UB40 New Release Is A Real Labour Of Love

The new album from UB40 features Ali, Astro, and Mickey, 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.

“The first three albums featured the songs we grew up listening to,” says Ali. “This one is built around the records we were listening to once UB40 were on the road.”

Contest details below

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’. Now, 20 years later Ali, Astro and Mickey are revitalizing 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.

“We were spending more time in Jamaica and some of these numbers are the ones we’d hear on the radio and out in the streets,” says Astro. “The singers of these songs were our heroes. They are quintessential reggae artists.”

The new album builds on the momentum gathered in the five years since Astro rejoined singer Ali and keyboardist Mickey in 2013. They have released two acclaimed albums, ‘Silhouette’ (2014) and ‘Unplugged’ (2016), their first acoustic album and their first release with UMG.

How to enter the contest – read this! Enter now – just answer a question – What is your favorite UB40 song? This next part is important: Put your answer in the “Message” field of the online entry form! If you don’t do that, you won’t win. Click on this sentence to enter the contest. Contest ends on March 22, 2018.

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