Slaves were forbidden from speaking to each other, so conversed in song instead. Calypso is thought to have been based on a west African folk music called “kaiso”, named after a shout of encouragement in the Hausa language (something like “bravo!”).

The first songs were sung in patois (the French-Creole dialect). Singing is traditionally led by a lead singer, the “griot” (known these days as the calypsonian).

With the ending of slavery in 1834, calypso became a fully-fledged artistic form, with singing competitions taking place at carnival time. Performers traditionally rehearse in large tents, which in recent years have become performance areas and showcases for new talent.

Calypso started becoming popular outside its native culture when the first vocal recording was made in 1914 of Jules Sims and the Duke of Iron.

Among the style’s first generation of recording stars were Lord Invader, Lord Beginner, Mighty Sparrow, Roaring Lion and Attila the Hun. The most prominent female artist has been Calypso Rose, known respectfully as the Queen of Calypso, whose career began in the 1960s.

Lord Kitchener

Lord Kitchener (“Kitch”), born Aldwyn Roberts, came to prominence in the 1940s, and pretty much dominated the scene until the 1970s, although he was still recording virtually up until his death in 2000 at the age of 77.

Kitch came to Britain on the Windrush in 1948, aged 26, and made his home here. On disembarkation at Tilbury, he treated waiting reporters to a performance of London Is The Place For Me, which became an early hit for him. Despite the title of the song, he actually settled in Manchester before returning to Trinidad in 1962.

Calypso entered the musical mainstream in 1944, when the Andrews Sisters covered a Lord Invader hit, Rum And Coca Cola. American artist Harry Belafonte’s popular 1956 album Calypso was the first LP in history to sell over a million copies. True aficionados are quick to point out that only two tracks on the album are authentic calypso songs.

The lyrics of calypso are a heady mix of social satire, political commentary and sexual innuendo. There is always an element of subversive mischief in them, harking back to the days when singers on the plantations used the medium to make scornful comments about their “masters”.

The satirical possibilities of the form appealed to the white English comedian, Lance Percival, who developed his own calypso act in the late 1950s. Percival went on to star in the late night satirical television show, That Was the Week that Was (1962-3), where he performed topical calypsos, also improvising them on subjects suggested by the audience.

Calypso has spawned many modern variants:

● Soca is a more up-tempo version that arose in the 1970s with the work of Lord Shorty, its name originally meaning “SOul of CAlypso”.

● Rapso combines calypso lyrics with slower rhythms familiar to rap and hip-hop.

● Ringbang originated in Barbados in 1994. It gets its name from the ban on drums the British imposed on their colonial subjects in Trinidad, which led to any metal objects – including sections of railway track – being used as percussion instruments. The term “Ringbang” itself was coined by Barbados-based pop star Eddy Grant as a term for the proud self-sufficiency of Caribbean culture.

● Chutney is an exotic fusion of soca and Indian influences, deriving from the east Indian migrant presence in Trinidad. It features Indian instruments such as sitar and tabla, as well as vocals often sung in the Hindi language.