British reggae group, formed 1979, Birmingham, England
Two pairs of brothers — Kelvin and Michael Grant, Frederick “Junior” and Patrick Waite — assembled by their fathers in 1979 while still at Duddeston Manor School in Birmingham. By the MCA signing Dennis Seaton had taken over lead vocals from Frederick Waite Jr., and it is Seaton’s name at the head of the 2012 case. Their MCA single went to No. 1 in the UK and No. 10 in the US, sold in the millions, and its Don Letts–directed video became the first by a black act to air on MTV. None of that is diminished by the chronology: it is a superb record made by children who were handed someone else’s song and a set of rewritten words, and the only error in the popular memory is the word “original”.