." She added: "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.'"
The Birth of Notting Hill Carnival
Betancourt partnered with Russell Henderson, described as a gifted Trinidadian jazz pianist and panman, and they played at Claudia Jones's 1959 Caribbean carnival and then, in 1966, led a steelpan walkabout around Notting Hill. Those two events became the basis for Notting Hill carnival, which celebrates its 60th anniversary in August. Beatrice said: "Sterling was surprised at how carnival took off over here. 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 with recording sessions with jazz, pop, reggae and soca musicians while still building his own instruments. Beatrice said that in the 1970s he would go to the back of King's Cross station, then an industrial wasteland, find an oil drum and make himself a drum. She said he would cut it with a saw, heat it, then carefully hammer it to develop the different notes. "Sterling had perfect pitch and it would take him a good three days to make a pan," she said.
Beatrice said the rest of the 1970s were spent popularising pan worldwide. "The Swiss were amazed by steelpan," she said. "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." In 2018, Betancourt recorded Brexit Bacchanal Story, a calypso-flavoured lament about the UK leaving the EU. Beatrice said: "Sterling was aghast at Brexit. He loved playing pan all over Europe and believed in bringing people together, not pushing them apart."
A Final Gift to Steel Scenes
Southbank Centre's Steel Scenes festival will trace pan's global popularity back to its west African roots and Trinidadian heritage and point to its future. Five hundred pan musicians will perform across the weekend, and contemporary British musicians including Blue Lab Beats, Nabihah Iqbal, Delphina James and Soweto Kinch have composed new music for pan to be performed. 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 that young bands will develop into work of their own. Betancourt had suffered a major stroke in 2024 and had not played pan since, but Bankole said he rose to the occasion and "put his mallet to his pan and said, 'one last time', and played the melody line while a friend recorded it."
Beatrice said 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." She said that right until his death, he remained humble. "He said to me: 'My role is not enormous but I'm very proud of what I've achieved,'" she said. "When people would praise him as the pan pioneer he would just say: 'Many people were involved.'" Steel Scenes is at Southbank Centre, London, from 24-26 July.
Why This Matters:
Sterling Betancourt's story illustrates the profound contributions migrant artists have made to British cultural life — often in the face of prejudice and economic hardship. His journey from a working-class neighbourhood in Port of Spain to the Royal Festival Hall embodies the postwar Commonwealth experience: arriving with skill and ambition, facing hostility and indifference, then slowly transforming the cultural landscape through persistence and creativity. Betancourt's distress at Brexit reflected a deeper truth about European cultural exchange — that music, like migration itself, thrives on openness and withers under walls. The Steel Scenes festival honours not just a musical form but a vision of Britain enriched by Caribbean culture, a vision that remains contested in an era of renewed borders and nationalist politics. That 500 pan musicians will gather at Southbank Centre this month is testament to what one migrant artist, armed with an oil drum and perfect pitch, can build across a lifetime.