Kernel Roberts – The Sound Of The Ghost

Kernel Roberts – The Sound Of The Ghost

This post is dedicated to one thing - the greatest pan tune ever arranged and the ending of my eight year search for the original track.

And before I go on, huge huge thanks to pukshop.com - the "world's 1st Caribbean digital download, jukebox and live stream" - for being seemingly the only place on the planet to provide online Soca music sales, and the provider of the fine specimen stage left (that's, erm, to the right then).

Renegades - Sound Of The Ghost

BP Amoco Renegades

Ok, no idea what I'm on about again? What's new... Anyway, for nigh on 13 years I played the steel pan in and out of school and college, and had the pleasure of being taught by probably the best proffesional pan player in the north of England. Not that it did me much good, other than obsess me with various steel band music for the rest of my life. So, back to this track. Sound Of The Ghost is a track by Kernel Roberts, son of one of the greatest Soca composers ever - Lord Kitchener, and was written as a  tribute to his father. Anyways, the recording that got me in to the track - a 2001 Panorama performance (that's Trinidad & Tobago's national steel pan competition, featuring ~100 players in every band, and far too many bands to mention, get just a glimpse of it here, musically and physically a logistical nightmare with bands playing one after another and moved into stadia on huge wheeled contraptions, but I digress...) - was performed by a steel band called Renegades, prefixed Amoco, BP, or god knows what else - they traditionally have some big oil company sponsorship thing going on over there. The 10 minute masterpiece to the left is IMO one of the finest things to come out of Panorama ever. Not like I've ever had more than one CD of the thing. Probably the only one ever to make it over the Atlantic in to the UK distribution channels. But these guys are a huge help.

And just because it's the only other recording of the track I've ever found, here's El Dorado secondary school's band's take, with a digression in to something familiarly Wet Wet Wet.... Now I must be off to finally finish learning to play the Monkey Island theme tune, and muse some more over that Sooz one from As If joining the Navy; weirder than that time Vu ate a durian...

Eldo Panside - Sound Of The Ghost

- Chris-panjumbie-topher.