Knollis Watson, one of the founding members of Jamaica’s beloved mento group Stanley and the Turbines, has died, with his son, reggae singer Real VI, confirming the news.
Watson passed away on September 12 after being hospitalised at the Kingston Public Hospital, where he had suffered a stroke on top of several existing illnesses.
Real VI, speaking openly about his father’s final days, said Watson had been ailing for some time before things took a sharp turn. “He was ailing for some time with multiple illnesses. When I took him there last, he had a stroke and his blood pressure was really high,” the singer said.
Stanley and the Turbines came together in the 1970s under the direction of lead singer Stanley Beckford, and Watson was part of the core that made the group work.
The band put out a string of mento hits including Brown Gal, Come Sing With Me, and Soldering, carving out a real place in Jamaican musical history.
Beckford himself died in 2007 from complications of throat cancer, and Watson’s passing now leaves a generation of that original lineup gone.
The group’s contribution to mento, a genre that predates ska and rocksteady and often gets overshadowed by them, is something fans of Jamaican roots music have long held close.
For Real VI, the loss is deeply personal, and he made clear that his father was more than just a musical connection. My father helped to spark the love of music in me and you can hear that in my sounds.
He was an amazing father and he did what he needed to do. He never abandoned us and helped us to pass the worst,” Real VI said.
That loyalty was tested in one of the most brutal ways possible. In 2003, Real VI was shot in the back by gunmen in his Seaview Gardens community, an attack that damaged his spinal cord and left him paralysed from the waist down. Watson, by his son’s account, never left his side through the hospitalisation that followed.
Real VI recalled watching the toll it took on his father in real time, and it clearly still sits heavy with him. “When I got shot and was hospitalised, my dad was there right through and I watched mi father get grey in space of a week. I never like to know that a me make him hair grey in space of no time,” he said, speaking between tears.
That image, a father going grey almost overnight out of fear for his child, is the kind of detail that says everything about who Watson was to his family. Real VI said it always bothered him, even though he never brought it up directly with his father.
A date for Watson’s thanksgiving service has not yet been announced, with the family expected to confirm details in the coming days.
