Number One for one week on 30th May 1981
Note – This single was a double A-side with Don’t Let It Pass You By – the NME Charts (either deliberately or mistakenly) list it solely as “Don’t Slow Down”, so that’s the side I’ll focus on here.When you’re having conversations with someone else about music, it’s always interesting to witness the assumptions that pop up; for example, until fairly recently I assumed everyone knew that UB40 were once an extremely credible band. I took it for granted that their backstory was so enormous that it hadn’t been forgotten, even beneath the crushing weight of oldies radio exposure their biggest hits get. Very often, though, people are astonished by the idea that they were ever anything more than a very commercial Breeze FM friendly act. Their childhood memories begin at “Red Red Wine” and go back no further.
That’s a strange mistake to make. UB40, as most people reading this almost certainly realise, had deeply humble, lo-fi underground beginnings. Starting off as a Birmingham live act, they signed to the independent label Graduate in 1980 and proceeded to issue a string of successful top ten hits which felt like reggae viewed through a grease-smeared post-punk lens. Titles like “The Earth Dies Screaming”, referencing a possible nuclear apocalypse, felt more targeted towards IPC journalists and John Peel than the national top ten, but somehow pushed their way through anyway.
This period is also significant in that it produced allegedly the first ever single on an indie label to go top ten – “King”. I’ve seen this fact bandied around often, but nonetheless I doubt it’s entirely true, or at the very least it depends on what your definition of ‘indie’ is. President Records were distributed by Lugton in the sixties (a company far away from the business of major labels) and got The Equals to number one, and Joe Meek’s Triumph Records earlier in that decade also scored a top ten hit in the form of Michael Cox’s “Angela Jones”. What I think people mean is that UB40 were the first to score a major hit single while an independent chart of some form also existed, which is a clear difference.
No matter; to begin with, UB40 were certainly operating on minuscule budgets. Their debut LP “Signing Off” was recorded in a bedsit in Birmingham, and contained a reproduction of an unemployment form on the cover. It was deemed a brave, brilliant and authentic record at the time, and found support among dopeheads, students, reggae fans, soulies and casual listeners alike. I heard the LP frequently in the bedroom I shared with my brothers growing up, and when I was old enough to eventually buy a copy for myself, I did. “Signing Off” is nothing like UB40 at their commercial peak – it’s far too skeletal and dour for that – but despite that, its sound and dominant themes were entirely right for the period. Like The Specials’ “Ghost Town”, its sulk sums up the mood of the early eighties. While it may have been more compressed, boxed in and less widescreen than that record, the disc and its packaging are equally tied to an era which promised little for those in the old industrial heartlands.
Following the success of that album, the group left Graduate Records – who survived without them for awhile but never found another act who caught the public imagination to the same extent - and formed their own label DEP International, with a view to issuing their own material and that of other reggae artists they admired. The first handful of DEP records were distributed by Spartan and, in common with their previous work, entered the indie charts as a result.