When was ub40 red red wine released

The members of the biracial band had all grown up loving reggae; the music had been part of their environment. They became a band after singer Ali Campbell got a glass smashed into his face in a barfight on his 17th birthday. Campbell got a corneal implant and 90 stitches, and he spent a month in the hospital. The UK has a thing called Criminal Injuries Compensation, where victims of violent crimes get payouts from the government. Campbell used that money to buy some instruments, and UB40 started.

Campbell put the band together with his brother Robin and with a whole crew of his childhood friends. They named themselves after the form — Unemployment Benefits form 40 — that broke young people would use to sign up for the dole. The band members were mostly unemployed when they started, and that name works as a kind of sly statement of working-class solidarity.

UB40 had showed up at the exact right moment; their sound and working-class leftist perspective fit perfectly with the British pop zeitgeist. Within a couple of years, UB40 cranked out two albums and sent four singles into the UK top UB40 wanted to bring pop attention to this music that they loved, and they had no idea that the most immediate of those covers was a damn Neil Diamond song. UB40 slow the tempo to a crawl, building the song around a digital bassline and a breezy, loping drum track.

Instead, the groove bubbles away pleasantly, and Astro comes in with a thick-accented toast. Shout out to that simian. And yes, Red, Red Wine was a good song from way back in And I have to say, while you hear a song there, it is perhaps languid and almost sleepy as if Neil had already finished a few bottles.

Or, maybe it was those strings doing a lullaby in the background. Their first hit had come in Those in the U. Then, in , they re-released the song in a slightly reworked version which went all the way to the top of the charts reaching no. It's a song that took a long and winding road to 1 on the Hot Let's connect the dots with five fun facts.

UB40 didn't realize they were covering Neil Diamond when they recorded "Red Red Wine" "Even when we saw the writing credit which said 'N Diamond,' we thought it was a Jamaican artist called Negus Diamond," said Astro, the group's former vocalist and trumpet player, to the Daily News. The song was a hit in the band's native UK, soaring to 1 on the singles charts. UB40's performance at Nelson Mandela's 70th birthday party gave the song new life in summer Mandela's 70th birthday bash was a huge star-studded concert at London's Wembley Stadium.

When it topped KZZP's local charts, the band's label took notice. Interestingly enough, the band was ready to release Labour of Love II when the label asked them to push it back while they relaunched "Red Red Wine" in America. The whirlwind promotion sent the tune soaring to the 1 spot on the Hot for the week of October 15,