Back when Clint Mansell was a rock star of sorts, he looked like, well… a sort of rock star. At the time of our last encounter, he had red dreads piled on top of his head and several piercings in his nose and ears. In 2009, even the most committed fan of Pop Will Eat Itself – the band with whom he notched up eleven top 40 hits – would stroll right by if they passed Mansell in the street. Somewhere along the way, as he gradually set about becoming one of the world’s most sought-after film composers, he changed. On the afternoon I walk into Air Studios in Hampstead, there are three soberly-dressed, sensible-haired middle-aged men hunched over a mixing console, all in some way involved with a timpani session for Christian Carion’s upcoming cold war thriller L’Affaire Farewell. Until a deep Black Country greeting – “Hello mate! How long has it been?” – leaves Mansell’s mouth, it isn’t altogether certain which of those is him.
Though my memory fails me on this count, it’s also likely that, as the frontman with Pop Will Eat Itself, Mansell wasn’t drinking red wine with the slow, appreciative sips of a man who, in time, would own a house in the Hollywood hills that came with its own wine cellar. It’s fair to say that there’s nothing in his old band’s cartoonish indie-rap canon to suggest that they were a dry run for the exquisitely understated neo-classical scores of films like The Wrestler, Requiem for a Dream and Duncan Jones’ acclaimed new sci-fi tale Moon.
But then, it’s remarkable just how much distance you can put behind you in 15 years. This Monday when Mansell – flanked by Los Angeles string ensemble The Sonus Quartet and assorted other players performs – at the Union Chapel, he’ll have 20-odd scores from which to choose. Flying in to introduce him will be Darren Aronofsky, who has used Mansell to score his films ever since the two worked on π (Pi) eleven years ago. Mansell remembers that at the time both found themselves uncertain about what their immediate future held. Aronofsky settled in New York with the screenplay for π but no immediate funding prospects. Having dissolved Pop Will Eat Itself, Mansell also found himself in New York for no greater reason than his girlfriend lived there. “I had this idea that I’d do something different,” he remembers, “I couldn’t tell you what it was, but obviously my ego thought it was something that would change the world.” Without any clear idea of how to proceed, Mansell says he “lost any sort of drive.” Being so far removed from his bandmates and his family in Stourbridge was “a pure shock to the system. I had a lot of growing up to do.”
Mansell and Aronofsky met through mutual friends. That Aronofsky had never heard Pop Will Eat Itself almost certainly counted in Mansell’s favour. After all, when picking likely composers to score a psychological thriller about a man who builds a computer to find predictable patterns in the stock market, it’s unlikely that you would turn to the frontman best known for songs such as their paean to Italian porn star politician Touched By The Hand of Cicciolina and their not-about-the-animal early hit Beaver Patrol. “I’m not sure he had me in mind as someone who [ital] could [ital] score films,” confides Mansell, “There was this idea that I might write the opening title piece, and then the rest of the film would use pre-existing electronic music. He was going to license all these songs for use in the film. But the reality was that he had no money and no track record. So every time we were denied permission to use a song, I had to write a piece to replace it.”
Asked how he was supporting himself at this time, Mansell laughs, “Like all musicians, I had a girlfriend. In truth, it was hand-to-mouth.” No matter how bad things were, however, he could at least tell himself he was in New York. “If I had gone back to signing on in Stourbridge, it might have been more of a reality check. Time to put my rock star ego behind me and get a life.” As his relationship foundered, calling an end to his time in New York, Mansell realised that, at least creatively, his decision to place himself outside his musical comfort zone was yielding music that he had previously thought beyond him.
In particular, Lux Aeterna – the musical leitmotif at the heart of Aronofsky’s second film Requiem For A Dream – seemed to assume a life of its own well beyond the circumstances of its original creation. In 2002, four years after writing it at “a particularly low personal ebb”, Mansell walked into Mann’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood where he had gone to see Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch Drunk Love. But it was his own Lux Aeterna he heard booming out in surround sound, over a trailer for the upcoming Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers. Momentarily mislaying all residual self-deprecation, Mansell chirps, “It blew my mind! It sounded incredible. I kept looking around to see if anyone else was listening to it, but everyone else was talking!”
The intervening years have elevated Mansell to his current position as one of Hollywood’s most sought-after composers. Throughout it all, his working relationship with Aronofsky has endured. A few Christmases ago, he recalls the producer staying at his parents’ house in Stourbridge and watching his reaction as Mansell’s father played him a choice selection of old Pop Will Eat Itself videos. “There was one where I had my leather trousers on and a headband. He turned around and said, ‘Why are you dressed like a pirate?’ In my head I’d been going for more of an Axl Rose look… We weren’t very good at concealing our latest obsessions.”
Whether they even tried to do so is a moot point. Barely two years into their recording life, the group embraced hip-hop with precisely the sort of guileless glee that enraged purists. Displaying a naivety that almost proved to be their undoing, the group accepted an offer to support Public Enemy on a string of European dates promoting the rap troupe’s It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back. Just to recap, then: the militant black New York collective affiliated to Nation of Islam, supported by four white middle-class boys from Stourbridge. “We thought the first two dates at Brixton Academy might be a bit rough,” smiles a rueful Mansell. “There were no two ways about it. It was a black hip-hop audience. And we come on with our long hair, our leather jackets and guitars – I mean, maybe if they’d listened, they’d have gone, ‘Hmm… interesting hybrid!’ We lasted four songs. Once our roadies picked up all the coins that were thrown at us, it added up to about ten quid. But that was the least of it really. They were throwing shoes, umbrellas, anything they didn’t want to take home with them. In the heat of the moment, I was even goading them a bit, but then I turned around, tripped over a monitor and fell flat on my face. The place erupted. The worst of it was knowing that we were going to have to do it all again the following day. I mean, we were little kids really. We were shitting it.”
The life of a band is a distant dream, but by the same token, Mansell has had to work hard to feel a sense of entitlement to his current job. For the longest time, he was worried that he was going to be found out – “that somebody was going to spot the cheat sheet in my back pocket.” He admits that when he first dabbled in composition, he laboured under the misapprehension that “a jobbing composer goes, ‘You want a little bit of jazz? Here you go. A bit of reggae? Coming right up.’ With me, it’s less tangible than that. It comes from a different place.”
If, in recent years, Mansell felt he has anything left to prove, it’s a desire to convince the wider world that he can deliver exceptional work on a film that doesn’t bear Aronofsky’s imprint. This month, when the wider world finally gets to see Duncan Jones’ Moon, any lingering doubts should be kicked into touch. By sidelining almost all electronic embellishments for some of his most traditional-sounding arrangements to date, Mansell brings out the human frailty in Jones’ sinister space-age parable. “All my favourite themes were in there,” he smiles. “Isolation, melancholy, nostalgia. Plenty to get stuck into.” The same themes also loomed large in The Wrestler, Mansell’s most recent Aronofsky score. At the end of that film, of course, we see Mickey Rourke returning to the nostalgia entertainment circuit, realizing that whatever else happens in life, his old fans will always love him. Could that have been an option for Mansell, had things not worked out as he would have liked?
“Well, Pop Will Eat Itself did do four or five shows over here about four years ago,” he says, “You wouldn’t have heard about it. We just did them for fun and put the word out among the old fans. I tell you what though. It was knackering. After we did our last show, I could barely walk for the next three months. I took that as a sign.”
Sunday, 6 February 2011
Tuesday, 25 January 2011
"A broken Britannia for a broken Britain." PJ Harvey: Let England Shake
For Polly Harvey, creation and reaction have long been interwoven. From the swampy reptilian longing of To Bring You My Love and into the febrile solitary confinement chronicled on 1998’s Is This Desire? Then to her nearest brush with the mainstream with the layered FM swagger of Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea. On September 11, 2001, she won a Mercury for that – although at her Washington hotel, a stone’s throw away from a burning Pentagon, celebration was the last thing on Harvey’s mind. In any case, prize or no prize, she was swift to disown that one too. Don Van Vliet – voice of Captain Beefheart, and favourite singer of Harvey’s stonemason father – had become one of four people to whom Harvey sends her records when she has finished them. Van Vliet didn’t like Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea, but he loved its 2004 successor, Uh Huh Her, a record which, at its outermost extremes – Cat On The Wall and Who The Fuck? – sounded like an act of wilful hostility. Lest some of us at the back hadn’t been paying attention, an interview with Barney Hoskyns that same year saw Harvey reiterate, “My ground line when I’m beginning to write a new record is: how far can I get away from the last thing I did?”
Nevertheless, when Harvey reappeared in 2007, with the release of White Chalk, the change seemed to come from a different place altogether. Playing songs from that album in Bristol on the day of its release, Harvey seemed to have discovered a hitherto unheard voice – a high, tremulous thing, perfectly suited to the ornate, mildewed desolation of new songs such as Grow Grow Grow and Silence. Having grown up listening to predominantly American music, it was as though, finally, the West Country scenery of Harvey’s upbringing had finally overpowered her. Perhaps the moment that most strongly symbolized that shift came when she played 1995’s Down By The Water. Played not on guitar but autoharp, the bluesiest standout from To Bring You My Love suddenly sounded like an English folk song of unearthly purity: more Shirley Collins than Albert Collins.
Four years have elapsed since an album of Harvey-penned melodies (she merely provided lyrics on A Woman A Man Walked By her 2009 co-header with John Parish). Appearing on The Andrew Marr Show last May, a confident-looking Harvey affirmed that England was continuing to exert its influence on her writing. This time, however, came yet another break with the old way. For the first time, her new songs were directing the lyrical anglepoise outwards, away from the make-ups, break-ups and losses seemingly chronicled on her previous records. She told a surprised Marr that she took a close interest in politics and that the music she was now making was formed out of “the history of this nation.” By way of illustration, she took her autoharp to a corner of the studio and – sang what we now know to be the title track of her eighth album. “Let England shake,” she sang, “Weighted down with silent dead/I fear our blood won’t rise again.”
Augmented on every song by Parish and sometime Bad Seed Mick Harvey, Let England Shake is an album indelibly coloured by ambivalence towards that very landscape and everything it stands for. “Goddam’ Europeans!/Take me back to England,” begins The Last Living Rose. The singer’s damp, clomping hymn to a Blighty of “fog rolling down behind the mountains/and on the graveyards, and dead sea-captains” isn’t dissimilar in tone to what Peter Doherty achieved on his unjustly overlooked 2008 album Grace/Wastelands. Like Doherty too, the psychogeography of Harvey’s newest songs seems to have been formed by days spent nose deep in history books. The 1915 battle for Gallipoli, which wiped out much of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps prompts no less than three songs.
To the beat of a wearied gait, All And Everyone sounds like the centerpiece of a macabre war musical. Whilst there are no real misfires on Let England Shake, it’s nonetheless overshadowed by its two companion pieces here. “The scent of thyme carried on the wind/Stings your face into remembering/That nature has won again,” sings Harvey over the muted, mournful gallop of On Battleship Hill. Mirrored on vocals by drummer and longtime associate Jean-Marc Butty, her tone of calcified sadness could be that of an aged war widow visiting the scene of her husband’s demise, caught between the beauty of the land and the horrors that once took place there. On the The Colour of the Earth, Butty gives voice to a former soldier recalling the moment his best friend ran forward from the Anzac trench, never to be seen again.
The imagery of the battlefield isn’t restricted to these songs either. In The Glorious Land, she describes a country “ploughed by tanks and feet marching.” Here and on The Words That Maketh Murder, you’re left with an inescapable sense that Harvey set out to write a cache of nursery rhymes as discombobulating in its way as that pre-school plague perennial Ring-A-Ring-A-Roses. Her success is measurable by the proliferation of songs that scratch away at your subconscious from their very first airing. To those already mentioned you can add Written On The Forehead – whose images of civil insurrection dovetail neatly into a sample of Niney The Observer’s conscious reggae anthem Blood & Fire – and, of course, that aforesaid title track. On The Andrew Marr Show, Harvey performed it over a jarringly sinister loop of Istanbul (Not Constantinople). On the album, the sample has been supplanted by the same notes picked out by Parish on a xylophone. “England’s dancing days are gone,” sings Harvey over a bleached out production that makes you think of post-war Super 8 footage shot in blazing sunshine.
Eight months since she debuted those words, we’ve had plenty of opportunity to consider what our Englishness amounts to. We’ve had Dizzee Rascal and James Corden’s Sun-sponsored World Cup song Shout For England challenging all-comers to “come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough”. In Harvey’s hometown of Yeovil, the monument honouring local soldiers who had died in armed combat since the First World War saw its stone column sent crashing to the ground by local youths. We’ve had ministers from the new coalition Government shifting uncomfortably on their Commons benches whilst voices outside echoed their broken promises back at them. We’ve seen deadlines set for our withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan, with no clear indication of what we meaningfully achieved there in the first place.
Of course, as she applied the finishing touches to these songs, Harvey couldn’t have known the degree to which England would start to shake by the end of 2010. Nevertheless, there are moments here where it’s hard not to feel that you’re listening to an uncannily timely piece of work. “I live and die through England,” she sings on England. A wordless harmony, almost North African in tone, does nothing to detract from the enveloping spell of this post-Empire lament. “I have searched for your springs,” she continues, “But people stagnate with time/Like water or air/Undaunted, never failing love for you, England/Is all, to which I cling.” Of all her many guises – doomed blues siren; righteous rock vixen, tormented Victorian ghost – this may be her most powerful to date. A broken Britannia for a broken Britain. It turns out that, more than ever, Polly Harvey was made for these times.
Nevertheless, when Harvey reappeared in 2007, with the release of White Chalk, the change seemed to come from a different place altogether. Playing songs from that album in Bristol on the day of its release, Harvey seemed to have discovered a hitherto unheard voice – a high, tremulous thing, perfectly suited to the ornate, mildewed desolation of new songs such as Grow Grow Grow and Silence. Having grown up listening to predominantly American music, it was as though, finally, the West Country scenery of Harvey’s upbringing had finally overpowered her. Perhaps the moment that most strongly symbolized that shift came when she played 1995’s Down By The Water. Played not on guitar but autoharp, the bluesiest standout from To Bring You My Love suddenly sounded like an English folk song of unearthly purity: more Shirley Collins than Albert Collins.
Four years have elapsed since an album of Harvey-penned melodies (she merely provided lyrics on A Woman A Man Walked By her 2009 co-header with John Parish). Appearing on The Andrew Marr Show last May, a confident-looking Harvey affirmed that England was continuing to exert its influence on her writing. This time, however, came yet another break with the old way. For the first time, her new songs were directing the lyrical anglepoise outwards, away from the make-ups, break-ups and losses seemingly chronicled on her previous records. She told a surprised Marr that she took a close interest in politics and that the music she was now making was formed out of “the history of this nation.” By way of illustration, she took her autoharp to a corner of the studio and – sang what we now know to be the title track of her eighth album. “Let England shake,” she sang, “Weighted down with silent dead/I fear our blood won’t rise again.”
Augmented on every song by Parish and sometime Bad Seed Mick Harvey, Let England Shake is an album indelibly coloured by ambivalence towards that very landscape and everything it stands for. “Goddam’ Europeans!/Take me back to England,” begins The Last Living Rose. The singer’s damp, clomping hymn to a Blighty of “fog rolling down behind the mountains/and on the graveyards, and dead sea-captains” isn’t dissimilar in tone to what Peter Doherty achieved on his unjustly overlooked 2008 album Grace/Wastelands. Like Doherty too, the psychogeography of Harvey’s newest songs seems to have been formed by days spent nose deep in history books. The 1915 battle for Gallipoli, which wiped out much of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps prompts no less than three songs.
To the beat of a wearied gait, All And Everyone sounds like the centerpiece of a macabre war musical. Whilst there are no real misfires on Let England Shake, it’s nonetheless overshadowed by its two companion pieces here. “The scent of thyme carried on the wind/Stings your face into remembering/That nature has won again,” sings Harvey over the muted, mournful gallop of On Battleship Hill. Mirrored on vocals by drummer and longtime associate Jean-Marc Butty, her tone of calcified sadness could be that of an aged war widow visiting the scene of her husband’s demise, caught between the beauty of the land and the horrors that once took place there. On the The Colour of the Earth, Butty gives voice to a former soldier recalling the moment his best friend ran forward from the Anzac trench, never to be seen again.
The imagery of the battlefield isn’t restricted to these songs either. In The Glorious Land, she describes a country “ploughed by tanks and feet marching.” Here and on The Words That Maketh Murder, you’re left with an inescapable sense that Harvey set out to write a cache of nursery rhymes as discombobulating in its way as that pre-school plague perennial Ring-A-Ring-A-Roses. Her success is measurable by the proliferation of songs that scratch away at your subconscious from their very first airing. To those already mentioned you can add Written On The Forehead – whose images of civil insurrection dovetail neatly into a sample of Niney The Observer’s conscious reggae anthem Blood & Fire – and, of course, that aforesaid title track. On The Andrew Marr Show, Harvey performed it over a jarringly sinister loop of Istanbul (Not Constantinople). On the album, the sample has been supplanted by the same notes picked out by Parish on a xylophone. “England’s dancing days are gone,” sings Harvey over a bleached out production that makes you think of post-war Super 8 footage shot in blazing sunshine.
Eight months since she debuted those words, we’ve had plenty of opportunity to consider what our Englishness amounts to. We’ve had Dizzee Rascal and James Corden’s Sun-sponsored World Cup song Shout For England challenging all-comers to “come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough”. In Harvey’s hometown of Yeovil, the monument honouring local soldiers who had died in armed combat since the First World War saw its stone column sent crashing to the ground by local youths. We’ve had ministers from the new coalition Government shifting uncomfortably on their Commons benches whilst voices outside echoed their broken promises back at them. We’ve seen deadlines set for our withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan, with no clear indication of what we meaningfully achieved there in the first place.
Of course, as she applied the finishing touches to these songs, Harvey couldn’t have known the degree to which England would start to shake by the end of 2010. Nevertheless, there are moments here where it’s hard not to feel that you’re listening to an uncannily timely piece of work. “I live and die through England,” she sings on England. A wordless harmony, almost North African in tone, does nothing to detract from the enveloping spell of this post-Empire lament. “I have searched for your springs,” she continues, “But people stagnate with time/Like water or air/Undaunted, never failing love for you, England/Is all, to which I cling.” Of all her many guises – doomed blues siren; righteous rock vixen, tormented Victorian ghost – this may be her most powerful to date. A broken Britannia for a broken Britain. It turns out that, more than ever, Polly Harvey was made for these times.
Sunday, 23 January 2011
“Nothing is the same as it was.” Ali Campbell and UB40, 2008
It’s been several years since Ali Campbell moved out of Birmingham, but the accent remains intact. In January, when the 49 year-old singer found himself back there, he was staying at the Hotel du Vin in the city centre. His brother Robin drove there to pick him up and – he notes this with some amusement – the two found themselves lost amid the regenerated city’s vastly altered landscape. “Nothing is the same as it was,” he says.
Like much of what he’ll go on to talk about the words chime with an accidental sort of poignancy. Two months isn’t a long time – but then two months ago, no-one had any reason to suspect that, after so long together, the most successful reggae band in British history was on the cusp of an acrimonious split. Right now though, UB40s ex-frontman – how strange to type those words – is no longer on speaking terms with Robin or the rest of the group. As Campbell himself says, “It takes a lot for eight members to stay together for 28 years. If you think about it, there’s only U2 – and there’s twice as many of us.”
And yet, there’s seemingly no going back. In February – the last time Campbell and the rest of UB40 exchanged glances – 30,000 Ugandan fans were gazing on at them, many unaware that the band were honouring their final live commitment. By that time a storm of claims and counter-claims had already broken out between the two parties. UB40 said that he had placed the promotion of his solo album Running Free over his duties with the band. On January 29th, a statement from Campbell’s solicitors stated that the singer had left to seek “a resolution to numerous ongoing long term issues that have arisen with the business managers of UB40.”
Come the very end, there were no awkward goodbyes. Since being treated for alcoholism, Campbell has kept a car waiting at the end of every UB40 show, lest he be lured into the recreational habits that come with the after-show party. In Kampala, it meant that he could simply run off stage and, effectively, out of UB40. But that was February – and if truth be told, by this point, the feud had already assumed a personal tone.
Taking exception to UB40’s contention that his “management” grievances were a smokescreen for his desire to put his solo career first, Campbell struck back, implying sour grapes. On Running Free’s arrival in UK top ten last October, he said that Paul McCartney was quicker to offer his congratulations than any of UB40. “All I got [from the band] was a text off Norman [Hassan, trombonist] that said, ‘Well done Piggy.’” Campbell’s nickname, presumably? “Yes. Well, it used to be.”
The hurt comes out in brief bursts. During the course of a one hour conversation, Campbell says things about his bandmates that I suspect he doesn’t really mean (a trait you hope he learns to curb before more excessive remarks end up being published). His bullish demeanour is heightened by the news that the group’s keyboard player Michael Virtue has also announced his departure, citing similar grievances. Just as telling though is the sense of a man keen to reassure himself that he has made the right decision. He points across the corridor to a studio where Chrissie Hynde – who duetted with UB40 on their version of I Got You – was recently rehearsing. “She came in, saw my band and said how brilliant they sounded. Then, she says, ‘I’ve f***ing had it with my band as well. Martin [the drummer] is still there, but she says she got rid of the others last week. She said, ‘We went into the studio and it just sounded like The Pretenders… and who wants to hear that apart from four f***ing fat lesbians in Ohio?’ I wanna do what you’re doing.”
Campbell may have inspired Chrissie Hynde to find a new band, but the fact is that plenty of people remain fond of Campbell’s old one. Whatever you think of their 80s mutation into a living reggae-lite jukebox, their first two albums – Signing Off and Present Arms – deserve to be acknowledged alongside more feted Midlands contemporaries such as The Specials and The Beat. As it happens, they rediscovered their militant edge in fine style on 2005’s Who You Fighting For. When it comes to talking about the group’s collective infancy, Campbell needs no encouragement. “Back then, Birmingham was multiracial. We’ve gone backwards in that respect. If you go back to our old stomping ground – Balsall Heath and Sparkhill – black kids hang around with black kids and white kids stick with other whites.”
Campbell says that the values promoted by ensuing forms of music have changed the social scenery. “You would never have a band emerge now, in the same way that UB40 did in 1979. But that’s the problem you’ve got now. Hip-hop came along and we inherited the segregation that it promotes.” All the more reason, you think, for them to stay together in 2008. By the same token, it’s nice to see him revelling in nostalgia for happier times. Like all bands starting out, he remembers UB40 as a band of simple pleasures. His friendship with Hynde dates all the way back to 1980 when The Pretenders toured with UB40 and “shared their rider with us.”
Two years later, substance abuse had killed off two members of The Pretenders, but UB40 had ingested nothing stronger than beer and weed. That all changed, remembers Campbell, with the release of UB44 in 1982. Prior to recording it, they embarked on a tour of Europe. Belgium provided their introduction to cocaine. “You go there and the hotels have glass dressers with grooves for coke and little scoops for heroin – from the 1920s. So we were all getting into the history of it. I remember going out and trying [cocaine], and just going out and laughing at the top of our voices – you know, that big elation thing you feel for the first time. Two years later, we were in Bogota with the crew f***ing marking out the stage with coke like [it was] chalk, ’cos we all had that much Peruvian flake, you know?”
Conspicuous by his abstinence was Campbell’s brother Robin. The younger brother likens himself to their father, womanizing Scottish folk singer Ian Campbell – “I did everything to excess” – while he likens the comparatively timid Robin to their mother. “He smokes weed now, but he didn’t start until his 30s.” says Ali, now a near-teetotal father of eight children (four from a previous marriage).
How to square the affectionate glint with which Campbell talks about UB40’s past with the open warfare being reluctantly conducted by both parties through publicists, solicitors and newsprint? In pop there’s no shortage of precedents for this sort of thing. For a year at the end of the 60s, The Bee Gees used the press to level all sorts of accusations at each other. In 1970, a heartbroken Paul McCartney left The Beatles before going on to sue them for the dissolution of their contractual relationship.
UB40’s implosion may yet turn out to be temporary. Right now though, a dream-team comprising Kofi Anan, Terry Waite and a resurrected Mo Mowlam would to struggle to establish common ground between the conflicting utterances currently being issued by both parties. Campbell’s story centres on two bones of contention: (i) his alleged attempts to access details pertaining to the band’s finances; and (ii) his decision to make a solo album at the same time as UB40 were recording their 24th studio album, entitled 24/7. Leaving aside (i) for now, Campbell insists that his solo tracks were recorded in his spare time, without compromising the band’s schedule. For a while, relations between Campbell and the band must have been amicable – at least amicable enough for the singer and UB40 saxophonist Brian Travers to co-write nine songs for Running Free.
However, Campbell now alleges that his album plans became an issue for members of UB40, who thought its release would detract from 24/7. In a bid to placate his colleagues, Campbell says he then tried to convince the band that publicity for his solo album would have a positive effect on the fortunes of 24/7. A further sticking point may have been Campbell’s decision to enlist guest vocalists such as Smokey Robinson, Mick Hucknall, Lemar and Katie Melua on his solo album. UB40’s album was also planned as a set of collaborations. If Campbell describes the clash of projects as surmountable, the same cannot be said of his problems with those running the band’s business affairs. “Every single band member knows I’ve got gripes with the management and I’ve had them for years. But their statement is that I’ve left to pursue a solo career and [I think] I’ve become bigger than the band is all about protecting… management”
And so two issues that – in Campbell’s mind are separate – are intertwined in the eyes of his ex-mates. Rightly or wrongly, UB40 see his business grievances as a smokescreen for his own personal acquisitiveness. Responding to Campbell’s words, UB40 ¬– via their publicist – emailed to say they were “disappointed that Ali Campbell continues to use and hide behind a variety of allegations against the other band members of UB40 and their supposed ‘management Svengali’s [sic].’ Ali Campbell's departure from UB40 has always been about promoting his solo career.”
Campbell, obviously begs to differ, alleging that the group are happy to live on their monthly allowance for the sake of a quiet life: “I want to find out where the rest of the money’s going.” As part of the statement sent to The Times, drummer James Brown suggests that Campbell – who once claimed to have bought his wife a £2000 pair of Gucci jeans – may have become too used to living beyond his means, “The truth is UB40 were no longer prepared to fund the extravagant lifestyles of the other two band members. After being given an ultimatum by both Ali and Michael [Virtue] to sack our staff, some of whom have worked with us for nearly 30 years, we chose to ignore their ultimatum and they chose to leave.”
Campbell’s representatives dispute James Brown’s words. They say Campbell requested four weeks off this June, for a UK tour – and that prior to asking UB40 for this time, he checked with their agent to ensure there was no conflict with a planned UB40 tour of America. It seems, though, that – with the release of 24/7 to avoid a clash with Campbell’s solo promotional duties – the singer’s decision to play solo shows in June this year compounded existing tensions. Prior to last week, fans were still holding out hope of a resolution. But on Saturday, Brian Travers posted a notice on the group’s message board from which there may be no return. Angry at what he sees as the behaviour of “someone that could sell us out quite so easily”, he accused Campbell of “turning into an egomaniac” and using the dispute to “sell tickets for his upcoming tour.” On the afternoon of our meeting, Campbell had already read Travers’ posting and pledged to “never share a stage with him again.”
Of course, if people have to move on, they will move on. Campbell asks if I want to see his new band and beckons me into the rehearsal room. Once in, it isn’t hard to see what so enthused Chrissie Hynde. Eight or nine skilled musicians busily run through Campbell’s imminent Royal Albert Hall show. Scheduled to appear among these venerable reggae sessioneers are most of the guest singers on Running Free – Smokey included. Fans will no doubt go home happy. But when Campbell opens his mouth to sing the lines, “All I can do, I’ve done/But memories won’t go”, will Red Red Wine have ever sounded sadder?
Like much of what he’ll go on to talk about the words chime with an accidental sort of poignancy. Two months isn’t a long time – but then two months ago, no-one had any reason to suspect that, after so long together, the most successful reggae band in British history was on the cusp of an acrimonious split. Right now though, UB40s ex-frontman – how strange to type those words – is no longer on speaking terms with Robin or the rest of the group. As Campbell himself says, “It takes a lot for eight members to stay together for 28 years. If you think about it, there’s only U2 – and there’s twice as many of us.”
And yet, there’s seemingly no going back. In February – the last time Campbell and the rest of UB40 exchanged glances – 30,000 Ugandan fans were gazing on at them, many unaware that the band were honouring their final live commitment. By that time a storm of claims and counter-claims had already broken out between the two parties. UB40 said that he had placed the promotion of his solo album Running Free over his duties with the band. On January 29th, a statement from Campbell’s solicitors stated that the singer had left to seek “a resolution to numerous ongoing long term issues that have arisen with the business managers of UB40.”
Come the very end, there were no awkward goodbyes. Since being treated for alcoholism, Campbell has kept a car waiting at the end of every UB40 show, lest he be lured into the recreational habits that come with the after-show party. In Kampala, it meant that he could simply run off stage and, effectively, out of UB40. But that was February – and if truth be told, by this point, the feud had already assumed a personal tone.
Taking exception to UB40’s contention that his “management” grievances were a smokescreen for his desire to put his solo career first, Campbell struck back, implying sour grapes. On Running Free’s arrival in UK top ten last October, he said that Paul McCartney was quicker to offer his congratulations than any of UB40. “All I got [from the band] was a text off Norman [Hassan, trombonist] that said, ‘Well done Piggy.’” Campbell’s nickname, presumably? “Yes. Well, it used to be.”
The hurt comes out in brief bursts. During the course of a one hour conversation, Campbell says things about his bandmates that I suspect he doesn’t really mean (a trait you hope he learns to curb before more excessive remarks end up being published). His bullish demeanour is heightened by the news that the group’s keyboard player Michael Virtue has also announced his departure, citing similar grievances. Just as telling though is the sense of a man keen to reassure himself that he has made the right decision. He points across the corridor to a studio where Chrissie Hynde – who duetted with UB40 on their version of I Got You – was recently rehearsing. “She came in, saw my band and said how brilliant they sounded. Then, she says, ‘I’ve f***ing had it with my band as well. Martin [the drummer] is still there, but she says she got rid of the others last week. She said, ‘We went into the studio and it just sounded like The Pretenders… and who wants to hear that apart from four f***ing fat lesbians in Ohio?’ I wanna do what you’re doing.”
Campbell may have inspired Chrissie Hynde to find a new band, but the fact is that plenty of people remain fond of Campbell’s old one. Whatever you think of their 80s mutation into a living reggae-lite jukebox, their first two albums – Signing Off and Present Arms – deserve to be acknowledged alongside more feted Midlands contemporaries such as The Specials and The Beat. As it happens, they rediscovered their militant edge in fine style on 2005’s Who You Fighting For. When it comes to talking about the group’s collective infancy, Campbell needs no encouragement. “Back then, Birmingham was multiracial. We’ve gone backwards in that respect. If you go back to our old stomping ground – Balsall Heath and Sparkhill – black kids hang around with black kids and white kids stick with other whites.”
Campbell says that the values promoted by ensuing forms of music have changed the social scenery. “You would never have a band emerge now, in the same way that UB40 did in 1979. But that’s the problem you’ve got now. Hip-hop came along and we inherited the segregation that it promotes.” All the more reason, you think, for them to stay together in 2008. By the same token, it’s nice to see him revelling in nostalgia for happier times. Like all bands starting out, he remembers UB40 as a band of simple pleasures. His friendship with Hynde dates all the way back to 1980 when The Pretenders toured with UB40 and “shared their rider with us.”
Two years later, substance abuse had killed off two members of The Pretenders, but UB40 had ingested nothing stronger than beer and weed. That all changed, remembers Campbell, with the release of UB44 in 1982. Prior to recording it, they embarked on a tour of Europe. Belgium provided their introduction to cocaine. “You go there and the hotels have glass dressers with grooves for coke and little scoops for heroin – from the 1920s. So we were all getting into the history of it. I remember going out and trying [cocaine], and just going out and laughing at the top of our voices – you know, that big elation thing you feel for the first time. Two years later, we were in Bogota with the crew f***ing marking out the stage with coke like [it was] chalk, ’cos we all had that much Peruvian flake, you know?”
Conspicuous by his abstinence was Campbell’s brother Robin. The younger brother likens himself to their father, womanizing Scottish folk singer Ian Campbell – “I did everything to excess” – while he likens the comparatively timid Robin to their mother. “He smokes weed now, but he didn’t start until his 30s.” says Ali, now a near-teetotal father of eight children (four from a previous marriage).
How to square the affectionate glint with which Campbell talks about UB40’s past with the open warfare being reluctantly conducted by both parties through publicists, solicitors and newsprint? In pop there’s no shortage of precedents for this sort of thing. For a year at the end of the 60s, The Bee Gees used the press to level all sorts of accusations at each other. In 1970, a heartbroken Paul McCartney left The Beatles before going on to sue them for the dissolution of their contractual relationship.
UB40’s implosion may yet turn out to be temporary. Right now though, a dream-team comprising Kofi Anan, Terry Waite and a resurrected Mo Mowlam would to struggle to establish common ground between the conflicting utterances currently being issued by both parties. Campbell’s story centres on two bones of contention: (i) his alleged attempts to access details pertaining to the band’s finances; and (ii) his decision to make a solo album at the same time as UB40 were recording their 24th studio album, entitled 24/7. Leaving aside (i) for now, Campbell insists that his solo tracks were recorded in his spare time, without compromising the band’s schedule. For a while, relations between Campbell and the band must have been amicable – at least amicable enough for the singer and UB40 saxophonist Brian Travers to co-write nine songs for Running Free.
However, Campbell now alleges that his album plans became an issue for members of UB40, who thought its release would detract from 24/7. In a bid to placate his colleagues, Campbell says he then tried to convince the band that publicity for his solo album would have a positive effect on the fortunes of 24/7. A further sticking point may have been Campbell’s decision to enlist guest vocalists such as Smokey Robinson, Mick Hucknall, Lemar and Katie Melua on his solo album. UB40’s album was also planned as a set of collaborations. If Campbell describes the clash of projects as surmountable, the same cannot be said of his problems with those running the band’s business affairs. “Every single band member knows I’ve got gripes with the management and I’ve had them for years. But their statement is that I’ve left to pursue a solo career and [I think] I’ve become bigger than the band is all about protecting… management”
And so two issues that – in Campbell’s mind are separate – are intertwined in the eyes of his ex-mates. Rightly or wrongly, UB40 see his business grievances as a smokescreen for his own personal acquisitiveness. Responding to Campbell’s words, UB40 ¬– via their publicist – emailed to say they were “disappointed that Ali Campbell continues to use and hide behind a variety of allegations against the other band members of UB40 and their supposed ‘management Svengali’s [sic].’ Ali Campbell's departure from UB40 has always been about promoting his solo career.”
Campbell, obviously begs to differ, alleging that the group are happy to live on their monthly allowance for the sake of a quiet life: “I want to find out where the rest of the money’s going.” As part of the statement sent to The Times, drummer James Brown suggests that Campbell – who once claimed to have bought his wife a £2000 pair of Gucci jeans – may have become too used to living beyond his means, “The truth is UB40 were no longer prepared to fund the extravagant lifestyles of the other two band members. After being given an ultimatum by both Ali and Michael [Virtue] to sack our staff, some of whom have worked with us for nearly 30 years, we chose to ignore their ultimatum and they chose to leave.”
Campbell’s representatives dispute James Brown’s words. They say Campbell requested four weeks off this June, for a UK tour – and that prior to asking UB40 for this time, he checked with their agent to ensure there was no conflict with a planned UB40 tour of America. It seems, though, that – with the release of 24/7 to avoid a clash with Campbell’s solo promotional duties – the singer’s decision to play solo shows in June this year compounded existing tensions. Prior to last week, fans were still holding out hope of a resolution. But on Saturday, Brian Travers posted a notice on the group’s message board from which there may be no return. Angry at what he sees as the behaviour of “someone that could sell us out quite so easily”, he accused Campbell of “turning into an egomaniac” and using the dispute to “sell tickets for his upcoming tour.” On the afternoon of our meeting, Campbell had already read Travers’ posting and pledged to “never share a stage with him again.”
Of course, if people have to move on, they will move on. Campbell asks if I want to see his new band and beckons me into the rehearsal room. Once in, it isn’t hard to see what so enthused Chrissie Hynde. Eight or nine skilled musicians busily run through Campbell’s imminent Royal Albert Hall show. Scheduled to appear among these venerable reggae sessioneers are most of the guest singers on Running Free – Smokey included. Fans will no doubt go home happy. But when Campbell opens his mouth to sing the lines, “All I can do, I’ve done/But memories won’t go”, will Red Red Wine have ever sounded sadder?
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