I’d always thought of UB40 in relation to chart hits like Red Red Wine or I Got You Babe, and thus considered them to be purveyors of diluted easy-listening reggae for a white middle-class audience, but this, their debut album, is a very different animal.
It’s some hard-hitting dub reggae, replete
with post-production effects with echo and panning, fractured and experimental
beats on the reggae form, and charged political lyrics. Like The Specials, UB40
use their mixed racial personnel as a repudiation of the racism of the times.
And since they take their name from the unemployment benefit claims form of the
time, it shouldn’t surprise me that they’d have a leftist political leaning.
Yet it does.
The tracks cover topics like Britain’s
Imperial past, in the excellent Burden of Shame, which balances national pride
with a recognition of failings of the past, something that has for some reason
become verboten these days - “I’m a British subject, and proud of it, but I
carry the burden of shame”. So much more balanced than the rather pathetic and
childish attempts by certain demagogues these days to simultaneously deny any
malfeasance in the past, claim that it was perfectly fine and nothing to be
ashamed of, and paint those who do recognise that no nation is perfect as “unpatriotic”
somehow. A plague upon all of them.
Food For Thought, one of the singles from the album, compares starvation in poorer parts of the world with the Christmas message, and conspicuous consumption that goes along with it, four years before Bob Geldof got Band Aid in his head. It’s perhaps a little diluted by Ali Campbell’s distorted vocals leading many (including myself) to hear “Ivory Madonna” as “I’m a prima donna”. The full lyric is “Ivory Madonna, dying in the dust, waiting for the manna, coming from the West”. So many layers to the song – the hypocrisy of eating big meals while others starve and congratulating ourselves on “goodwill to all”, the moral dichotomy of foreign aid that addresses symptoms but not causes and may be too little to make a difference, and carries a slightly patronising air of the "Great White Saviour". It’s a far cry from Red Red Wine.
A sentiment echoed in the track Little By
Little, “Poor boy sleeps on straw, the rich boy sleeps in bed. That fat boy
fills his belly, my poor boys's a dead” which makes the optimistic claim that
“Little by little by little, and stone by stone. Rich man's mountain comes
crumbling down”. Not yet, it hasn’t. The rich man’s mountain has got even
bigger.
The album is a sort of double album – one
regular LP and an EP, which features the excellent 12-minute Madame Medusa,
which is supposedly about Thatcher - “Lady with the marble smile, spirit of the
night” and “In her bloody footsteps, speculators prance.” Yes, that could be about Thatcher, and barely a year onto her first term; they had her number already before the jingoism of the Falklands War gave her a popularity boost.
Throw in a few instrumentals as well, and
this is really good stuff – it's a shame that they lost that hard edge and
became rather banal, pretty much pandering to the yuppie class, the speculators
prancing in the bloody footprints of the lady with the marble smile.
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