History

Norman and Ralston Grant formed the Twinkle Brothers in Falmouth, on Jamaica's north coast, in 1962. Norman was twelve and Ralston fourteen. Jamaica became independent that August. The brothers had been singing together for years by then, first in the Anglican Sunday school choir and then in the talent competitions that were, for young performers outside Kingston, the most reliable way of being heard at all.

They are still at it. Norman runs the band from London, and most of the catalogue, now past sixty albums, has come out on the Twinkle label he set up in Jamaica in 1971. There were spells with other companies along the way, Grounation in the mid-1970s and Virgin's Front Line at the end of that decade, but the arrangement he kept returning to was the one where nobody else had a say.

Falmouth is a small port town, the parish capital of Trelawny, the same parish that later produced Usain Bolt. The Grant brothers grew up there in what Norman describes as poor but happy: two families sharing one kitchen, ten shillings a month in rent, the sea on one side and the country on the other. They were baptised in the Anglican Diocese and put into the Sunday school choir, Ralston at eight and Norman at six.

There was a Pocomania church close by holding service every day, so there was drumming most mornings, and on the corner, as Norman remembers it, somebody was always playing. A man in the neighbourhood organised the children into concerts and taught them to put their lines together, which is where Norman started writing. The Junkanoo processions came through at Christmas. At home their grandfather played fiddle and their father sang Jamaican folk songs during weekend beach trips. "We learn from their voice," Norman has said. "They sing, and lots of other people sing, your neighbour sings, so you just catch bits."

They had no money for instruments, so they made them. Norman went through the rubbish for cans and pans, knocking them to hear which sizes gave which sound; milk cans and old frying pans became a drum kit. The guitar came from a sardine tin strung with line salvaged from broken fishing tackle. "You put the string on and you get a sound," he says. "So that's where it started." Ralston took the guitar, Norman the drums. A chimmy, the Jamaican word for a chamber pot, ended up in the percussion. "A lot of Jamaican bands, that's where they started," he says. "Making their own equipment, because we didn't have money, or anybody to give us any."

The name came from a Rastaman the brothers knew as Some-me-say, who heard them rehearsing one evening in Falmouth and told them to call themselves the Twinkle Brothers. It stuck.

"When we heard we were getting Independence, we're going to be our own nation," Norman said. The practical form that took, for two boys in Trelawny, was the Jamaica Pop and Mento Festival, which the government launched the same year.

The competition ran from parish level through regional heats to a final in Kingston. For two brothers from Falmouth with no studio connections and no money, it was a way in that did not depend on knowing anybody. They won at parish level on their first entry, then went through to the heats against St James, St Elizabeth, Hanover and Westmoreland. At the regional final in Montego Bay the judges' decision went against them while the crowd booed, and the same thing happened in 1963.

On the third attempt, in 1964, they took the regional heat and went on to Kingston, where they won the group category in the same year that Norman took the solo category outright.

By 1968, six years into competition, they left the All Island Festival with two gold medals on the same night, one as the Twinkle Brothers and one for Norman as a solo performer.

The festival was not only for amateurs. Toots and the Maytals entered the professional side four or five times, as Norman remembers it. He thought at the time that it might be the start of something larger, that a singer popular in Jamaica could send the music abroad and be popular there too. "We say, well, we could start an industry," he said. "But it didn't turn out the way we think."

By the mid-1960s the brothers were working two circuits at once. The hotels on the north coast paid. Kingston, where the records were made, did not.

The hotel work came through the Cardinals, a respectable Falmouth band made up of lawyers, accountants and teachers. Norman and Ralston were, as Norman puts it, "the only ghetto youth in the band". They played the hotel runs at Montego Bay, Lucea, Negril and Ocho Rios, six nights a week, and went to school in the daytime.

The repertoire was whatever the rooms wanted: calypso and soul, Beatles ballads, James Brown, Smokey Robinson, the Impressions, the Temptations. Norman took it as an apprenticeship. "Knowing all those melodies helps you create your own style," he says, "and helps you not to clash with music that's already made."

The Cardinals broke up and some of the same musicians formed Schubert and the Miracles. From there the brothers moved to the Celestial band in Montego Bay, where Norman was paid properly for the first time, around £20 a week, good money then. He stayed about eight years, entering the festival in the same period. The band cut two albums for the tourist trade, sold in the hotels. On one of them Norman recorded "Little Green Apples" as reggae, before Dennis Brown's version. In 2023 he came across a copy that had sold for £150, bought out of America.

Kingston was harder to break into. Ralston had spent time at Cobbler Camp, a technical college where students could train as electricians and in other trades, and it was there he met Aston "Family Man" Barrett, the future Wailers bassist, singing in the choir. Norman stayed with an aunt and other relatives in August Town and Trenchtown, sleeping on floors and living on whatever was going. "Just eat dumpling and butter," as he later put it.

They queued for auditions at every label that would see them. At Prince Buster's studio they were picked to record, then the Maytals ran over their session and that was the end of it. "We never got to record," Ralston recalls. The same thing happened at Studio One. Duke Reid gave them their first group single in 1966, "Matthew, Mark, Luke And John"; he liked it, and told them they had a nice little Christian song.

There were no headphones. The band laid the track live, the backing coming off a box in the corner of the room, and the singers stood in with it. Norman sings hard, and in a room like that a strong voice carried into the piano and guitar-amp mics. He learned to turn away from the piano while he sang. "There was kind of technique that you have to start to use," he says. Duke Reid rarely set foot in the studio himself, but he did that day, Ernest Ranglin remarking that he must have liked the tune to have come in for it. They were paid in six copies of the record rather than cash. In those Kingston years they met Bob Marley, Desmond Dekker, Alton Ellis and Jimmy Cliff.

In 1970 they placed third in the Jamaica Festival Song Contest, and the six finalists were told to present themselves to the producer Bunny Lee the following morning. They went to Randy's Studio at 17 North Parade and had the song recorded, mastered and pressed inside two days, with Family Man and his brother Carlton on the session. Those were the first sessions the Soul Syndicate ever played together. Lee cut around fourteen songs with them and taught them the part nobody explains: PRS, publishing, how a studio is booked and who ends up owning what.

Norman went further and asked Family Man and Carlton directly what they charged for a session. The hotel work meant he could pay it.

By 1974 they were booking sessions under their own steam, with Sly Dunbar on drums, Lloyd Parks on bass and Ansell Collins on keyboards. That year they became the first act ever to rent Treasure Isle outright from Duke Reid, who had never let the room to anyone else. They had recorded there before, but for Duke Reid's own sessions, including "I Love You So" in 1971. "Jahovia" followed in 1978, cut in the same room with the Barrett brothers on drum and bass.

Ralston was outside before dawn in Falmouth in 1974, looking at a full moon. In the shadow of a cloud crossing it, Haile Selassie appeared, and then the face turned into a child of about ten. "I was kind of scared to go back in the house," he recalls. "I come back out and I look up again. And I said, well, stick on the locks." He grew his locks that year. Norman's path had been longer and quieter. There had been Rastamen around Falmouth since he was fourteen, and Selassie had visited Jamaica in 1966, by which time Norman was already recording. For him it was less a single moment than a conviction settling. "It was about self-reliance."

"Rasta Pon Top" came out on the independent UK label Grounation in 1975. Five thousand copies was a good sale for a reggae LP in Britain then. The tracks were not coded: "Give Rasta Praise", "Beat Them Jah Jah". The band that had come up through the Sunday school choir and the hotel lounges was now openly Rastafarian. "We were going to the studio singing 'I'm hungry, fire for Babylon,'" Ralston said. "Sad songs, but we're happy, dancing off the sadness. For some reason the world loved it!"

The Twinkle Brothers played their first American show at the Roxy on Sunset Strip on 2 November 1980. Norman had come over singing with Inner Circle, who carried on touring the States after Jacob Miller was killed that March. At the Roxy the band were still setting up when Roger Steffens, who had been collecting and broadcasting Jamaican music for years, came out onto the stage. John Belushi was in the room that night.

They were back in 1982, with reggae opening up in America after Bob Marley's death the year before. UCLA students and West Coast collectors had been following the records from a distance. "When Twinkle Brothers came back," Norman recalled, "they said I never knew you were so great live." Across the American visits they also played the Country Club and the Olympic Auditorium.

Matt Groening had a weekly music column in the LA Reader from 1982, some years before The Simpsons. He became a regular at Twinkle Brothers shows and reviewed them more than once. What struck him was the gap between the records and the band on stage. "Fans who had only heard the records," he wrote, "were surprised by the group's intensity and wit."

Norman did not take to the country. "America is too big," he said. "Reggae is not popular in every state. You maybe have to pass one, two state to go to the state that reggae is popular, and the travelling for me is too long." In England the music had arrived before he did. In America you had to play to make your name.

In August 1982 they played Reggae Sunsplash at Jarrett Park in Montego Bay, Sunsplash then at its height. After years of building an audience abroad they came home as an international touring act. The show was filmed and the audio released on LP. It remains the last time the Twinkle Brothers have performed in Jamaica.

Norman had been making regular trips to England since 1975. From 1976 the label Carib Gems was distributing his music there, releasing "Do Your Own Thing" the following year. Then letters began arriving to say his songs were being pirated. In 1978 he flew over with four songs. A reggae A&R man known as Wenty put him in front of Virgin, then a young independent operating out of Portobello Road, and he played the tracks to a room of about ten people that included the label's co-founders Simon Draper and Richard Branson. Virgin released "Love", the first 10-inch reggae record issued in England.

Virgin was the third English deal Norman signed and the best of them. "They put us in a market where maybe we couldn't put ourselves," he says. The contract ran five years for three LPs, through the Front Line imprint. The punk audience had taken to roots the way the skinheads had taken to ska, and Virgin put them on the same compilations: the Sex Pistols, the Twinkle Brothers and the Gladiators on one record. Front Line released "Praise Jah" and "Countrymen" and gave the band five sessions across the decade, then cancelled early and shut the reggae operation down.

Norman has not approached a record company since. He put the music out on Twinkle, the label he had set up in Jamaica in 1971 and now ran from England; the first UK release was "Me No You - You No Me" in 1981. The first dedicated UK tour came the same year.

After America and Sunsplash, Norman made England his home. His friendship with Jah Shaka went back years by then. Shaka, born Neville Powell in Clarendon, ran his sound out of South East London, and his dances had become an institution; the sound's influence carried on into jungle, drum and bass and dubstep. He also kept the Culture Shop in New Cross, part record shop, part Caribbean food counter, part Rastafari hair salon. The Twinkle Brothers were a fixture of his selection, Norman a constant presence at the dances, and Shaka would come looking for him whenever he wanted new dubplates.

They cut "Revelation 18" together in the early 1980s. Shaka played the bass on it. He had picked the instrument up while the band's own bassist was in the toilet, and that was the take.

Norman took up UK residency in 1986.

When Norman was ten or eleven, the cheapest shoes in Jamaica, strong durable leather, came from Poland. He would not set foot in the country until he was thirty-eight.

Władek Kliszcz worked for Polish state radio and came to London in 1986 on holiday, knowing that Jamaican artists had been settling in England. He tracked Norman down and interviewed him at Jah Shaka's Culture Shop, with a simple message: the Twinkle Brothers were popular in Poland and Norman should come and see for himself. Norman's objection was money. Kliszcz told him he would be paid.

He arrived in 1988, to a country still under Communist rule, Solidarity alive in the streets, soldiers at the airport, and young people cheering from the pavements as the car moved through the city. The studio was the surprise: a 24-track room for £1.20 an hour, when England was charging at least £24. Norman made eight albums there. He was paid in millions of złoty that could not leave the country, so he spent it, on a trombone, a trumpet, about fifteen leather coats that cost him around £5 each and sold in London for £85, leather skirts that went to Jamaica. He carried it home in three suitcases. "If I never count millions again," he said in 2023, "I've counted millions in Poland."

The Solidarity connection went back further than his first visit. The band had been following what was happening in Poland on the news, and in 1984 an underground LP came out there with the Solidarity logo on the cover, pressed outside official channels and circulated through the networks keeping the movement alive. Later he played shows for Solidarity himself.

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Kliszcz also introduced Norman to Trebunie-Tutki, a family band from Zakopane in the Tatra Mountains who played traditional Polish highland music. Norman and the bassist Dub Judah travelled there and lived with the family for a week, eating, sleeping and rehearsing in the house, with Anna, the sixteen-year-old daughter of the group's leader Władysław Trebunia-Tutka, translating. At Spirit Studio in Zakopane, ganja growing in the garden outside, Norman told Judah how they were going to approach the recording: "We have to create our own beat. Don't follow them." They laid bass and drum down first and brought the violins in on top.

They made four albums together. The Twinkle Brothers went to number one on Polish radio, above Michael Jackson. A TVP documentary, Higher Heights, filmed them in Zakopane in 1992, and the album followed in 1993. The band appeared in a Polish film, "Girl Guide", in 1995. "Songs Of Glory · Pieśni Chwały" came out in 2008 and went gold.

The money Norman accumulated in Poland funded the purchase of his London recording studio in 1995. "Even that," he said, "is another memory for Poland."

The Twinkle Brothers still perform and record, with Norman leading. The line-up around him has taken four decades to assemble.

Norman has run the band from the UK since 1986, writing the lyrics and leading the touring operation. Ralston, based in Oakland, has gone on recording for the Twinkle label from his own studio there, and his voice carries some of the catalogue's best-known tracks, including the lead vocal on "Jahovia". The bassist Dub Judah, in the band since 1990, is a UK dub producer and recording artist in his own right, and the same musician who went to Zakopane and laid the foundation the Trebunie-Tutki violins were built on. The guitarist Black Steel, there since 1986, is a UK lovers rock and roots multi-instrumentalist whose credits include Mad Professor and Jah Shaka. Jerry Lions, also on guitar, joined in 1987 and is a long-standing reggae producer and former member of the Fasimbas. Derek "Demondo" Fevrier has engineered for the band since 1986. The keyboard player Aron Shamash and the drummer Barry Prince both joined in 2004.

The band has not played Jamaica since Sunsplash in 1982. Since then the work has taken them across the West Coast of the United States, Brazil, Chile and South Africa, and through most of the major European festivals: Rototom Sunsplash, City Splash in London, Outlook, Shambala, Bestival, the Helsinki Reggae Festival, Reggae Eruption in Holland and the Ostróda Reggae Festival, with regular dates in Germany, Poland, Spain and France, where the following has been steadiest. In the United States they have played Reggae on the River and Reggae in the Park.

Norman, now in his seventies, has been putting down roots in Jamaica again. He has built a house with a performance space on the top floor and runs a youth club there of the kind he used as a boy in Trelawny. He makes music every day. Asked about playing in Jamaica again, he says: "It's getting to the time now."