UB40’s Ali and Astro return for another Blaisdell performance

Reggae music had been around for little more than a decade when a bunch of unemployed young men in Birmingham, England, decided to put a band together and have a go at it. Who knew that the band — UB40, slang for Unemployment Benefit Form 40, and an appropriate choice since none of them had jobs — would become one of the biggest acts in reggae?

Almost 40 years after he helped put the original group together, Ali Campbell is still going — bringing the hits he made famous in the 1980s and 1990s to audiences around the world.

“We knew we had something fresh that hadn’t been heard before, and we thought we had something to offer, so I’d say we were arrogant when we started, but you could never have guessed that we’d still be going, selling out all over the world years later,” Campbell said recently, calling from “the Perth side of things” in western Australia. He and his makeup of UB40 — officially billed as UB40 featuring Ali & Astro — were in the middle of a tour of Australia and New Zealand.

“It’s 40 years, basically, since we made our first record,” he said. “2020 is the actual ‘40,’ so we’re close.”

Catching the group on the way home from an Australia-New Zealand tour has become a welcome tradition for fans here. UB40 will be on stage Friday at the Blaisdell Arena, and Honolulu is anticipating another great evening of classic British reggae.

CAMPBELL’S CONTRIBUTIONS to all that history include singing lead on both of UB40’s biggest hit singles — a remake of “Red Red Wine,” released in 1983 and re-released in 1988, and a remake of “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” released in 1993 and subsequently appearing on the soundtrack album for the erotic thriller “Sliver.”

UB40 went from one success to another until Campbell departed in January 2008. Keyboardist Mickey Virtue, famed for his ability to keep the beat with the machine-like precision of a metronome, left the group to join Campbell a month later. Astro (birth name Terence Wilson), the other prominent vocalist in the group — he’s the voice heard singing/toasting the phrase “Red red wine, you make me feel so fine. You keep me rocking all of the time” — joined Ali and Mickey in 2013.

All three cited business management issues as reasons for leaving the original group. Almost every member of the original group — except Campbell’s brother, Robin Campbell — was eventually declared bankrupt relating to the debts of the band’s record label, although this was not the end of UB40.

At that point, following some legal jostling with former bandmates, Campbell, Virtue and Astro became UB40 featuring Ali, Astro and Mickey.

UB40 featuring Ali, Astro & Mickey stepped forward impressively as recording artists in 2016 with the release of a two-disc album, “Unplugged,” that included a collection of hits recorded with the original group. They followed that in 2018 with “A Real Labour of Love,” a cross-section of reggae classics by trailblazers like Gregory Isaacs and Barrington Levy.

Those albums are now musical portraits of something that no longer exists. Virtue, 62, retired last fall after almost 40 years playing reggae music with Campbell.

“He decided before we embarked on what is probably our 25th world tour … that he didn’t want to tour any more,” Campbell said. “We wish him well. We don’t fully understand all the reasons why he decided not to continue, but good luck to him, and we wish him the best.”

CAMPBELL, who celebrates his 60th birthday on Friday, and Astro, 61, plan to record another album later this year — and then embark on yet another tour.

“If we’re not in the studio recording, we’re touring,” Campbell said. “We will continue to tour and make new music. There aren’t that many bands that go 40 years. Most bands go for about five years and a couple of albums.

“I’m on my 31st album, I think it is. We’re still releasing new music and charting, so we’re very, very fortunate.”

The key ingredient to Campbell’s good fortune is the music that he devotes his heart and soul to.

“The main thing is that we play reggae music, and I think that’s why we’re still here,” he said. “When we chose reggae as our genre it was only around 11 years old. It came to England around 1968 and we started in ’79, so reggae was a real young music; 40 years later it’s still relevant.

“Its influence on contemporary music has never been stronger. It’s still calling and kids are still listening to it. That’s why we’re still here, because reggae is universally loved.”

An irony in the story of Ali Campbell and UB40 is that their biggest hits — “Red Red Wine” and “Can’t Help Falling in Love” — were remakes of songs from other writers that were hits for other artists first.

“People thought that we’d become a ‘cover band’ because we had such success, but we made over 24 albums that were self-penned,” Campbell pointed out.

The list of UB40 originals starts with songs from their first-ever single, “King”/”Food for Thought,” recorded in the last days of 1979, and continues on up through the decades.

“Our biggest selling album was ‘Promises and Lies,’ which was a self-penned album,” he added. “But we tacked ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love’ on it.”

Campbell and Astro have no plans to give up their current schedule, but there is something he wants to get to, eventually.

“Toward the end of our career I’d like to do a Las Vegas reggae revue,” he said. “We’ve never done that. It would be a sort of ‘Big Love Reggae Revue’ where we could have different reggae guests come in. I’d fancy doing a bit of that!”