Exclusive Interview with UB40's Ali Campbell ahead of Margate gig
Legendary frontman Ali Campbell on lost cassettes, the Solomon Islands and rockumentaries
Trying to work out whereabouts in Margate UB40 played when they were touring as a young band in the 80s is not that easy. It could well have been The Winter Gardens, which rings a bell with legendary frontman Ali Campbell. But then Ali is someone who has played live gigs in two of the most uncharted areas of Planet Earth.
“I love doing live shows, it’s what I’ve done all my life,” he says. “But I really love going to far-out places, you know, when we’re abroad. We’re the only people that have ever played Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands and places like that.”
UB40 feat. Ali Cambell will tour with The Who this year to Hull, Derby, Durham and Badminton (Gloucestershire) and while they are all wild in their own way, they don’t stack up to the jungles of remote Pacific isles.
“We were greeted there in the Solomon Islands by these men, you know, from the forests in the hills,” Ali says. “They greeted our plane naked with birds-of-paradise feathers in their hair and had blowpipes and bows and arrows pointing at us in a greeting. We followed them back to the airport lounge and they all whipped out their panpipes and started doing UB40 songs. I mean, you know, that just blew us away. That’s the power of radio and reggae, I guess.”
Hailing from Birmingham, UB40 scored 50 singles in the UK charts, selling millions and millions of records. So it’s not surprising that the global scale of the band’s notoriety reaches the farthest points of the planet.
“It’s amazing, but I don’t think it’s as much UB40, as reggae,” says Ali. “You know, I think reggae was sort of adopted as rebel music. It’s adopted worldwide as the sufferer’s music. And I think that’s why it’s still there, because enough people are still suffering, right?”
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Unlike others, reggae is a genre that doesn’t dip. It doesn’t waver. If you love it, you love it forever. But why does it endure so well?
“Probably because it’s a young genre of music,” says Ali. “When we decided we were going to promote reggae music, it had only really been around for about 10 years. So it still hasn’t sort of outlived its own cool, if you know what I mean. Reggae is still in its early stages, I’d say.
“We see it all over the world. It continues to grow and it continues to influence contemporary music more than any other music form, really. If you look at all the modern music that’s happening now, it’s all dub. And, of course, dub comes from reggae. So the influence reggae is having on contemporary music now is massive, probably bigger than it’s ever been.”
Of course, the hits ‘Red Red Wine’, ‘Kingston Town’, ‘Food For Thought’ and countless others are a mainstay of the UB40 feat. Ali Campbell experience. But in 2021, Ali and UB40 original Astro (Terence Wilson) made a new album before Astro sadly passed away after a short illness.
“We’d just finished ‘Unprecedented’ in Jamaica,” says Campbell. “Thank God, we got some time to go out to Jamaica after lockdown. Astro loved Jamaica and we’d been in lockdown and all that, so I finally got back out to make it and to work with Sly Dunbar. And I wanted to work with Robbie Shakespeare [of production duo Sly & Robbie], but he was in hospital in Miami and we lost him, too.
“It’s a real hole that Astro has left, you know? And really, it was me and him in collaboration on the last album. But yeah, I’ll carry on doing new music. Of course I will. But it’s just things will always be different now, and you just have to come to terms with that.”
Ali is currently compiling an anthology of songs from across the years that people haven’t necessarily heard.
“You know, I’ve done about 32 albums,” he laughs. “A lot of albums, too many albums.
“I’m going through them all saying ‘Well, I want to include that. And that. There’s a list of like 70 samples, so I’ve got to whittle them all down.”
UB40 were well known for their huge collaborations with the likes of Chrissie Hynde (‘I Got You Babe’) and Robert Palmer (‘I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight’) and Ali has teased a couple of projects with different artists that’ll come out this year.
“Both of the people that I’ve collaborated with are massive people, but I can’t say who they are,” he says. “I’m sorry, I can’t, because one of them might be being placed in a movie and, you know, we can’t go anywhere near that yet.”
We joke that there could be a UB40 film or at least a documentary about the founding years. Maybe there have been enough documentaries about the band?
“No good ones. Well, no, sorry. The South Bank Show was a great one. If you ever want to know what UB40 was up to with the ‘Labour Of Love’ series and all that, then it’s a great documentary to watch. It’s before all the daft nonsense that went down. So it’s quite lovely.”
As a self-confessed Beatles nut, Ali’s favourite rockumentary is the ‘Get Back’ series produced by Peter Jackson last year.
“It was brilliant, wasn’t it? Being a mad Beatles fan and having watched everything on film that they’ve ever done, the real downer for me was the ‘Let It Be’ album.
“Because that’s the last record that was made about the break-up of The Beatles and all that.
“But it was so inaccurate and wrong. And that’s made obvious by the ‘Get Back’ documentary. How delightful they all were with each other, with absolutely no problems with Yoko.
“I really loved, above all, the closeness between the band members, and the general vibe was lovely. It was nothing like that. And I think with The South Bank Show for the UB40 documentary, that was in a period when we were all still getting on and everything was groovy. That’s a more accurate look at UB40. The ‘Promises and Lies’ documentary was just awful. And a crock of sh*t, actually.”
So, there’s not a video being uncovered of UB40 in the studio in the early days being readied for release?
“I wish there was,” says Ali. “It’s a tragedy, actually – I had so many cassettes. I mean, that’s how long ago it was when we started. We had cassettes of everything. And I left them in my house, and they all got cleared out in my absence. So, you know, all your old demos and everything. Exactly what could have been a sort of in-depth look at us recording in the early days was all thrown into skip, I’m afraid.”
Having been with his band for 17 years now, Ali has been touring across the world again this summer, culminating in a trip to Dreamland for the Margate Summer Series in September.
“I’m just doing what I normally do, and that’s collaborating with people and touring live. Yeah, my main thing is to tour live to promote reggae and I’m still on the same mission that we started out with.”
WHO: UB40 feat. Ali Campbell
WHERE: Dreamland, Margate
WHEN: Saturday 30th September 2023
