Gyasi Mer­rique

Se­nior Re­porter

gyasi.mer­rique@guardian.co.tt

‘Lucky for you my friend!

Ah in a good, good spir­it,

Ah drink­ing a good, good spir­its,

De vibes right up to de lim­it

So doh hold me down,

doh fight me down’

The open­ing lines of the 2025 run­away hit Good Spir­its on the Big Links Rid­dim by broth­ers Kevon and Ko­ry Hart, bet­ter known as Full Blown En­ter­tain­ment.

The renowned writ­ers and pro­duc­ers cre­at­ed the Big Links Rid­dim. In ad­di­tion to Good Spir­its, they are re­spon­si­ble for 2025 Car­ni­val hits Great­est Bend Over by Yung Bred­da, The Truth by Machel Mon­tano, and No Sweet­ness by Kes.

But what has them in par­tic­u­lar ‘good spir­its’ these days is that the broth­ers have now delved in­to the world of stage per­for­mance for Car­ni­val 2025 and be­yond. How­ev­er, even with an un­de­ni­able so­ca an­them on their hands, this new act is quick­ly learn­ing that life on stage is quite dif­fer­ent from life in the stu­dio.

“Tech­ni­cal dif­fi­cul­ties are the worst part for me,” de­clared Kevon with a wry smile dur­ing a re­cent in­ter­view af­ter a band re­hearsal with Er­phaan Alves’ The An­chors. “We’re still learn­ing how to deal with cer­tain things. Sea­soned per­form­ers have seen it all, but (for us) it’s a lot of things hap­pen­ing with­in a few short per­for­mances, so it could be a lit­tle over­whelm­ing. But we not dunce, so we’ll fig­ure it out.”

This au­thor could not de­ci­pher whether the al­most syn­chro­nised chuck­le the two let out was a re­sult of a life­time of bond­ing be­tween 42-year-old Kevon and his younger broth­er, 38, or a more re­cent­ly de­vel­oped trait of so­ca’s newest sib­ling duo.

Rough­ly a month af­ter the re­lease of their mega-hit, Full Blown has quick­ly tran­si­tioned from be­ing known as dom­i­nant song­writ­ing and pro­duc­tion pow­er­hous­es to tak­ing cen­tre stage in the bright lights of the fete sea­son.

It is a far cry from where they start­ed in 2011, when an al­ready es­tab­lished ti­tan in the busi­ness, Kasey Phillips, of Pre­ci­sion Pro­duc­tions, took a chance on the self-pro­claimed Eng­lish lit­er­a­ture nerds. With a CD con­tain­ing Phillips’ now im­mor­tal An­tilles Rid­dim and no pri­or ex­pe­ri­ence of play­ing mas, Kevon and Ko­ry penned their first so­ca and first hit—Machel Mon­tano’s Vibes Cyah Done–on a rid­dim that al­so spawned Bac­cha­nal­ist by Ker­win Du Bois, Shiv­er by Na­dia Bat­son, and Alves’ In Your Eyes, which all gained heavy ro­ta­tion on the air­waves and in the fetes that year.

With­in the next decade and a half, Full Blown En­ter­tain­ment wrote, co-wrote, and pro­duced some of T&T Car­ni­val’s sig­na­ture songs and sounds. That discog­ra­phy in­cludes, but is not lim­it­ed to, Mon­tano’s Mr Fete (2012), Bot­tle of Rum (2012), The Fog (2013), and E.P.I.C (2014) as well as Du Bois’ Too Re­al, and Un­for­get­table fea­tur­ing Patrice Roberts, Fallin’, Mil­lion and Body Talk by Kes, and a slew of oth­er hit songs for Voice, Nes­sa Prep­py, and more among a list too long to men­tion.

Good Spir­its is not the first song they have writ­ten and record­ed for them­selves, how­ev­er. In 2022 they of­fered their de­but sin­gle en­ti­tled Full of Love, a groovy so­ca with RnB un­der­tones on the Palmwine Rid­dim, with lyri­cal themes sim­i­lar to Fred­die Mc­Gre­gor’s Lov­ing Pau­per. Zoom Zoom on the Night Shift Rid­dim fol­lowed in 2023 and in 2024, their song Wassy sam­pled Baron’s 1988 clas­sic, Dance Floor, which was writ­ten and arranged by Wins­ford “Jok­er” Devine.

Now, with a grow­ing reper­toire of their songs, and a wealth of tricks gleaned from as­so­ci­at­ing close­ly with some of the in­dus­try’s heavy­weights, the Tacarigua-born broth­ers have de­cid­ed that this is their time to evolve in­to a bonafide en­ter­tain­ment “triple threat.”

“We spent so many years writ­ing songs for oth­er peo­ple that we felt like we found our way of ex­press­ing our­selves in the genre,” Ko­ry ex­plained. “Now we feel like we have some­thing to say and it has nat­u­ral­ly pro­gressed to the point where we feel that we might write some­thing dif­fer­ent from what we write for Kes or Machel. We have a dif­fer­ent mes­sage.

“Ours is not di­rect­ly re­lat­ed to the Car­ni­val, ours is just (re­lat­ed) to life and ex­pe­ri­ences and that’s what we want to give to peo­ple.”

Both Kevon and Ko­ry, who are al­so the grand­sons of well-known for­mer politi­cian Ed­die Hart, ad­mit­ted that the de­ci­sion to try their hands at live stage per­for­mances was not ini­tial­ly in their plans and that it is out­side of their com­fort zones.

Ko­ry re­vealed he tried to con­vince his old­er broth­er to go it alone as a per­former, but Kevon strong­ly re­fused to do so with­out his younger broth­er. Now that they have warmed up to the idea though, Ko­ry said they have giv­en ex­ten­sive thought to every as­pect of how to present them­selves to the pub­lic.

“Fash­ion is a big part of our artis­tic ex­pres­sion, es­pe­cial­ly now in 2025 with all of so­cial me­dia. Mu­sic is now vi­su­al. It’s not just about lis­ten­ing to the mu­sic. They have to see you and see vi­su­als. So we want peo­ple to look at us and feel like yeah, those fel­las know what they’re about.”

On man­ag­ing the new di­men­sion of their ca­reers, Kevon wel­comed the chal­lenge of si­mul­ta­ne­ous­ly try­ing to main­tain their sta­tus as cer­ti­fied hit-mak­ers while craft­ing their own iden­ti­ty as per­form­ers.

“Just to be a duo is dif­fer­ent. We don’t have much of those out there in the so­ca world. And we are a duo but we are very dif­fer­ent in terms of per­son­al­i­ties. So we try to just be our­selves on stage so that we give the crowd that dif­fer­ent dy­nam­ic.”

He added, “I think even if you stum­ble up­on some­thing you re­alise you’re good at, and it feels right in your soul, you can’t just walk away from it just like that.

“That’s why you see a lot of per­form­ers go­ing un­til they are old and grey be­cause some­times it’s just in your soul and you feel like that’s what you have to do. So we plan to do it for as long as we can, as long as it feels right.”