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[Idara Viengxay]

Followingemancipation in 1834, former slaves were allowed to participate in Trinidadian Carnival activities. However, African-descended percussive performance was heavily targeted by restrictive government bills, sparking protests and demonstrations.

These protests facilitated the development of improvisational and non-traditional percussive instruments out of scrap metal, metal containers, dustbins and bamboo stamping tubes. These 'Tamboo Bamboo' bands are widely accepted as the precursor to modern steel bands.

In the 1930s, it was realised that the convex dent at the bottom of metal drums could be tuned to distinct musical pitches and could therefore produce recognisable melodies, marking the creation of the first steel pans.

In 1951, the Trinidad All Steel Percussion Orchestra (TASPO) arrived in the UK to perform at the Festival of Britain, receiving overwhelmingly positive public feedback.

Watch archival footage of their performance below.

In the U.K. competition, much like its Trinidadian counterpart, bands grow to 100+ players, performing a 10-minute arrangement of a soca tune. Unfortunately, Panorama was cancelled in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, however the U.K. Panorama competition is returning in 2021.

Here watch a compilation of some of the performances from Notting Hill Carnival 2020: Access All Areas, streamed online during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Explore our other stories to Meet the Steel Bands, and be sure to catch them on the road at next year's carnival!

The human race, to which so manyof my readers belong, has beenplaying at children's games fromthe beginning, and will probably doit till the end, which is a nuisance for the fewpeople who grow up. And one of the gamesto which it is most attached is called "Keepto-morrow dark," and which is also named (bythe rustics in Shropshire, I have no doubt)"Cheat the Prophet." The players listen verycarefully and respectfully to all that the clevermen have to say about what is to happen inthe next generation. The players then waituntil all the clever men are dead, and bury themnicely. They then go and do something else.That is all. For a race of simple tastes,however, it is great fun.

For human beings, being children, have thechildish wilfulness and the childish secrecy.And they never have from the beginning of the[Pg 14]world done what the wise men have seen to beinevitable. They stoned the false prophets, it issaid; but they could have stoned true prophetswith a greater and juster enjoyment. Individually,men may present a more or less rationalappearance, eating, sleeping, and scheming.But humanity as a whole is changeful, mystical,fickle, delightful. Men are men, but Man is awoman.

But in the beginning of the twentieth centurythe game of Cheat the Prophet was made farmore difficult than it had ever been before.The reason was, that there were so manyprophets and so many prophecies, that it wasdifficult to elude all their ingenuities. When aman did something free and frantic and entirelyhis own, a horrible thought struck him afterwards;it might have been predicted. Whenevera duke climbed a lamp-post, when a deangot drunk, he could not be really happy, hecould not be certain that he was not fulfilling someprophecy. In the beginning of the twentiethcentury you could not see the ground for clevermen. They were so common that a stupidman was quite exceptional, and when they foundhim, they followed him in crowds down thestreet and treasured him up and gave him somehigh post in the State. And all these clever[Pg 15]men were at work giving accounts of whatwould happen in the next age, all quite clear,all quite keen-sighted and ruthless, and all quitedifferent. And it seemed that the good oldgame of hoodwinking your ancestors could notreally be managed this time, because the ancestorsneglected meat and sleep and practicalpolitics, so that they might meditate day andnight on what their descendants would be likelyto do.

But the way the prophets of the twentiethcentury went to work was this. They tooksomething or other that was certainly going onin their time, and then said that it would go onmore and more until something extraordinaryhappened. And very often they added that insome odd place that extraordinary thing hadhappened, and that it showed the signs of thetimes.

Then there was the opposite school. Therewas Mr. Edward Carpenter, who thought weshould in a very short time return to Nature,and live simply and slowly as the animals do.And Edward Carpenter was followed by JamesPickie, D.D. (of Pocohontas College), who saidthat men were immensely improved by grazing,or taking their food slowly and continuously,after the manner of cows. And he said that hehad, with the most encouraging results, turnedcity men out on all fours in a field covered withveal cutlets. Then Tolstoy and the Humanitarianssaid that the world was growing moremerciful, and therefore no one would ever desireto kill. And Mr. Mick not only became avegetarian, but at length declared vegetarianismdoomed ("shedding," as he called it finely, "thegreen blood of the silent animals"), and predictedthat men in a better age would live on[Pg 17]nothing but salt. And then came the pamphletfrom Oregon (where the thing was tried),the pamphlet called "Why should Salt suffer?"and there was more trouble.

And on the other hand, some people werepredicting that the lines of kinship wouldbecome narrower and sterner. There was Mr.Cecil Rhodes, who thought that the one thingof the future was the British Empire, and thatthere would be a gulf between those who wereof the Empire and those who were not, betweenthe Chinaman in Hong Kong and the Chinamanoutside, between the Spaniard on the Rock ofGibraltar and the Spaniard off it, similar to thegulf between man and the lower animals. Andin the same way his impetuous friend, Dr. Zoppi("the Paul of Anglo-Saxonism"), carried it yetfurther, and held that, as a result of this view,cannibalism should be held to mean eating amember of the Empire, not eating one of thesubject peoples, who should, he said, be killedwithout needless pain. His horror at the ideaof eating a man in British Guiana showed howthey misunderstood his stoicism who thoughthim devoid of feeling. He was, however, in ahard position; as it was said that he hadattempted the experiment, and, living in London,had to subsist entirely on Italian organ-grinders.[Pg 18]And his end was terrible, for just when he hadbegun, Sir Paul Swiller read his great paperat the Royal Society, proving that the savageswere not only quite right in eating their enemies,but right on moral and hygienic grounds, sinceit was true that the qualities of the enemy, wheneaten, passed into the eater. The notion that thenature of an Italian organ-man was irrevocablygrowing and burgeoning inside him was almostmore than the kindly old professor could bear.

There was Mr. Benjamin Kidd, who saidthat the growing note of our race would be thecare for and knowledge of the future. Hisidea was developed more powerfully by WilliamBorker, who wrote that passage which everyschoolboy knows by heart, about men in futureages weeping by the graves of their descendants,and tourists being shown over the scene of thehistoric battle which was to take place somecenturies afterwards.

And Mr. Stead, too, was prominent, whothought that England would in the twentiethcentury be united to America; and his younglieutenant, Graham Podge, who included thestates of France, Germany, and Russia in theAmerican Union, the State of Russia beingabbreviated to Ra.

There was Mr. Sidney Webb, also, who said[Pg 19]that the future would see a continuously increasingorder and neatness in the life of the people,and his poor friend Fipps, who went mad andran about the country with an axe, hackingbranches off the trees whenever there were notthe same number on both sides.

And it did certainly appear that the prophetshad put the people (engaged in the old game[Pg 20]of Cheat the Prophet) in a quite unprecedenteddifficulty. It seemed really hard to do anythingwithout fulfilling some of their prophecies.

But there was, nevertheless, in the eyes oflabourers in the streets, of peasants in the fields,of sailors and children, and especially women, astrange look that kept the wise men in a perfectfever of doubt. They could not fathom themotionless mirth in their eyes. They still hadsomething up their sleeve; they were stillplaying the game of Cheat the Prophet.

Then the people went and did what theyliked. Let me no longer conceal the painfultruth. The people had cheated the prophetsof the twentieth century. When the curtaingoes up on this story, eighty years after thepresent date, London is almost exactly like whatit is now.

Very few words are needed to explainwhy London, a hundredyears hence, will be very like it isnow, or rather, since I must slipinto a prophetic past, why London, when mystory opens, was very like it was in those enviabledays when I was still alive.

And some things did change. Things thatwere not much thought of dropped out of[Pg 22]sight. Things that had not often happened didnot happen at all. Thus, for instance, theactual physical force ruling the country, thesoldiers and police, grew smaller and smaller,and at last vanished almost to a point. Thepeople combined could have swept the fewpolicemen away in ten minutes: they did not,because they did not believe it would do themthe least good. They had lost faith in revolutions.

Democracy was dead; for no one mindedthe governing class governing. England wasnow practically a despotism, but not anhereditary one. Some one in the official classwas made King. No one cared how: no onecared who. He was merely an universalsecretary.

In this manner it happened that everythingin London was very quiet. That vague andsomewhat depressed reliance upon things happeningas they have always happened, which iswith all Londoners a mood, had become anassumed condition. There was really no reasonfor any man doing anything but the thing hehad done the day before.

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