History

From Falmouth on Jamaica's north coast, Norman and Ralston Grant have been making music for more than six decades. Founded in 1962, the year Jamaica became an independent nation, the Twinkle Brothers grew from a pair of brothers singing in Sunday school choirs and beating rhythms on sardine tins into one of reggae's most uncompromising acts. They have toured the world, recorded over sixty albums, and still release records on the proudly independent Twinkle label.

Falmouth is a small port town, the parish capital of Trelawny, the same parish that would later produce Usain Bolt. Norman and Ralston grew up there: two families to a kitchen, ten shillings a month in rent, poor as Norman would later put it, but happy. They were close to the sea, close to the countryside, and in a community where music ran through everything. Both brothers were baptised in the Anglican Diocese and began singing in Sunday school choir from the ages of six and eight respectively.

Church choir was their first formal training, but the education was wider than that. Poccomania drumming happened in the neighbourhood. The John Canoe processions at Christmas filled the streets with noise and spectacle. At home there was a grandfather who played fiddle and a father who sang Jamaican folk songs on 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."

Without money to buy instruments, they made their own. Sardine tins became guitar bodies strung with fishing line; milk cans, old frying pans and whatever else was available turned into a drum kit. Norman gravitated to drums; Ralston to the makeshift guitar. When they ran out of obvious materials, they used what was there. A chimmy (the Jamaican word for a chamber pot) ended up in the percussion setup. "A lot of Jamaican bands, that's where they started," Norman has said. "Making their own equipment because we didn't have money, or anybody to give us any."

The Twinkle Brothers name came from a Rastaman one evening in the district of Uggingstown, while the brothers were rehearsing. He looked at them and said: "Call yourselves the Twinkle Brothers." It stuck.

Independence & the Festivals

In 1962 as Jamaica cut its ties with the British Crown and became an independent nation, Norman Grant was twelve years old, Ralston fourteen. "When we heard we were getting Independence, we're going to be our own nation, that creativeness bloomed in all of us," Norman recalled. "We said, okay, we're on our own now. We can do our own thing."

That same year, the Jamaican government launched the Pop and Mento Festival, a national music competition running from parish level through regional heats to a national final in Kingston. For two brothers from Falmouth with no studio connections and no money, it was a proper door. They entered at parish level and won. The following year they advanced to the regional final in Montego Bay, and they felt they were robbed. By their own account the decision went against them two years running while the crowd booed the judges. On the third attempt, in 1964, they won the regional heat, and went on to Kingston. They won that too, taking first place in the group category while Norman simultaneously won the solo category outright. Both in the same year.

By 1968, six years into competition, they walked away from the All Island Festival with two gold medals in a single night: one as the Twinkle Brothers, one for Norman as a solo performer. Toots and the Maytals were entering the festival in the professional category around the same period (four or five times, as Norman remembered it), the whole generation passing through the same circuit. For acts coming up without industry connections, the festival was the one mechanism that didn't require you to know anyone to get heard. Norman called it an industry nursery.

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That creativeness bloomed in all of us. We said, okay, we're on our own now. We can do our own thing.

Norman Grant

Kingston: Studios and the Hotel Circuit

Ralston Grant, standing outside before dawn in Falmouth in 1974, watched a full moon. In the shadow of a cloud passing across it, the face of Haile Selassie appeared, then shifted into the form of a child of about ten years old. "I was kind of scared to go back in the house," he remembered years later. "I came back out and looked up again. And I said, well, stick on the locks." He grew his dreadlocks that year. Norman's own path toward Rastafari had been building longer and more quietly. There had been Rastamen around Falmouth since he was fourteen. Haile Selassie had visited Jamaica in 1966, and Norman was already making music by then. The faith, for him, was less a single conversion moment and more a deepening conviction. "It was about self-reliance," he said.

"Rasta Pon Top" came out in 1975 on Carib Gems in the UK. Carib Gems had been distributing their music since around 1972. In the British reggae market of the time, five thousand copies was considered a solid result for an LP. The album was unambiguous in its intent: "Give Rasta Praise," "Beat Them Jah Jah," music built entirely on conscious conviction, fourteen years into a career that had started in Sunday school choir and hotel lounges. "We were going to the studio singing 'I'm hungry, fire for Babylon,'" Ralston has said. "Sad songs. But we're happy, dancing off for sadness. For some reason the world loved it." He put it another way too: "In the world there are classes of people. People all over can relate to reggae, at one time maybe some would say they're singing about us."

In 1982, reggae was breaking in the United States in the wake of Bob Marley's death the previous year. The Twinkle Brothers arrived in Los Angeles for their first American dates. At the Roxy on Sunset Strip, before anything was set up, reggae archivist Roger Steffens ran onto the stage. He had been collecting and broadcasting Jamaican music for years and knew exactly who had just walked in. John Belushi was in the crowd that night.

The audience that turned up surprised them. People had been following from a distance — UCLA students, West Coast reggae faithful. "When Twinkle Brothers came back," Norman has recalled, "they said: I never knew you were so great." They were booked for further dates: the Country Club, the Olympic Auditorium, venues where the bass response of the PA had become part of the legend of the night.

Among those watching and writing about it was a young cartoonist working as an arts and music critic for the LA Reader. Matt Groening — who would later create The Simpsons — was a regular attendee at Twinkle Brothers shows during this period and covered them in print more than once. His reviews captured the energy of what was happening: roots reggae landing in Los Angeles with a force that surprised people who thought they already understood it. "Fans who had only heard the records," he wrote, "were surprised by the group's intensity and wit." That dispatch was filed from a show the year after the Roxy debut — by which point, the Twinkle Brothers had already become a fixture.

Booked for Reggae Sunsplash in August 1982, the Twinkle Brothers took the stage at Jarrett Park, Montego Bay—Sunsplash at its height, the centre of world reggae. They had returned to Jamaica as an international act, recognised at home after years on the road as working musicians. It would be the last time they performed there—and the footage remains.

Since 1975, Norman had been making regular trips to England. Records were already moving there through Carib Gems, and there was a market he could feel from Jamaica — people writing letters, music getting pirated, word coming back. In 1976 he arrived with four songs. A DJ known as Sir Lee connected him to Virgin Records, then a young independent operating out of Portobello Road. He played to a room of around ten people, including Simon Draper and Richard Branson. "Love" came next, a 10-inch that became the first 10" reggae record released in England.

Virgin ran three deals with Norman in total, the third being the best. Their reggae operation, working through the Frontline imprint, brought the Twinkle Brothers to an audience that surprised some people but not Norman. The punk generation drawn to roots was the same generation buying Sex Pistols records, and Virgin put them on the same compilation albums. The Sex Pistols, the Twinkle Brothers, and the Gladiators all on one record. "Just like the skinheads loved ska, the punks loved roots," Norman noted. Virgin released "Praise Jah" and "Countrymen", gave the Twinkle Brothers five sessions across the decade, and then closed their reggae operation entirely. When the contract ran out, Norman put out music on his own Twinkle label — first established in Jamaica in 1971, now reactivated in England. In 1980 they toured with Inner Circle. The first dedicated UK tour came in 1981.

After America and Sunsplash, Norman made England his permanent home. His friendship with Jah Shaka by then went back years. Shaka, born Neville Powell in Clarendon Parish, Jamaica, ran the most significant sound system operation in British reggae history out of South East London. His dances had become a kind of institution. Followers included people from Public Image Ltd and the Slits, and his influence ran forward into jungle, drum and bass, and dubstep. NME journalist Vivien Goldman described a Shaka dance in 1981: "When the other sounds had done with their boasting and toasting, there would come a discreet hiss from the corner, and Shaka would mutter a title, and the walls seemed to be tumbling down around your ears." He ran the Culture Shop in New Cross, a community hub combining a record store, Caribbean food, and a Rastafari hair salon. The Twinkle Brothers were part of his regular selection; Norman a constant presence at his dances. The two collaborated in the early 1980s on "Revelation 18", a landmark of UK roots. When Polish radio journalist Władek Kliszcz came to London in 1986 seeking Jamaican artists, it was at Jah Shaka's shop that he and Norman first met. That same year, Norman took up residency in the UK.

Norman Grant was born in 1950. When he was ten or eleven, the cheapest shoes available in Jamaica, strong durable leather, were made in Poland. He would not visit the country until he was thirty-eight.

Władek Kliszcz worked for Polish state radio and came to London in 1986 on holiday, aware that Jamaican artists had been settling in England. He found Norman through Jah Shaka's network and delivered a simple message: the Twinkle Brothers were popular in Poland. Come. What Norman found when he arrived in 1988 was a country still under Communist rule, Solidarity live in the streets, soldiers at the airport, and young people cheering from the pavements as their car moved through the city. The studio was another matter entirely: a 24-track facility for £1.20 an hour, compared to £24 or more in England. Norman made eight albums. He was paid in millions of złoty, which couldn't be taken out of the country, so he bought leather coats, seventeen of them, at five złoty apiece, loaded three suitcases, and sold them in London for £75 to £85 each. "If I never count millions again," he said in 2023, "I've counted millions in Poland."

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An earlier visit had produced something else: an underground LP released in 1984 with the Solidarity logo on the cover, pressed outside official channels and circulated through the networks keeping the movement going.

Kliszcz also introduced Norman to Trebunie-Tutki, a family band from Zakopane in the Tatra Mountains who played traditional Polish highland music. Norman and Dub Judah travelled there and lived with the family for a week, eating together, sleeping there, rehearsing daily. A sixteen-year-old named Anna served as translator. At Spirit Studio in Zakopane, ganja growing in the garden outside, Norman told Judah exactly how they were going to approach it. "We have to create our OWN beat. Don't follow them." They laid bass and drum first, and brought the violins in after. They made four albums together. The Twinkle Brothers were number one on Polish radio, above Michael Jackson. The TVP documentary "Higher Heights" filmed them in Zakopane in 1992 (the album of the same name came out the following year); the feature "Girl Guide" followed in 1995. In 2006 they went back and picked up a Gold record.

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

The Twinkle Brothers continue to perform and record under Norman Grant's leadership. The lineup took four decades to assemble and cuts through a lot of UK reggae history.

Norman and Ralston Grant have been at the centre since 1962. Norman has run the band from the UK since 1986, writing original lyrics and leading the touring operation. Ralston, based mainly in Oakland, California, has continued to record on the Twinkle label from his own studio. His voice is on some of the most important tracks in the catalogue, including "Jahovia." On bass since 1990 is Dub Judah, a UK dub producer and recording artist in his own right, and the same musician who made the journey to Zakopane for the Polish sessions and helped lay down the rhythmic foundation the Trebunie-Tutki violins were built on. Black Steel has been on guitar since 1986, a UK lovers rock and roots multi-instrumentalist who has also worked extensively with Mad Professor and Jah Shaka. Jerry Lions, on guitar since 1987, long standing reggae producer and member of the Fasimbas. Derek "Demondo" Fevrier, the band's engineer since 1986 a veteran UK reggae producer. Completing the lineup: Aron Shamash on keyboards and Barry Prince on drums both from 2004 onwards.

They may not have performed in Jamaica since Reggae Sunsplash in 1982, but they have toured the world: the West Coast of the United States, Brazil, Chile, South Africa, and virtually every major reggae festival in Europe, including Sunsplash, the Essential Festival in Brighton, Reggae on the River, Reggae in the Park, the Helsinki Reggae Festival, Holland's Reggae Eruption, and regular dates across Germany, Poland, Spain, and France, where the band has built a particularly loyal following over many years. Their catalogue runs to over sixty albums. "The word is the power," he has said. Norman, now in his seventies, has been putting down roots there again. He has built a house in Jamaica with a performance venue on the top floor and is already running a youth club of the kind he used growing up in Trelawny. The band that started on sardine tin guitars in a small port town has recorded over sixty albums, toured six continents, gone number one in Poland, and collaborated with mountain musicians in the Tatra highlands. Norman makes music every day. Asked about returning to perform in Jamaica, he has said: "It's getting to the time now."