Picture the London punk scene in 1978: The Clash are singing of a city aflame, the Sex Pistols are somehow getting more popular after imploding on tour, and on every street corner, mohawks and safety pins are on rebellious display.
Meanwhile, in a poor neighborhood in Birmingham, 120 miles northeast, eight young men, many of them teens, are learning how to play the guitars, bass and drums they just acquired.
Oh, but playing reggae, not punk.
“We grew up listening to reggae,” says Ali Campbell, the founding singer-guitarist of the English band UB40. “All our neighbors were Windrush children,” he says of the generation of Caribbean immigrants invited to come help the United Kingdom rebuild after the war.
“They were Caribbean or Jamaican, West Indian,” he says. “Asian. I grew up with [Indian singer] Asha Bhosle as well. But the music of the streets was reggae, you know.”
Like punk, reggae was an outsider’s music in Balsall Heath, where Campbell and his bandmates grew up.
“It was a red-light district where I grew up,” he says. “The wrong side of the tracks. There was a lot of shebeens [unlicensed bars] and blues parties in our area.
“As a child, as a 10-year-old or whatever, I’d hang around the blues parties and the shebeens to get the rice and curry goat juice that would be leftover at night.”
And all around Balsall Heath, the sounds of reggae echoed from apartment windows, pool hall jukeboxes, and portable soundsystems.
“I’d be exposed to Eric Donaldson’s ‘Cherry Oh Baby’ and all the great reggae that was happening at the time on all the jukeboxes in the cafes that we frequented because we used to play pinball,” Campbell says.
“You know, that’s how I learned ‘Red Red Wine’ by Tony Tribe,” he says of the Jamaican cover version of a Neil Diamond song that became a hit for UB40 in the mid-’80s. “Nobody was more surprised than us to find that Neil Diamond had written it.”
UB40 featuring Ali Campbell comes to Pacific Amphitheatre in Costa Mesa on Thursday, May 14. [Note: Other original members of the group tour under the original name.]
And you can be sure that Campbell will sing “Red Red Wine,” “Cherry Oh Baby,” Jimmy Cliff’s “Many Rivers to Cross,” and other covers and originals with which UB40 had hits.
In an interview edited for length and clarity, Campbell talked about the band’s best-selling 1980 debut, how Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders discovered UB40, and how the multiracial reggae group was initially accepted more in Jamaica than at home.
Q: Tell me about “Signing Off,” the band’s first album, recorded just months after forming the band.
A: We wanted to do [covers] as our first album, but we were talked out of it. Because in 1980, you were just getting over punk, and everybody wrote their own stuff. So we were convinced that we should write our own album.
We’d only been going for six months, and in that six months we’d “acquired” our instruments because we couldn’t afford to buy them. We were all on the dole, £7.60 a week, so yeah, basically we nicked them.
We learned to play them by listening to a Sly and Robbie record that we just copied piecemeal. And then we wrote our first album, called “Signing Off,” because we were signing off the dole. All in six months.
Q: That’s amazingly fast.
A: And then we had our first hit. Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders discovered us, really. She was No. 1 with “Brass in Pocket” at the time, and she was looking for someone to support the Pretenders on a 35-day tour around England. We’d only done about a dozen gigs in pubs up until that point, she saw us in the Rock Garden in London.
Asked us if we’d go on tour and we went, “Yeah!” [He laughs] That was it. We released our first single, and that went to No. 3, I think it was, and that was the start of us having hits.
Q: Was that “Food for Thought”? Or “King”?
A: It was both. A double A-side. We weren’t very savvy business-wise, so we put two of our best songs on one single.
Q: I listened to that album again yesterday, and it’s still great. It’s also quite political for a first record by young guys like you were.
A: We wrote the song “King” about Martin Luther King. We wrote the song [“Tyler’] about Gary Tyler from Louisiana, who was wrongly arrested and put in jail. We did a song about South Africa called “Burden of Shame.”
“Food for Thought,” we made a couple of years before Live Aid. But really, “Skin and bones is creeping, doesn’t know he’s dead / Ancient eyes are peeping, from his infant head [He sings], it’s about famine, it’s about children starving to death while we celebrate Christmas with food.
It was a pretty political album. We felt that we had a platform, we should use it responsibly and say some stuff that we all felt strongly about, you know.
Q: And it did very well.
A: Oh, it was No. 2 in England. Went on to sell 8 million copies, which is ridiculous for eight guys from Balsall Heath. That’s more than “Kind of Blue” sold. Miles Davis and John Coltrane, the two great musicians of our time, and we outsold them with “Signing Off,” which to us was just absurd.
Q: Your next album, “Present Arms,” had the unemployment song, “One in Ten,” on it, and that did very well, too.
A: We decided we’d show people what dub [a slowed, reverb-heavy reggae style] was. We loved dub, and we wanted to popularize dub. “Present Arms” went to No. 2 in the charts. We thought, This is the perfect time to do “Present Arms in Dub” to show people what dub was.
People brought it back in droves, saying it was faulty. [He laughs] Because our demographic was sort of blue-collared housewives, you know. They brought it back to the shops saying, ‘It’s faulty. There’s no vocals on it, and there’s all these echoes on it and stuff.’
So it wasn’t the great success we thought it would be. But it was the first dub album to ever get into the main [English] charts. That’s something to be proud of.
Q: “Labour of Love” in 1983 was a huge hit with “Red Red Wine,” “Cherry Oh Baby,” “Johnny Too Bad,” and more. Did you have any idea how popular it would become?
A: High expectations, really, because we love those songs so much. We were convinced that if people heard them they were going to love them, too. And they did. We had big hits, the first volume, and then there’s “Labour of Love II.” Fifteen hits or something.
Q: Did the broader reggae community accept UB40 in England and the Caribbean?
A: Not in England we weren’t, but in Jamaica, we were. Because Jamaicans always found us very novel and loved the stuff we were doing. There was a bit of racism in England about it. The fact that I was White and my brother was White. But you’ve got to remember that we’re a multi-racial band.
There was Astro, who was a Jamaican rasta, and Earl [Falconer], the bass player, who was Jamaican. We had an Arab. If you had taken eight people from Balsall Heath, where we came from, they’d have looked like us. They’d have been Indian and Arab, a couple of West Indians, a couple of White kids. So yeah, we never had any problems in Jamaica.
Q: It was often White kids in college who had the Bob Marley albums, reggae albums, and liked to smoke weed.
A: Yeah, the weed connection. We took Burning Spear on our first European tour, basically in Germany and places like that. And the audience was all White, but in red, gold and green jumpsuits and red, gold and green hats and everything. They were the ones that were digging reggae.
Q: After this tour, what do you have coming?
A: I’ve got an anthology coming out at some point, which is like my favorite songs. It’s like a “Labour of Love” for me. Songs that I’m particularly proud of. And I’m also doing some new stuff. You’ve heard of Bitty McLean?
Q: I’m not sure.
A: He started off as a tape-op in our studios. We took him straight from college and made him an engineer in our studios. We did a demo with him, me and a guy called Patrick Tenyue, who is a trumpet player. We went off on tour and when we came back, Bitty was No. 2 in the charts with the song that we’ve made with him. “It’s raining, it’s raining, tears from my eyes.” [He sings]
I introduced Bitty to Sly and Robbie, and I produced an album called “Respect,” which was Sly and Robbie and Bitty singing Otis Redding songs. It never got released because the record company was stupid. But they [Sly and Robbie] loved him.
For the last few years, Sly has been sending drum beats over to Bitty in England, and some of these beats, you’ve never heard anything like them. I think because Sly, he wasn’t doing the beats for anything, he was just experimenting. [Bassist Robbie Shakespeare died in 2021; Sly Dunbar died in January this year]
So we’re putting songs on top of these beats at the moment. We’ve got five and they are so exciting. I can’t wait for people to hear them because it’s like it’s reggae, but it’s not reggae as you know it.