ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON FEB. 24, 1984
By Steve Newton
British reggae artists UB40 will be appearing at the UBC SUB Ballroom tomorrow (Saturday), touring in support of their latest album, Labour of Love.
That record–which debuted at #1 on the British Top 10–is an amalgam of tunes originally recorded by the likes of Bob Marley (“Keep on Moving”), and Jimmy Cliff (“Many Rivers to Cross”). And according to UB40 guitarist/vocalist Robin Campbell, who was contacted by telephone in L.A. last week, it’s somewhat of a soundtrack to the band’s adolescence.
“It’s a collection of just a few of the records we grew up on, the records that actually got us into reggae music in the first place. They’re all from a specific era, 1968 to ’72, and we deliberately kept it that way. I mean we could have done a double or a triple album. The difficulty was keeping it down to one.”
The song that heped pull Labour of Love up the charts and will probably bring a lot of UB40 fans to their feet tomorrow night is “Red Red Wine”. A grooving, sensual tune, it caused the band members no small measure of surprise when they realized who its creator was.
“We had absolutely no idea that it was written by Neil Diamond,” says Campbell. “We knew it as a reggae classic by a guy called Tony Tribe. And it was only after we recorded it and were finding out for publishing reasons who the composers were, that we discovered it was written by him. We were all shocked!”
UB40 followers might have been a bit shocked themselves, to find that the group had released a complete album of cover material. But it shouldn’t be long before new and original UB40 sounds are once more available.
“The next album will be back to normal,” confides Robin. “This was a kind of ‘sidestep’ project–just something that we wanted to do for years, ever since the band started. The next album we’ll be working on as soon as we get back from the States, and it will be back to doing our own stuff. It will be quite different from Labour of Love.”