There’s a twat in my kitchen, what am I gonna do? The twat in question is Ali Campbell singing “Red Red Wine”, and the only course of action is to hurl the radio out of the window. The UB40 official website has a wonderful picture of the band’s severed heads roasting in Hell – this is the only good thing I can say about them. UB40 were a testimony to the unifying power of reggae – as in their hands any song, be it country, rock or AOR, sounds basically the same. A mid-tempo shuffle ornamented with Campbell’s graceless Brummie whine, the music of UB40 brings to mind fag ash floating in half-drunk cans of stale Red Stripe and joints made out of tea leaves.
“Red Red Wine” is by a distance their worst offender. There is no song that cannot be made more insufferable by a dire ‘reggae version’, in fact there is only one surer-fire way of lowering quality and that is to include a bit of toasting. “Red Red Wine” of course does just this. The song is a hymn to the power of booze to obliterate the memory, however red wine stains awfully and to get this record off your mind you would need to drink France dry.
It has come to my attention that I have attacked Red, Red Wine before as part of my Rainbow Of Rubbish. Well let us say this piece, and indeed the whole Round Of Rubbish is a reggae version of said feature and then I can be as terrible as I like. Luckily you can seperate out the Red from the Red Wine in the name to justify this. And anyway, I cannot think of a better way to spend my time than kicking Ali Campbell just when he may have recovered from the last time.