First film with all-steelpan soundtrack: Secret of The Heart Within

RAY FUNK

WHILE everyone is celebrating this month with World Steelpan Day, the recent passage of steelpan as the national instrument – and, after more than a decade without it – the return of the National Steelband Festival, one can only imagine many more vistas for pan opening in the future, maybe in films.

In a 2017 article, Ted Goslin noted effective use of steelpan in feature films like Star Wars (1977), 48 Hours (1982), featuring Andy and Jeff Narell, or Trini Denzil Boatus in The Brother from Another Planet (1984).

There are certainly scenes with steelbands briefly seen in movies: but what about a feature film where the entire soundtrack is by a steelband?

Amazingly, it happened decades ago, but in a film no one knows!

Back in 1957 in England, a film called The Heart Within featured a soundtrack written by Trinidadian Vivian Comma, featuring a steelband he managed, the Kings of the Caribbean, with about ten short pan pieces.

TV Guide described The Heart Within as a “well-acted presentation of a man (wrongfully) accused of murder because of the colour of his skin.”

The steelpan sequences are used effectively to heighten the tension in the film.

It also featured three leading Caribbean actors: Earl Cameron from The Bahamas, Pauline Henriques from Jamaica, and Frank Singuineau from Trinidad and Tobago, who left a job with Shell Oil to be an actor in London, where, over a career of several decades, he appeared in films, television and onstage, notably in a lead role in Horace Ove’s Pressure (1976).

The first and last scenes of The Heart Within are framed by the band on camera. The opening shot is a close-up, and only the drums and sticks and hands of the players are seen. In the final scene, the steelband is seen performing at a party.

The steelband is the Kings of the Caribbean. It was originally Katzenjammers, a leading band active in Port of Spain in the 1950s. By the middle of 1956 it was one of the top steelbands in Trinidad.

Don Bain, head of the Tourist Board, had hired them during this time to meet cruise ships coming into the country. Made up of members from Woodbrook and Belmont, they were led by Percy Thomas, already a well-regarded builder/tuner of the instrument. The band also got the attention of Emory Cook, who recorded an excellent album in 1956 by them, The Enchanted Steelband.

Kim Johnson commented in If Yuh Iron Good You Is King on their early success: “Katzenjammers was ambitious, and by 1954 their lead tenor Everest Barquain entered the Steelband Festival and was only edged out from first place by Dudley Smith. And in 1956 the band took on the big guns once again in the Steelband Festival, winning with The Breeze and I.”

They then caught the attention of film producers in Trinidad for Fire Down Below. This was a blockbuster featuring three of the leading actors in Hollywood at the time – Robert Mitchum, Jack Lemmon and Rita Hayworth.

The main footage was shot in Trinidad and, after that shoot, the producers brought back composer Vivian Comma, Stretch Cox and his limbo dance troupe and Katzenjammers for the nightclub scenes to be shot in a studio in England, followed by post-production work.

Comma is little remembered today, though he wrote Madeline Oy, the 1954 road march, and was an important composer in Trinidad in the Fifties. For Fire Down Below, Comma wrote the music that accompanied Hayworth’s dancing in the film. Stretch Cox and his limbo dance troupe are featured in the opening scenes and there is plenty of drumming to be heard on the soundtrack, but no clearly discernible pan.

Despite losing out on any prominent place in Fire Down Below, Katzenjammers was, however, shortly thereafter featured in another. Once in England, they were renamed The Kings of the Caribbean Steel Band, Vivian Comma became their manager and at the height of the “Calypso Craze,” they seemed destined for success.

The Kings of the Caribbean appeared in at least one British TV show, Away to Music, in a BBC radio series called Caribbean Carnival and recorded a single called Rock N’ Roll Susie. They played at the Horniman Museum in London in November 1957 and got a great response at a concert where they mixed calypso and rock ‘n’ roll. The museum curator noted, “We first included steelband music the year before last. It was a great success then but this is the biggest crowd ever.”

But then the band disappeared from view.

Comma did not; he became active in the Notting Hill Carnival, sang for a while in the British calypso tent at the Golden Cockerel, made occasional recordings, was a member of the Trinidad Folk Singers and ran a well-regarded kite company, featuring a small kite he designed called the Kiskedee. Four thousand of these kites were given away at a Paris Kite Festival in 1978.

He died in 1998 and there is a street named after him, Vivian Comma Close, in London.

But the triumph of his and Katzenjammers’ work in The Heart Within has remained hidden until recently.

Now the film is available online at: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8j5eho