‘I can’t keep money. I’ve made millions and I’ve spent it all’

THAT there is no love lost between Ali Campbell and his former colleagues in UB40 is evident from a frank exchange of views last October. Campbell, who quit the hit reggae band in 2008 to go solo, and who now tours as UB40 Featuring Ali Campbell, issued a terse statement on social media prior to a gig in Uganda.

The statement began: “It has continually come to our attention that Ali’s former band members and their current management are hell-bent on trying to stop UB40 Featuring Ali Campbell from performing shows globally including Ali’s forthcoming show in Uganda.”

It noted that Campbell had formed the band (in the late 1970s) after receiving compensation for an injury he had received, that, unlike his former cohorts in UB40 he had gone on to enjoy chart success, and that UB40 Featuring Ali Campbell had toured 70 countries “without any legal challenge of dispute”.

The statement made it clear that Campbell would continue to do what he set out to do when forming UB40 – to record, and to perform their hits, on which he had been the lead singer.

UB40 themselves responded with a hardhitting statement of their own. “It is well documented,” they said, “that Ali Campbell left UB40 to go solo in 2008 and following cancelled and failed tours, he then began to misuse the name and brand five years later, in 2013.”

It claimed that their former singer, now billing himself as UB40 Featuring Ali Campbell, “causes a lot of confusion, because the deceptive billing implies that Ali Campbell is performing with UB40.

“In fact, it is just one ex-member of UB40 and his backing band of session musicians, none of whom have ever performed with UB40, or ever participated in a UB40 record.”

Campbell’s own website makes the point that he quit in 2008, citing management issues, and that he was subsequently “vindicated when said managers were struck off”.

It is all a sobering conclusion to the story of an influential and highly popular Birmingham group who, from 1980 onwards, had a lengthy series of hit singles including King, I Won’t Close My Eyes, Red Red Wine, Many Rivers To Cross, Cherry Oh Baby, I Got You Babe (Ali Campbell duetting with The Pretenders’ Chrissie Hynde), and Kingston Town, among many others.

Their first two albums – Singing Off (1980) and Present Arms (1981) – both reached number two, while 1983’s Labour Of Love went to the very top, remaining in the British charts for 18 months.

In late October 1985, UB40 were the first group to play Glasgow’s SECC, with Simply Red in support.

Noting the venue’s sound problems, the Glasgow Herald’s David Belcher said that a “heavy bass backwash”, thudding dully, had suited the headliners. Their melodic, sweeping, highly competent Escort XR3i reggae walked a path through this dub-style echo and delay embellished with sassy horns and the high, slightly nasal vocals of the brothers Campbell [Ali and Robin].

“Over a catalogue of hits stretching back over five years, UB40 displayed a classiness and command to be respected, if not wholly admired. Worthy, capable, committed,” Belcher added.

Some 39 years later, Campbell was back on the SEC campus last Sunday, this time at the Armadillo with his UB40 Featuring Ali Campbell show. All the hits were present, even if some of them were restricted to snippets so they could all be shoehorned in.

It was an energetic and enjoyable show, one that had the audience on its feet right from the start. High up in the gallery, a young boy played an inflatable saxophone, playing in time to the music. Campbell himself had fun, even good-naturedly singing along with a woman who had made her way onto the stage (her singing voice didn’t quite match her audacity, however).

As touring schedules would have it, UB40 themselves will play the OVO Hydro on November 16, part of a long tour that begins in May and includes engagements in Guatemala, Costa Rica, New York, California, Sydney, New Zealand, and the Continent. Their latest album, UB45, is due out soon. The band will be signing copies for fans at HMV Glasgow on April 25 at 5pm.

An evocative phrase used on the band’s website recalls the distinctive times in which they had their beginnings.

“The story of UB40, and how this group of young friends from Birmingham transcended their working-class origins to become the world’s most successful reggae band, selling over 100 million records and spending over a combined 11 years in the UK album charts, is not the stuff of fairy tales as might be imagined,” it says.

“The group’s led a charmed life in many respects, it’s true, but it’s been a long haul since the days they’d meet up in the bars and clubs around Moseley, and some of them had to scrape by on less than £8 a week unemployment benefit.

“The choice was simple if you’d left school early. You could either work in one of the local factories, like Robin Campbell did, or scuffle along aimlessly while waiting for something else to happen.”

Before long, they had aligned themselves to left-wing political ideals and had “forged their own identity, separate from the many punk and two tone outfits” then current. Their political convictions had been cemented in place by attending marches protesting against the National Front, or rallies organised by Rock Against Racism.

Colin Larkin, in his Virgin Encyclopedia of Eighties Music, notes that UB40’s debut album, Signing Off, boasted an album sleeve with a 12-inch-square replica of the “notorious, bright yellow unemployment card”, an image which attracted “a large contingent of disaffected youth as well as proving popular with followers of the two tone/ska scene”.

As well as their distinguished record of chart successes, UB40 toured widely (including Russia, in 1986) and were one of the acts at the Nelson Mandela concert at Wembley in 1988. In 2003, they received an Ivor Novello Award for International Achievement

Astro (real name Terence Wilson), the toaster who was a founder member of UB40, died in November 2021, aged 64. He departed from the original group in 2013 and joined Ali Campbell and the band’s former keyboard player, Mickey Virtue. Astro and Campbell recorded three albums together but he passed away shortly after the completion of a fourth, entitled Unprecedented.

A 2021 Guardian profile of the original UB40 makes the point that they “were once the authentic voice of informed working-class disaffection. Setting streetlevel grievances and global political protest to a stoned stepper’s beat, they made music for the feet, head and heart, tackling apartheid, Thatcherism, racism, global poverty and social injustice head on”.

The article, by Graeme Thomson, quotes Ali Campbell as saying: “We were the real deal. We were eight people who had been unemployed since school, trying to wade through Thatcher’s quagmire of s*** and then sing about it. We were politicised, we were disenfranchised, and we had a lot to say.”

On the subject of the break-up in 2008, Campbell observed: “It was an acrimonious split and it has stayed like that. Too much water under the bridge and too many nasty things said and done.” He acknowledged that profligacy had played a part in his financial troubles.

“I can’t keep hold of money,” he conceded. “I’ve made millions and I’ve spent it all.”