History
Norman and Ralston Grant founded the Twinkle Brothers in Falmouth on Jamaica's north coast in 1962, the year the island declared independence from Britain. Their working life has tracked the wider arc of Jamaican music in the world: the festival circuit of the early independence years, the roots reggae movement of the 1970s, British sound system culture in the 1980s, and a long career in continental Europe that took the group as far as the Polish Tatra mountains. The Twinkle label, which Norman established in Jamaica in 1971 and reactivated from London in the mid-1980s, has released more than sixty of their albums.
To be independent in music means you don't have a company to tell you what to sing - you're singing from your heart.
Norman Grant
The Early Years
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 conditions Norman has described as poor but happy: two families sharing a kitchen, ten shillings a month in rent, the sea on one side and the countryside on the other, and a community where music ran through everything. Both were baptised in the Anglican Diocese and joined the Sunday school choir, Ralston at eight, Norman at six.
Church choir was their first formal training, but the education was wider. Pocomania drumming carried through the neighbourhood. The Junkanoo processions at Christmas filled the streets with noise and spectacle. At home a grandfather played fiddle and their father 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 built their own. Sardine tins became guitar bodies strung with fishing line; milk cans, old frying pans, and whatever else was at hand became a drum kit. Norman gravitated to drums, Ralston to the makeshift guitar. When the obvious materials ran out, 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 name came from a Rastaman one evening in the district of Uggingstown, where the brothers were rehearsing. He listened, looked at them, and told them to call themselves the Twinkle Brothers. It stuck.
Independence & the Festivals
When Jamaica cut its ties with the British Crown in 1962, 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 has said. "We said, okay, we're on our own now. We can do our own thing."
The Jamaican government launched the Pop and Mento Festival the same year, a national competition running 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 proper door. They won at parish level on first entry, and at the regional final in Montego Bay the following year the judges' decision went against them while the crowd booed; the same outcome followed 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, one for Norman as solo performer. Toots and the Maytals were competing in the professional category at around the same period, four or five times, as Norman has remembered it, the whole generation passing through the same circuit. For acts coming up without industry connections, the festival was the one mechanism that did not require you to know anyone to be heard. Norman called it an industry nursery.
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
By the mid-1960s the Grant brothers were working two circuits at once: the hotel trade and the Kingston studio system.
The hotel work came through the Cardinals, a Falmouth band of professionals (lawyers, accountants, teachers) who took Norman and Ralston on as, in Norman's later phrase, "the only ghetto youth in the band". They played hotels all over the island six nights a week while attending school in the daytime, covering calypso and soul, Beatles ballads, James Brown, Smokey Robinson, the Impressions, the Temptations. "Knowing all those melodies helps you create your own style," Norman has said, "and helps you not to clash with music that's already made." After the Cardinals they passed through Schubert and the Miracles and eventually spent around eight years in the Celestial band, based in Montego Bay, earning about £20 a week and recording two albums aimed at the tourist trade; those records still command large sums on the collectors' market. Along the way they cut a reggae version of "Little Green Apples" long before Dennis Brown took the song on.
Kingston was harder. Ralston had spent time at Cobbler Camp, a correctional facility, where he encountered Aston "Family Man" Barrett, the future Wailers bassist and one of the most recorded musicians in reggae, singing in the choir. Norman stayed with relatives in August Town and Trenchtown, sleeping on floors, living on whatever was available. "Just eat dumpling and butter," as he later put it. They queued for auditions at every major label. At Prince Buster's studio they were turned away before they could set up: the Maytals were in the middle of a session, and when their time was up, it was up. "We never got to record," Ralston has remembered. Duke Reid gave them their first group single in 1966; the room had no headphones, and Norman had to turn his back to the piano to hear what he was playing over it. "He liked us," Ralston has recalled. "Said, 'you have a nice little Christian song.'" In those Kingston years they met Bob Marley, Desmond Dekker, Alton Ellis, and Jimmy Cliff, the whole generation passing through the same rooms.
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, recorded, mastered, and pressed inside two days, and were paid in records rather than cash. That session was the first the Soul Syndicate, Jamaica's foremost studio rhythm section, ever cut together. Lee recorded around fourteen songs with them across multiple sessions and taught them the business side: PRS, publishing, how studios operated, and who owned what. "He showed us that we could do it ourselves," Norman has acknowledged.
By 1974 they were booking sessions under their own steam, working with the drummer Sly Dunbar, the bassist Lloyd Parks, and the keyboardist Ansel Collins. That year they became the first act ever to rent Treasure Isle studio from Duke Reid, who had never let the room to another act before. The session produced "Jahovia" and "I Love You So", with Aston and Carlton Barrett on bass and drums.
Rasta & Roots
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 has remembered. "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, and Haile Selassie had visited Jamaica in 1966, by which time Norman was already making music. The faith, for him, was less a single conversion moment than a deepening conviction. "It was about self-reliance," he has said.
"Rasta Pon Top" came out on Carib Gems in the UK in 1975, the label having distributed 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 record was unambiguous in its intent, with tracks such as "Give Rasta Praise" and "Beat Them Jah Jah", the work of a band fourteen years out of Sunday school choir and the hotel lounge circuit, and now openly Rastafarian. "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 has put it another way: "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."
These songs are not going to tell you to take a gun and kill that man because he is wicked. We can tell you that you're wicked, with a smile.
Ralston Grant
America
In 1982 reggae was breaking in the United States in the wake of Bob Marley's death the previous year, and the Twinkle Brothers arrived in Los Angeles for their first American dates. At the Roxy on Sunset Strip, before the band had finished setting up, the reggae archivist Roger Steffens, who had been collecting and broadcasting Jamaican music for years, ran onto the stage; he knew exactly who had just walked in. John Belushi was in the crowd that night.
The audience surprised them. UCLA students and West Coast reggae faithful had been following the records from a distance for years. "When Twinkle Brothers came back," Norman has recalled, "they said: I never knew you were so great." Further dates followed at the Country Club and the Olympic Auditorium, venues whose PA bass response 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 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 had it figured out. "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 become a fixture on the West Coast circuit.
Booked for Reggae Sunsplash in August 1982, the Twinkle Brothers took the stage at Jarrett Park, Montego Bay, Sunsplash then at its height as 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 Norman performed in Jamaica; the footage remains.
England
Norman had been making regular trips to England since 1975. Records were already moving there through Carib Gems, and the British market was something he could feel from Jamaica: letters arriving, songs being pirated, word coming back. In 1976 he flew over with four songs. A DJ known as Sir Lee connected him to Virgin Records, then a young independent operating out of Portobello Road, and he played to a room of around ten people that included the label's co-founders Simon Draper and Richard Branson. "Love" came next, the first 10-inch reggae record released in England.
Virgin ran three deals with Norman in total, the third the best of them. 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 one 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 has noted. Virgin released "Praise Jah" and "Countrymen", gave the band five sessions across the decade, 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 and now reactivated in England. They toured with Inner Circle in 1980, and the first dedicated UK tour came in 1981.
After America and Sunsplash, Norman made England his permanent home. His friendship with Jah Shaka went back years by then. 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, his followers including members of Public Image Ltd and the Slits, his influence carrying forward into jungle, drum and bass, and dubstep. The 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 reggae. When the Polish radio journalist Władek Kliszcz came to London in 1986 looking for Jamaican artists, it was at the Culture Shop that he and Norman first met. Norman took up UK residency the same year.
Poland: An Unlikely Meeting of Cultures
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 set foot in the country until he was thirty-eight.
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 the car moved through the city. The studio was another matter: a 24-track facility for £1.20 an hour, against £24 or more in England. Norman made eight albums. He was paid in millions of złoty that could not 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."
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 alive.
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, a sixteen-year-old named Anna serving as translator. 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 first, then brought the violins in. They made four albums together. The Twinkle Brothers went to 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 followed the next year), and the feature "Girl Guide" came out in 1995. They returned in 2006 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."
If I never count millions again, I've counted millions in Poland.
Norman Grant
The Living Legacy
The Twinkle Brothers continue to perform and record under Norman Grant's leadership. The current lineup took four decades to assemble, and cuts a wide path through the history of UK reggae.
Norman and Ralston Grant have been at the centre since 1962. Norman has run the band from the UK since 1986, writing the 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 there, and his voice carries some of the most important tracks in the catalogue, including the lead vocal on "Jahovia". The bassist Dub Judah, on the band since 1990, is a UK dub producer and recording artist in his own right, and the same musician who made the journey to Zakopane and laid down the rhythmic foundation the Trebunie-Tutki violins were built on. The guitarist Black Steel, with the band since 1986, is a UK lovers rock and roots multi-instrumentalist whose extensive credits include work with Mad Professor and Jah Shaka. Jerry Lions, also on guitar since 1987, is a long-standing reggae producer and former member of the Fasimbas. Derek "Demondo" Fevrier, a veteran UK reggae producer, has been the band's engineer since 1986. The keyboardist Aron Shamash and the drummer Barry Prince complete the line-up, both having joined in 2004.
The band has not performed in Jamaica since Sunsplash in 1982, but its working life has covered the West Coast of the United States, Brazil, Chile, South Africa, and almost every major reggae festival in Europe, including 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. The catalogue runs to more than sixty albums. "The word is the power," Norman has said. Now in his seventies, he has been putting down roots in Jamaica again: he has built a house with a performance venue on the top floor, and runs a youth club there of the kind he used as a boy growing up in Trelawny. The group that began on sardine tin guitars in a small port town has gone to number one in Poland, played six continents, 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."
