Solid Steel Gallery

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Our stage clothes and our ‘look’, generally

As a popular steel band, we’re in demand all year round. We’re well- known not just for our reliability and the quality of our music, but for our versatility too. So we have to be prepared to dress appropriately to perform in all sorts of situations and in various formats. Inevitably though, because the steel drum is generally regarded as a folk instrument, our Caribbean roots tend to dictate most European people’s expectations of us and informs them of what to expect a steel band to wear during a performance.

Many people like steel bands to wear multi-coloured, loud, short sleeved shirts with figures of palm trees and hula dancers printed on them. That’s because they have been duped by a popular stereotype.

No-one, but no-one walks down a street anywhere in the Caribbean wearing a Hawaiian-style shirt! Oh, hang on, I just remembered. Some of them do. And the locals have a name for them too. They’re called ‘tourists’.

So when people ask us to dress ‘authentically’, what they want 99% of the time is for us to dress like tourists who are holidaying in the Caribbean. And woe betides us if their event is Caribbean-themed, because all of the guests will be dressed just like us.

I’d say it’s a little bit like asking an English band abroad to perform wearing bowler hats, but it’s far sillier than that. Bowler hats were at least popular with some English men for some part of English history.

Having said all that, I’m a pragmatist so we do wear the tourist shirt if we’re specifically asked to. If left to our own devices, though, we often wear something that looks ‘stagey’, but also references our cultural heritage.

Trinidad is the true home of steel band music, but there’s no national dress to speak of. So we like to take it back a little further to West Africa. I daresay in Ghana, people aren’t walking around in waistcoats with kente designs, but I hope you’ll agree that the look which you will see in our photos works for us, regardless.

Other than this option, we tend to go for a co-ordinated look with bright, and sometimes fluorescent colours or sometimes we’re asked to wear all white. Either of these looks great on a steel band in my opinion.

But what of the far more sensitive aspect of the look of a steel band, the race or colour of the steel band musicians themselves?

I find generally that again we do still have to deal with quite a bit of ignorance when dealing with some clients. They will ask me if my band looks ‘authentic’ and we’ll both know they’re not talking about our shirts.

Their concept of the ideal Caribbean look generally favours those who are dark and preferably wear dreadlocks.

I must admit to personally being at a terrible disadvantage in this respect. With a white English mother, a not-all-that-black Trinidadian father and having lost my (admittedly quite straight) hair, I fear I fall way short of these purists’ high standards.

A terrible thing, I know you must be thinking. Like being short and wanting to play professional basketball. Or being a Tottenham fan and wanting to win the League.

But no, actually. Not that bad. Because the real Caribbean look isn’t at all like the stereotype.

I’ve been lucky enough to have travelled to most of the Caribbean islands and it’s clear that the real Caribbean look is ‘defined’ by a lot of mixed and intermixed races with a dominance of African firstly followed by East Indian and Creoles. As you move from the northern to the southern islands, the African dominance is diminished somewhat. By the time you reach Trinidad, more people look like me than ‘ Rasta stereotype’ man.

So we won’t be booking any steel bands off of them if we want to keep our Caribbean party real, will we?

Allow me to finish by stating that I’m an equal opportunities employer. At this moment of time the steel band musicians that play with Solid Steel all have some element of African ethnicity. But the anthropologists say that we all derive from Africa, right? And the next white musician in my band will be hired for his/her talent and will not be discriminated against on the grounds of race.

If he/she plays great calypso, Latin, reggae, jazz et al in an authentic style- that’s what should matter most.

But for those of you who fear I may now field you an all-white steel band....Like I said before, I’m a pragmatist.