“You can’t help but fall in love with “Red Red Wine!” UB40 brings a summery reggae vibe to the Hollywood Casino

OMCP's Jason Fraley Presents UB40 at Hollywood Casino (Part 1)

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“We pride ourselves on sending people home much happier than when they came to the show,” drummer Jimmy Brown told WTOP. “We hope to uplift the audience, which is what music does. Reggae music is inherently an uplifting style of music, so yeah, it’s party time. We want everybody to dance and we expect everybody to sing along.”

Born in 1957, Brown formed the band in Birmingham, England, in 1978 with brothers Robin and Ali Campbell, Earl Falconer and Brian Travers. The five original members met while growing up at Moseley School of Art.

“We’ve all known each other since we were 11 and we come from a multicultural melting pot in inner-city Birmingham,” Brown said. “We were all friends at school, we left school and said, ‘Hey, let’s start a band,’ and that’s exactly what we did. Living in the inner-city, we were surrounded by people from the Caribbean, mainly Jamaica, so we were exposed to reggae music, so that’s the genre we chose to play.”

The catchy name “UB40” actually comes from a British government form for unemployment benefits.

“UB” stood for unemployment benefits and it was a Form 40,” Brown said. “You would give them that form, they would sign it and you would get your check. I am a big believer in generous benefits because you never know what people are going to do with the time they have. It definitely gave us an opportunity to grow the band and learn how to play without having to work, so it worked out really well for us and I am a big believer in generous benefits.”

They got their big break when they were discovered one night by Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders.

“We had done about 30 shows in local pubs and we were making noise, tickets were selling out really fast, people were out and couldn’t get in,” Brown said. “We did one show in a tiny bathroom called The Rock Garden in London. … She came to see us and came backstage afterwards. … She had a No. 1 single at the time with ‘Brass in Pocket’ and she said, ‘Do you want to come on our sold-out tour? We want you to come and support us.’”

In 1980, UB40's breakthrough double-sided record was King/”Food For Thought,” an ultra-liberal critique of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the way runaway capitalism had commercialized Christmas.

“King is not really a celebration of Martin Luther King. It’s more about saying, ‘Yeah, what you did was great, but what difference did it make?’ The question is, ‘Where are all your people now? Passive resistance, I can’t say that works,’” Brown said. “‘Food For Thought’ is about the indulgences of the West and the unequal distribution of wealth. A lot of our stories are really about class struggle, how the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. How can you celebrate Christmas when other humans are suffering in other parts of the world? We’re killjoys, for sure.”

In 1983, they temporarily put social commentary aside and learned to party with their hit cover of Neil Diamond's “Red Red Wine,” a hit so catchy that UB40's version is now the definitive version.

“We had no idea that Neil Diamond had written it. We knew it was a very popular reggae song from the early 70s… when we started doing ‘Labor of Love’, which was a celebration of the songs that introduced us to the reggae genre in the first place. … It was a phenomenal success for us all over the world and eventually in America, five years after it came out, it went to number one in the States. We were very proud of that.”

In 1985, the group returned the favor to Hynde by collaborating on a cover of Sonny & Cher's “I Got You Babe.”

“We’ve been friends with Chrissie ever since,” Brown said. “She claims she came up with the idea, our ex-singer Ali at the time claimed it was his idea, but regardless, it was a very successful record for us. I guess it was pretty bold of us to use such a famous song, and we wouldn’t pretend for a minute that we’re doing a better version than the Sonny & Cher original, which is one of my favorite songs, but it was just a huge, huge, huge success for us.”

In 1993, they reached the top of the charts again with a cover of Elvis Presley's Cant Help Falling in Love, which was originally intended for the film Honeymoon in Vegas, before the film's producers chose Bono's version of the same song. Instead, UB40's cover ended up on the soundtrack to the film Slither, and the song went to number one.

“I can’t say I was a huge Elvis fan, I’m too young actually… and I didn’t really respect him when he became this caricature of himself in Las Vegas, but he was definitely a pioneer early on,” Brown said. “It was huge for us too. We seem to be successful when we do covers, but that’s only a small part of our repertoire.”

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OMCP's Jason Fraley Presents UB40 at Hollywood Casino (Part 2)

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