Silver Stars 1st in the line
When Silver Stars upset the form book in 1963 and won the Band of the Year prize with its stunning interpretation of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, many people asked the question:
“Who the hell is Silver Stars?”
The attractive buxom packer near the cashier at Hi Lo Food Stores’ St. Augustine branch posed the same question the morning after the Tragarete Road band turned the pan world on its head by winning the Steelband Panorama competition the previous night.
The fact is that Silver Stars is celebrating 60 years as a steelband.
This is something most people, particularly youngsters, simply do not know: perhaps, because the band has been so invisible despite being revived in 1986 after a 20-year hiatus.
Silvers Stars certainly qualifies as a pioneer steelband. Its glory years were in the 1950s and 1960s under its captain, Junior Pouchet, an accomplished arranger.
Silver Stars went into decline when Pouchet took the band’s top players to Disneyland more than 40 years ago and although it won the Panorama medium band competition in 2004 and the “Pan In The Twenty First Century” competition in 2007, it was not looked upon as a threat.
Therefore, while pan aficionados were concentrating on Phase Two Pan Groove, Neal and Massy All Stars, Witco Desperados, BPTT Renegades and Sagicor Exodus as being the competition, Silver Stars, an unsponsored steelband, got the judges’ nod- winning by one point- with an appropriately titled piece, “First In De Line” .
The unusual opening bars of the roof raising arrangement by Junior Pouchet’s younger brother, Edwin, impressed many on that wet Saturday night at the Queen’s Park Savannah; but Phase 11 Pan Groove, the defending champion, gave a scintillating rendition of “Magic Drum”- and the result had to be a close one.
Ironically, last year, Phase Two won by one point.
Sagicor Exodus was undone by the new rule of 100 players. The St Augustine band discovered that there were more than that number when it lined up on the Savannah stage and took over 20 minutes to sort things out.
The Newtown dark horse, founded by St Mary’s College students who were of Portuguese, Chinese, Spanish or some European ancestry defying the social norms of the colonial era by being involved in what some clergymen deemed the “devil’s instrument”, won its first major Panorama competition.
Things had come full circle for the courageous schoolboys who did as much for the soul of the steelband movement as anyone else.
Silver Stars was also TT$1 million richer.
Pouchet described the victory as “a significant achievement.”
The other “big guns” slunk home to lick their wounds with supporters complaining of bad judging.
Silver Stars won with 469 points followed by Phase Two Pan Groove with 468, Neal and Massy All Stars with 460, Witco Desperadoes with 458, BP Renegades with 457, Petrotrin Deltones with 450.5 and RBTT Redemption Sound Setters of Tobago in last place with 442. Their placing is no indication of how well they played.
The organisers decided to streamline the show by removing the medium band competition. This was held on Wednesday night with Curepe steelband, Clico Sforzata, winning. Arima Golden Symphony won in the small bands category.