He inspired Bob Marley’s political awakening, survived a coma, and has sung about everything from sex workers to Khrushchev. And at 83, the calypso great still wants to turn the news into song

‘Can you put on the TV news?” asks Slinger Francisco, AKA Mighty Sparrow. While the photographer sets up in my living room in Queens, New York City, the 83-year-old calypso originator scrutinises the screen, where the US midterm elections offer gold to this instinctive satirist.

Watching Sparrow watch the news, eyes narrowed in concentration, is a reminder of the decades of conflict he has processed into poetry – from the impact of US naval withdrawal on Trinidad sex workers, on the infectious 1956 song Jean and Dinah, to the space age and cold war on 1963’s Kennedy and Khrushchev. More recently, he has hymned a pre-presidential Barack Obama, and railed against Russian oligarchs on Neurosis of the Rich. “If you have time to look at the news,” Sparrow observes, “you see where most of those songs’ inspiration comes from. There’s no question about it.” The concept of fake news is anathema to him. “Certain people are telling the audience: ‘Don’t believe what you see, don’t believe what you hear or what you read.’ But I do believe.”

Rather like today’s verbal argy-bargies between rappers such as Drake and Pusha T, early 20th-century calypsonians also elevated barbed banter into a showbiz art called picong, and locals would gleefully look forward to calypsonians’ response to every scandal and row. The rivalry between Sparrow, Lord Kitchener and Lord Melody, for example, gripped the calypso fans known as Bad Johns and Saga Girls, edgy dressers who danced the reel and quadrille in the carnival tents and were Sparrow’s constituents. “We used to put on a show!” he chuckles.

According to the Trinidadian writer and broadcaster Isaac Fergusson, “Even politicians were afraid of Sparrow and what he would reveal about them in a song. Until he came along, most calypsonians were semi-professional. People paid them with rum and food – a treat, rather than a salary. They survived on the gratitude of the people. Sparrow changed all that. He wore a suit like a businessman and insisted on being paid. He could be demanding, but musicians loved to play with him, because he treated them the best.”

Despite conflicts with the establishment behind Trinidad’s fabled carnival (1957’s Carnival Boycott documented his strike for fairer pay for male calypsonians), Sparrow is nevertheless an eight-time winner of each of the carnival’s Road March and Calypso Monarch awards, and is often dubbed Calypso King of the World.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘We always wanted to belong to the English side of things, that’s all we knew’ … Mighty Sparrow. Photograph: Max Burkhalter/The Guardian

The lyrical sting of calypso and the instrument associated with it, the steel pan, may be pop’s most embedded form of resistance. Starting in 1740, the legal banning of the African-style drum (made of wood and animal skin) under slavery and colonialism encouraged the invention of the steel pan. Hammering industrial metal into tempered scales, steel pans were made out of oil drums from the island’s chief export; this was music made by any means necessary, to defy those who benefited most from the island’s resources. Calypso’s lyrics, too, became a forum for thrashing out the issues of the day, reporting on anything from industrial disputes to sexual peccadilloes.

Colonial-era education and studies of the English poets remain foundational for Sparrow. “We always wanted to belong to the English side of things, because that’s all we knew,” he says. “As we grew up, America became a second part of us. But going to England felt like going home.” Throughout our conversation, Sparrow sings to make a point. “Remember this?” he asks, before breaking into Rule Britannia: “Britons never, never, never shall be slaves.”

When his mother Clarisse brought the 18-month-old Slinger and his elder brother on a small boat from their native Grenada to Trinidad, they were moving from one UK colony to another. Though both islands like to claim him, his ancestors were involuntary immigrants. Sparrow’s gripping track The Slave, from the 1964 album True Life Stories of People, Passion and Politics, set a template for how Caribbean music could interpret its bloody history. Fergusson recalls his friend Bob Marley confiding: “When I heard the Mighty Sparrow sing The Slave, I knew what I wanted to do with my music.” Over a propulsive afro-cuban jazz rhythm, Sparrow’s pointed enunciation and swelling attack on the chorus build a narrative that presages Marley’s Redemption Song. “I got to make a brilliant escape / But every time I think about the whip and dem dogs / My body starts to shake.” As Sparrow soars into the line, “Lord, I wanna be free”, the track stops so abruptly that it feels as if the listener is leaping from a cliff into the ocean to escape the slave-catcher’s dogs at their heels.

Sparrow’s life since has reinforced these creative imaginings. Few people have survived a coma to perform again; in 2013, he hovered between worlds for two weeks. Even fewer have teased those writing them off, as evidenced by 1970’s Sparrow Dead. And not many descendants of stolen Africans have managed to make the return journey, but Sparrow did. Inspired by a visit to Nigeria in the 1970s, he has recorded in Yoruba, as well as Creole French, Spanish and Dutch. Despite the military regime, Sparrow found Lagos a paradise. “I never thought I’d reach there – it was like the garden of Eden. They basically did everything like we do in Trinidad.” Sparrow met the firebrand Afrobeat creator, Fela Kuti, and was honoured with a title, Chief Omo Wale of Ikoyi.

But he had already toured Africa in song, taking a fantasy trip on one of his most beloved numbers, 1964’s hilarious Congo Man. Opening with a lusty chuckle, it finds Sparrow revealing his envy of a cannibal who has enjoyed eating two white American girls, one cooked and one raw. Despite the song’s popularity, it was banned from local radio till 1989. In my lounge, Sparrow sings the familiar verses and even enacts a typical audience reaction: “I never eat white meat yet, except” – a beat, eyes twinkling – “all right, just one time in Canada!” Cue the audience, corpsing. Well-versed in calypsonian double entendres, they understood that he was skewering not so much racism or cannibalism, but another taboo: oral sex.

The reason for today’s interview, however, is more serious. Sparrow has been called to England to perform at the London jazz festival’s Windrush celebration, curated by Anglo-Trinidadian poet and teacher Anthony Joseph, and featuring Calypso Rose, Cleveland Watkiss, Gaika and others. It is a strategic reminder, after the recent scandal in which some of those Caribbean immigrants were redefined as illegal by the Home Office, of the defining contribution that Afro-Caribbean artists have been making to British culture ever since Sparrow’s frenemy Lord Kitchener walked off the Windrush in 1948 and sang “London is the place for me” into a Pathé News microphone – a catchy line that heralded the arrival of multicultural Britain.

Contemplating Brexit, Sparrow mutters: “I wonder why that happened?” He has confronted such divisions and dashed dreams of solidarity before, in 1959’s Federation, his comment on the crash of the post-colonial ideal of a united Caribbean. “We were trying to benefit [from independence] and we wanted to get all these islands together, create a federation where we could bargain better and benefit by all being together,” he says. “But once individual prime ministers in the Caribbean had tasted power, nobody wanted to give it up. Suddenly, before you could really get together, it’s all broken up. What do you do? It was terrible.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mighty Sparrow gets crowned Calypso Monarch. Photograph: Echoes/Redferns

“In a way, it was similar to the scandal around the Windrush,” he continues. “Suddenly you are told you are a non-person, not to be treated with any respect. They say they don’t want you.”

Sparrow has succeeded in translating his witty island authenticity to the world, in a one-man demonstration of the role that culture plays in uniting humankind. Having seen and heard so much and compressed it into so many searing songs, as he anticipates performing to symbolise the beleaguered, resistant Windrush generation, how does Sparrow think we should approach the future?

“What would I like to see? People get together and get involved with fixing things instead of just having everything severed,” he replies. “We have to just hope that the younger ones step in and get involved as early as they can, to make things better. You know, singularity is not a thing that we want too much. We don’t want to be singular, as time goes on. We want to be together.”

Mighty Sparrow performs in Windrush: A Celebration, at the Barbican, London, tomorrow, as part of the EFG London Jazz festival