Bounce Magazine March 2018

FEATURE FEATURE
MARCH 2018 MARCH | 2018 ISSUE | ISSUE #65 | #65 ALI CAMPBELL
ALI CAMPBELL
Bounce Magazine’s Rachel Ducker speaks to Ali Campbell
about the bands new album ‘A Real Labour of Love’...
‘A Real Labour Of Love’ is the new album
from UB40 Featuring Ali, Astro & Mickey, to
be released March 2nd on UMC. Lead single
‘She Loves Me Now’ received its exclusive
first play today on BBC Radio 2, and will be
available tomorrow to stream and download
as an instant grat with album pre-orders.
As founding members of Britain’s biggest
reggae band UB40, singer Ali Campbell,
second vocalist Astro and keyboardist Mickey
Virtue topped the UK singles chart on three
occasions and sold 70 million records as they
took their smooth yet rootsy musical blend
to all corners of the globe. Now with ‘A Real
Labour Of Love’ the trio give us a fresh take
on the legendary series of albums, putting the
focus primarily on reggae
tracks from the 1980s.
Between 1983 and 1998
UB40 produced three
‘Labour Of Love’ albums,
bringing hits such as Eric
Donaldson’s ‘Cherry Oh
Baby’, Lord Creator’s
‘Kingston Town’ and
Johnny Osbourne’s ‘Come Back Darling’ to a
new, global audience. They also topped the
charts on both sides of the Atlantic with their
reggae cover of Neil Diamond’s ‘Red Red
Wine’.
And now 20 years later Ali, Astro and Mickey
are revitalising the concept by exploring the
tunes of a later golden age, ‘A Real Labour Of
Love’ sees the group explore the songs that
defined reggae in the Eighties. The concept
isn’t a rigid one: Stevie Wonder’s ‘A Place In
The Sun’ is a Motown classic from 1966, and
there are numbers from the late Seventies in
Dennis Brown’s sublime ‘How Could I Leave’
and Culture’s ‘International Herb’. But most of
the tracks on ‘A Real Labour Of Love’ are from
the Eighties, a decade that saw dancehall
reggae enter the mainstream.
The group are now looking forward to taking
their new album on the road, with UK festival
appearances lined up for the summer and a
UK arena tour in the pipeline for 2019. Given
the massive success of the trio’s last ‘Labour
Of Love’ outing, a 2016 tour that featured
sold-out shows at the O2 Arena
in London and the Barclaycard
Arena in Birmingham, there is
bound to be a huge appetite for
‘A Real Labour Of Love’.
Rachel Ducker caught up with Ali
Campbell, to find out about more
about the band and their new
album.
R: How did you first get into music?
My dad was a musician in the 60’s. He had
a folk group called the ‘Ian Campbell Folk
Group’, so we grew up in very musical
circumstances. We used to have the likes of
Paul Simon, Billy Connolly, and people like
that staying at our house, or whoever was
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