Brummie reggae icons UB40 are coming to Guildford on May 13 with their latest tour, Getting Over the Storm. Charles Dean meets drummer Jimmy Brown to catch up on over 30 years of live performances
“We are a live band.” Jimmy Brown, UB40’s drummer since the band's earliest days, is emphatic. “We’re better on stage than we are on records.”
That’s quite a claim for one of the world’s best-selling music artists – but he’s not wrong, and Jimmy clearly loves performing live.
“We were doing maybe half a dozen arenas each tour, and it just wasn’t fun, so we decided to play at more, smaller venues instead. Last year we did about fifty shows in England, and we enjoyed every single one of them."
"You get so much more pleasure from those smaller shows. There’s no gap between you and the audience.”
After over 35 years of performing, he knows what he's talking about.
Founded in a time of mass unemployment, inflation and union unrest, the band took their name from the contemporary unemployment benefit form, which also served as the front cover of their first album, ‘Signing Off’.
It was a political slice of Birmingham reggae, a style of music new to the Britain of those times, and a brilliant breakthrough album.
Their unique musical blend was rooted in their Brummie surroundings. Jimmy grew up in New Heath, “an inner city area with loads of Caribbean immigrants. At the local youth clubs there’d be a sound system, and that was where we listened to reggae. We committed to this style of music that we thought everybody was exposed to,” he laughs, “but when we got out of Birmingham we found it wasn’t as well-known as we thought”.
Despite the often-upbeat tunes they play, UB40 songwriting has a strong political history. Jimmy himself wrote ‘1 in 10’ in 1981, the year when a full one in ten people were unemployed, a process he says was fuelled by anger. “It was a list of things that made me angry, but I was also making a point about turning people into statistics… It was a time of turmoil. The unions were being ripped apart. Britain was being ripped apart.”
Their political days are hardly behind them. “You can see the consequences today. Deregulation, breaking the unions, selling off council houses, and now the result is austerity. We knew at the time it was wrong.” He shrugs. “We were right.”
UB40 actually toured the USSR in 1985, before anyone could have predicted that the Cold War would end with glasnost and perestroika.
“I’m actually really glad I went before the Wall came down. I come from a socialist background, so I appreciated the positive aspects of life there. I had such admiration for the Russian people, how they organized their lives with resources so thin on the ground. Most people could speak English, because they had a great education system, so I had some quite in-depth conversations. They were a highly intellectual people.”
“They didn’t have to think about paying for the roofs over their heads”, he muses. “The only money they needed was a token for whatever items were available that day. They had National Cabbage Day while we were there.”
Despite the socialist sentiment, it didn’t take long for the band to find commercial success. 1983 saw them cover a rocksteady reggae love song by Tony Tribe, itself a cover of a Neil Diamond record from 1968, which raced to number 1. You might remember it – ‘Red Red Wine’. A drastic departure from their politically-charged debut, wasn’t it?
“Of course. They were love songs. We were covering old hits, and we wanted to record them in their original spirit. To us, they were crossover commercial hits, the records that stood out from the stuff we’d grown up hearing. Of course, for a lot of people outside our area, it was the first time they’d heard anything like them.”
‘Red Red Wine’ even made it to number 1 in the US when rereleased, no easy feat. Did the band know straight away that they’d hit on a… well, hit?
“There was always talk in the band about whether this record or that record would be a hit, but I don’t think you can ever know ahead of time. Birmingham City is our local football club, and they sing the opening saxophone bars to King/Food for Thought when the team scores a goal. That’s from our very first single! You can’t predict that, you can’t pay for it; you can only hope that it catches on.”
“Anyone who says they know what’s going to be a hit… they’re not telling the truth.”
The band went on hiatus in 1995, following fifteen years of near-constant touring – then their lead singer, Ali Campbell, left. It’s been seven years since the band replaced him with his brother, which Jimmy feels was something of a rebirth.
“It was madness for years and years and years… eventually, you have to take stock and let things settle down. It was a long time for us to be together, and things had become stale the way they were before. We were constantly playing the same old hits from Labour of Love. I think we were becoming a little cabaret. So we took some time off, and things changed up a bit, and we felt reinvigorated. Last year and this year have been fantastic.”
Perhaps the break was what the band needed, but does he feel that age has mellowed them?
"Politically, yes, but there’s just as much energy in the shows as there’s always been. Music isn’t like sport, where you have to make your mark in the first ten years and then it’s over. In music, you get better and better. It’s a great feeling. Every show you do is a tiny bit better than the show you did before. Doing the perfect show has been an ambition since our very first gig.”
With a little luck, that show might just be this one.
UB40 are coming to G Live with their new tour Getting Over the Storm on May 13
