Originally Published on the Beaver County Times website on July 28, 2022
UB40 to play Red Red Wine and other hits on tour headed to Pittsburgh!
It might be easier to ask Robin Campbell to name the places he hasn’t heard his band UB40’s version of “Red, Red Wine.”
“I’ve heard it everywhere,” Campbell, the English reggae-pop band’s co-founding guitarist, said. “Honestly, absolutely everywhere. In the early days, the joy of hearing yourself on the radio is something special. We’d be driving along and we’d pull over and have a listen because you would hear your song on the radio, and it was the biggest buzz. But by the time we had ‘Red Red Wine,’ which was a No. 1, we’d probably had half a dozen Top-10 hits already. It was an extra buzz but we were kind of used to the idea.
“But literally everywhere I’ve heard it. And still today. I can travel around the world and hear it. If you go to a hotel in the Caribbean, you’ll hear ‘Red Red Wine’ played for the tourists. And the bands that play in the hotel, they always play ‘Red, Red Wine.’ So I’ve heard it in every corner of the world.”
In August, the Grammy-nominated, Billboard chart-topping UB40 will perform “Red, Red Wine” in a few other special corners of the world, such as New York’s Central Park (Aug. 24), the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark (Aug. 21), and a closed-down block of Forbes Avenue in downtown Pittsburgh, as headliners of the fifth Rock, Reggae & Relief benefit concert (Aug. 20.)
“I like the idea for what that’s for — the Café Momentum,” Campbell said about the Pittsburgh concert’s proceed recipients, an award-winning restaurant and culinary training facility that equips justice-involved youths with life skills, education and employment opportunities. “It’s a good reason to put a show on.”
Whether an outdoor block party, or an indoor performing arts center, the type of venue doesn’t matter.
“I don’t really care where the gigs are,” Campbell said. “I love playing clubs, I love playing arenas, I love playing open-air shows. I’m really only playing to the first few hundred people I can see. It really doesn’t matter to me who else is there, because the people you make eye contact with are the people you’re singing to.”
The lead singing will be handled by UB40’s new vocalist Matt Doyle. “It’s great to have his enthusiasm. To us he’s a kid, he’s 30 years old, but he’s having a ball,” Campbell, one of the four founding UB40 members who have been with the the band since 1978, said. “He was a bit like a deer in the headlights at first, but he’s got used to it now and he’s enjoying it and really coming into his own. His confidence is growing all the time. I can’t wait to take him on the American tour. He’s never been to the States. It’s gonna be a real buzz for him. And he’s singing really good.”
With ground-level band members Earl Falconer (bass), Jimmy Brown (drums), Norman Hassan (trombone-percussion), UB40 will hit the Pittsburgh stage following sets by The Original Wailers featuring Al Anderson, The Movement, Maxi Priest, Big Mountain, The Elovators and KBong & Johnny Cosmic.
UB40 hasn’t played the U.S. since an 107-show odyssey in 2019.
“Just being on the road again is fantastic,” Campbell said. “We had a couple of years where we couldn’t do anything. We literally couldn’t travel or play a gig, and it was not pleasant. We all got stir-crazy after a bit. We recorded some music and made an album. but it’s no substitute for being on the road and playing a gig.”
For the first time in 34 years, Campbell is in the band without a blood brother, which he said feels “strange.” His sibling, Ali Campbell, was UB40’s singer-lyricist from 1978 to 2008 until he had a falling out with the band. He was replaced by one of his brothers, Duncan Campbell, who handled the lead mic the next decade, until a health issue arose.
“When Ali left, I was more or less relieved because he had not been happy in the band for awhile and he was making noises about leaving,” Robin Campbell said. “So it hadn’t been comfortable in awhile, and so it was quite nice when he left and my other younger brother joined. That reinvigorated the band. And it was great having Duncan on the road with me. He was enjoying it so much because obviously, he hadn’t done it for decades like I’ve been doing it for. Then when he suffered the stroke and decided he needed to step back who could possibly argue? We had to support his decision.”
Left without a singer, UB40 needed a new plan, and hired Matt Doyle from reggae band Kioko, which had supported UB40 on 40 shows in Europe. Campbell said. “And we’ve worked in the studio with him because he did a track on our last album, the collaboration album, where he did the vocals. I was in the studio when he did that vocal, and I remember at the time thinking, ‘This kid can really sing. I really like him. And he would be a great fit in the band.’ I went straight to Matt and said, ‘We want you. Do you want the job?’ He said yeah, and again, it’s kind of reinvigorated the band.”
“So OK, I don’t have any of my blood brothers with me, but I consider the members of the band to be my family anyways,” Campbell said. “We’ve been together for 50 years. We’re celebrating 45 years as a band next year. And I’ve known all of them since they were school kids. So we’ve grown up together. So I still feel like I’ve got brothers in the band.”
Like his bandmates, Campbell grew up in 1970s, working-class Birmingham, England, where immigrants fostered an underground reggae scene. Campbell began playing acoustic guitar by age 12, latching onto the vibrant style of music originating in Jamaica. By his early teens, he grasped the reggae guitar technique.
“It’s not that difficult really. But for other musicians, if you don’t grow up on reggae and it’s not part of your culture, then it’s sometimes hard to reproduce,” Campbell said. “Even really good drummers find it difficult to drum reggae. Just because the emphasis is on the offbeat and it’s a completely different thing for people to understand. If you’ve grown up listening to it, as we have, it’s natural for us to do. I mean, I naturally play reggae now, whatever tune I’m playing. But that’s because I’ve grown up listening to it since its inception. That’s all I’ve listened to virtually all of my life.”
Embracing socio-political lyrics, UB40 took its name from Great Britain’s Unemployed Benefit, Form 40, and found swift success among a chiefly college-aged fan base in 1980, charting in its native England, and in Australia and New Zealand.
Truly worldwide, chart-topping success, including North America, came with “Red Red Wine,” in 1984. Released on the band’s “Labour of Love” covers album, UB40 redid Tony Tribe’s reggae version of “Red Red Wine,” unfamiliar at the time with Neil Diamond’s less joyful original.
The UB40 version added a Jamaican-style rap verse that goes “Red, red wine, you make me feel so fine/You keep me rocking all of the time,” which Diamond later began doing in concert.
“Sort of satirically, yeah,” Campbell said. “I’ve heard his version. I thought it was (mocking us) a bit, really. Especially hearing his lyrics now. He did a kind of a rap version like ours but not using our lyrics. He made his own up. Now what was it … (evokes a straight-laced American accent) ‘Red, red wine makes me feel so good even if the words aren’t understood.’ (Campbell returns to his regular voice.) I thought that was a bit nasty. Needless, you know. He could have just sent us a letter that said, ‘Thanks guys for the millions you just made me.’ But he didn’t.”
(If it’s any consolation, Diamond has been critical of Deep Purple’s version of his “Kentucky Woman,” too.)
“Well, you know, he’s a songwriter who’s used to having a lot of success,” Campbell said. “A lot of people have recorded his songs and had a lot of success with them, so it’s not unusual for him, is it?”
UB40 made the U.S. Billboard Top-40 again in 1985, collaborating with The Pretenders’ Chrissie Hynde on a cover of Sonny & Cher’s “I Got You Babe.”
“We’ve known Chrissie from when she took us on the road. She was our big break in 1980,” Campbell said. “We’d done 30 dates prior to Chrissie seeing us play a date in London, and she took us on the road and we did another 30 odd dates in the next six weeks. And in that six weeks we released a single (the Martin Luther King Jr.-inspired ‘King/Food for Thought’) and it went Top-5 in The UK. And we recorded and released our own album. It was a meteoric, massive rise and Chrissie was pretty much instrumental in that happening.”
In early 1990, another UB40 cover, “The Way You Do The Things You Do,” reached the U.S. Top-10.
“Obviously that is a Temptations tune, and we knew it as a Temptations tune, but the version we were covering was Jackie Robinson who was one of the members of the group The Pioneers. He did a version of that song in the very early ’70s. And we covered that in virtually the same tempo he did it in,” Campbell said. “Everybody knows The Temptations version obviously, but nobody outside of reggae circles knew the Jackie Robinson version and we wanted the world to hear that kind of thing, so that’s what we did.”
One more worldwide chart-topper came with UB40’s rendition of Elvis Presley’s “(I Can’t Help) Falling in Love With You.” Funny story there, too.
“We were asked to do it for a movie, ‘Honeymoon in Vegas.’ The whole soundtrack of the movie is Elvis tunes. Vegas, you know. Other artists recording Elvis tunes and we were asked to record ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love,’ which we did, and we returned it to them, late as usual,” Campbell said. “And they said they had already gone with someone else’s version. And it was Bono from U2. He did a version of ‘Can’t Help Falling’ and they used that in the film. So then we just had this song sitting on the shelf not knowing what to do with it because it had been rejected by the producers of the first film.”
Months later, producers of the Sharon Stone erotic thriller “Sliver’ got in touch with the band and brokered a deal to use UB40’s Elvis cover on their soundtrack. Unlike the Stone movie, the song was a smash hit.
Expect to hear it live on the August tour.
“That’s what we’ll be playing, the stuff people expect to hear when they come see us,” Campbell said. “The tunes you just talked about will all be played in the set.”
Scott Tady is entertainment editor at The Beaver County Times and easy to reach at stady@gannett
