How it all began...
It all happened in the year 2000, when a group of ambitious players originating from various Bernese steelbands joined the swiss formation Panch2000 to rehearse for the first European Steelband Festival in Paris.
Week after week they travelled the long way (in Swiss terms) to winterthur and relentlessly practiced their runs together in section practices, something not commonly done in Swiss bands.
The effort paid off - in Paris Panch came in fourth (Calypso) and first (classical piece) and qualified for the World Steelband Festival in Trinidad&Tobago, where Panch won the preliminaries and finally came in sixth – a success in which Claudio Pini's Calypso arrangement and Yaira Yonne's participation as the conductor of the classical piece played a significant role.
Something like this ties people together - the joy of working on music intensely, sitting on the hard benches of the minibus for hours on end, drinking ginger shandy and eating bake n'shark under the Caribbean almond trees, the collective tension before the performance at the competitions... no wonder did many members have trouble to reintegrate into their original bands after it was all over.
It was already evident on the plane back to Switzerland, then, that Panch2000" was going to have a local continuation in Bern, on the same high musical level. Under the musical direction of Claudio Pini and the initiative of the two Panch players Alain Hofer and Tina Büchler, the two Bernese bands "Zebra" and "Les Amies de la Casserola" merged, took on board some other Bernese (and a Zurichois) Panch players and formed the new band, ferrum helveticum, in December 2000.