Gibraltar’s first steel band made its debut in April under the direction of City PhD student Rachel Hayward. Royal Gibraltar Regimental Band Leader, Craig Philbin, aims to nurture community music-making on the Rock. Inspired by the bands he heard in Jamaica, he contacted Rachel to help initiate the project.

Rachel introduced members of the Regimental Band to traditional Trinidadian Carnival songs, ran workshops with local school children, and trained up two youth groups who then performed and won both their classes in the Rock’s Youth Music Festival. The cadets’ pipe and drum corp so wowed the adjudicator with their performance of Toots and the Maytals’ ska classic ‘Monkey Man’ that they were invited to open the gala concert the following week. Craig is now looking to treble the size of the project and fly Rachel back as soon as possible to further the cause of pan on the Rock.