UB40 – "Red Red Wine"

I have a dreadful urge to make a r4c1st calamacho joke. That is, a joke about a r4c1st calamacho, not a r4c1st joke about a calamacho. Though I fear the two are very similar 🙁

(see here for more details)

I didn’t like Sad UB40 at the time, only Happy UB40 (Rat In My Kitchen and a few others musically buoyant enough to rise above Campbell’s general despair), but now it’s the reverse and the ominous gloom in some of their early stuff has strange appeal (Food For Thought, One In Ten, maybe Don’t Break My Heart). Not here tho! Red Red Wine comes close to salvation via that nice fleeting poignant melodic detail just after the chorus but not enough to want to put up with the rest of it.

Awwww Peabo & Roberta! I am sad they never got to #1. That is such a good karaoke duet.

toniiiiiiiiiiiiight, i celebrate my love for you!

UB40 are a classic case of Showaddywaddy syndrome – starting out with a couple of great original tunes in a well-established genre, the hits started to run a bit dry so they tried an oldie, and found that worked so well that they fell into a career-long rut of retreads. And although the retreads worked well, and the band served as a human jukebox to promote songs they thought deserved a wider audience, it was a pity that the early promise of the band’s new material was more or less totally forgotten. I loved the likes of “King”, “Food For Thought” and “One in Ten” and would have been interested in more soft-reggae politics to come. (Incidentally, I don’t remember Astro’s toasting on the number one single – is that an album version you’ve listened to Tom?)

On Boxing Day 1981 I went to a mini-festival called the Christmas Cracker at the NEC in Birmingham, featuring (in this order) Squeeze, Rockpile, The Selecter, Madness, Elvis Costello and UB40. I was surprised Elvis wasn’t top of the bill, but should have realised it was a hometown gig for the ’40. Pity the last train to Manchester was about to leave, so many of us had to go just as Astro was introducing “another Rock Against Thatcher number”.

This was number one when I had the ultimate “Sliding Doors” moment of my life, one which, appropriately enough with UB40 in mind, involved a benefit office. My summer job had come to an end a couple of weeks before the start of final year at RHC, so I had to sign on for a short while. I decided, stupidly, to combine the trip to the benefit office with taking the dog for a walk, only to find that the mutt, a yappy little Yorkie, wasn’t in the mood to behave. So I aborted that trip and returned later sans dog. In front of me in the queue this time was an attractive brunette who was telling the clerk that she’d been teaching English in Germany as part of a uni course and her summer job had finished – i.e. pretty much exactly the same circumstances as me. So I stopped her as she left with the immortal words “Excuse me, I wasn’t eavesdropping but I just happened to overhear…”

We arranged to meet and compare notes, and finished up as an item for the next four years. And because of her insistence on confining job-hunting to the Manchester area after we graduated, which I reluctantly went along with, it was 18 months before we cast the net further afield than the recession-hit North West. Otherwise I would almost certainly have finished up with a different job, wouldn’t have met my wife and had our three kids. So everything my life is now stems from a bad call over walkies while “Red Red Wine” was number one!

It was indeed a US chart topper, though not until later.

I concluded (in the post I’ve linked to) that it sounds like the exact opposite of what it is: a reggae song being covered by a band who can’t play reggae.

A good example of a remake being better than the original. Makes me wonder (and if anyone knows the answer to this) if Diamond himself was surprised that somebody covered this song.

TOTPWatch: UB40 twice performed ‘Red Red Wine’ on Top Of The Pops;

25 August 1983. Also in the studio that week were; David Grant, carmel, Shalamar, Level 42, The Style Council and KC & The Sunshine Band. Simon Bates & Mike Smith were the hosts.

25 December 1983. Also in the studio that Christmas were; Freeez, Shakin’ Stevens, Eurythmics, Adam Ant, Bucks Fizz, Heaven 17, The Flying Pickets and KC & The Sunshine Band. Simon Bates, Janice Long, Mike Smith, Andy Peebles, Adrian John & Gary Davies were the hosts.

I remember when One In Ten was a hit, reading an interview with them where they said that they were on a campaign to introduce the British public to reggae, and this was a soft, commercial starting point, and from there they would lead everyone by the hand to the more demanding stuff, dub et al. Red Red Wine seemed to represent an overt abandoning of that idea. I quite like the Tony Tribe version, but there are plenty of better songs on the same lines (mostly within C&W), and this always truck me as a miserable dirge.

I think the English were already pretty familiar with reggae weren’t they? It was well popular ’round my way – even among kids I knew who supported the NF.

They did do longer dub versions of their songs on 12″ which were pretty good and released a whole dub version of their second album ‘Present Arms’

I always thought Tony Tribe’s version of this was too fast though, the beat seems to be racing ahead of the vocal. At least UB40 had the sense to slow it down.

LondonLee @ 24: Indeed, and we covered the fact way back in 1969, when reggae went with shaved heads, braces and bovver-boots in the heads of greasers!

Agree with Lee @24 – in fact if UB40 really did say they hoped ‘to introduce reggae to the UK’ it must verge on one of the most ridiculous things I’ve heard (and that’s saying something from a music business that seems to pride itself on talking absolute shit)
– after all by their time there’d only been about 4 or 5 reggae number ones in the pop chart and stretching all the way back to the ’60s!

Aha – it got to number 34 in America in 1983, but later “The song received a second life in the US in 1988 when DJ Bobby Stark started playing it at a dance club in Atlanta called Scenario. UB40’s label, A&M Records, re-released the song as a single, and it reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 that October”

I wouldn’t have danced much at that club.

I remember hearing “King” for the 1st time in a record shop. I thought it was kinda cool with it’s dubby start-off.

That’s all, thanks.

Bob Marley, yes, though by the late ’70s he was well off the leading edge of reggae, and “Silly Games” is pretty much down-the line lovers rock and probably falls outside what the UB lads would have considered proper roots.

I completely love “Silly Games” but if – if – the UB40 quote above was about them making a case for roots reggae in the charts (i.e. if they were being roots rock reggae rockists, if you will) then “Silly Games” wouldn’t have counted. Like claiming Joe Jackson or The Jags as punk, or something (NB this is not a precise analogy but I hope you know what I mean).

I claim ‘Offshore Banking Business’ by The Members, 1979!

xtc had a bonus “dub” disc with go2 (in 1978): but you don’t have to be very purist to scoff that it counts

The b-side of SIBG+E was a dub, wasn’t it? It was certainly a “version”.

I think the first PiL-related thing you’d count as a dub version was that Steel Leg vs the Electric Dread thing, which (the interweb tells me) was Dec 78, putting them behind XTC also.

(edited for accuracy!)

Tim @31, 34

Even if for the sake of argument I agreed with UB40s contention then what did they do to remedy the situation and put anything the remotest bit roots in any shape or form in the charts…

And then theres the question as to what is meant by roots in the quote ie are we saying “roots and culture” or just underground/street level reggae? And of course lovers rock was in everyone (but the white boys from the rock world’s conception)pretty authentic and just as likely to be heard at a Blues as dub/roots.

And just off the top of my head I can think of Junior Murvin ‘Police and Thieves’, Dennis Brown ‘Money In My Pocket’, one by Pluto Shervington (not novelty stuff like’Dat’ or ‘Your Honour’), and a track I remember from the mid70s which I’ve forgotten the title of but which went Top 10 and was if I remember correctly was almost a pure dub track which crossed over) – all of which were Top10/20 hits (straight from underground play) before UB40 got near a recording studio.

And thats excluding the countless Top 10 (sometimes Top5) reggae hits from the original 1968-71 (ie when it became reggae in its narrower defintion)skinhead era.

I might have a slightly skewed idea growing up as I did in the London in the mid-late70s in the London area as I seem to remember as a small kid Capital Radio (undoubtedly due to demographics)used to feature the reggae hits quite heavily (and listeners sometimes even got reggae tracks that werent even minor pop hits into the ‘Capital Hitline’ – nb this was a show every weekday evening where listeners phoned in to vote for a track of their choice and the more phone votes the higher the position in that night’s Hitline Top Ten) and even Radio London had programmes like ,Black Londoners’ in peak listening spots where you couldnt help hearing reggae as a part of the background of growing up.

But having said that I still think UB40 were talking out of their arses.I’d rather have ‘Dreadlock Holiday’anyday!

Is Ire Feelings the only dub top 10 hit ever? It sounded utterly alien – during its 2 weeks in the top 10 in Dec 74, competition included You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet by Bachman Turner Overdrive, Gonna Make You A Star, the Rubettes’ Jukebox Jive and Gary Glitter’s Oh Yes You’re Beautiful. No one (Andy aside) tends to remember it.

Another nod to King, especially for the desolate electric harpsichord – at least I think that’s what it is. They stopped using it once they invented the “UB40 button”, a fearsome device that automatically created a backing track for any oldie whose guts they felt like smearing all over the walls.

Another nod, too, to Neil Diamond’s deeply melancholy original. It wasn’t a songwriter’s demo, it was a proper single. Real end-of-the-line self-obliterating stuff, as well. How UB40 managed to make it sound so chirpy and soulless, God knows. But they spent the next decade refining their ugly art, the bastards.

Andy – as I say I hold no brief for UB40 but what I was trying to do was work out why someone might have said something like that – and it was me, not them who first mentioned “roots”.

Actually what the quote – not even really a quote, as it goes – reminds me of is the way I and my friends in the mid-80s would talk about the grievous unfairness of our beloved indie not being fully represented in the charts – it made us furious but I could surely mention a greater number of broadly “indie” hits from 85-90 than I could chart reggae stuff in 76-81. I hated pretty much every one of those indie hits, incidentally, because they didn’t conform to my/our very tight definitions of what was good. I certainly would have told you that the British public needed to be introduced properly to indie pop. So I’m trying to map those feelings onto this imaginary UB40, I suppose. I rather like frustratingly narrow-minded obsessives.

I do remember a Smash Hits interview with Musical Youth in which they were asked what they were listening to – one of them made a point of saying that he listend to a lot of “hard jam-down reggae” (I think he mentioned Dillinger), which I took to mean as opposed to, um, other kinds of reggae.

And I agree that growing up outside London lessened ones daily contact with reggae fairly substantially. Certainly in Devon where I grew up, you had to make an effort to hear much of anything past the hits already mentioned.

Re 45: Can only think of a Scottish group, once Self Abusers, later a pile of toss, but very good in between. They’ll be troubling Popular with a single some way past their prime. Reputation sunk for good by weight of bombast.

Tim – I agree that UB40 were surely paying tribute to a “reggae” they had grown up with. Labour Of Love is much like Pin Ups. Imagine if Pin Ups had sold so well that Bowie spent the rest of his career singing Kinks and Who songs in an uncomfortable baritone – he would be a joke, Starman and Space Oddity as thoroughly swept under the carpet as King and Dream A Lie.

Andy – it’s true, there was almost always a reggae presence on K-Tel and Ronco albums in the mid-late 70s. 1972’s Believe In Music featured 5 in a row (if you include Big Six). There were just less top tenners in the few years before King/Food For Thought, that’s all.

Thevisitor might be able to tell us how popular reggae was in Birmingham in the late seventies. I’m guessing the answer is very.

Yep, no Astro-toast on the 7″ – another I perplexingly own despite never feeling much affinity for the record. Must have been a scattergun shopper that summer; perhaps I’d had a pocket money raise. The sleeve is a lovely dull grey, with a record label to match – marvellously apt.

‘Don’t Break My Heart’ is the UB40 track for me. The bassline, I think.