8. UB40Present Arms/Present Arms In Dub
This is two albums in one as well – I couldn’t help it [laughs]! Everyone surely knows UB40. They wrote some amazing songs. I’m not talking about the cover versions, I know they did a lot of covers. But their own songs were great. They were a great band, an important band. For anybody who thinks they’re into dub, they need to listen to this. This is the foundations. This is what dub is to me. In 1985 UB40 did a project called Baggariddim that I was going to try and squeeze in here. It was a pure reggae album and featured all the local reggae artists and MCs from Birmingham on it. So it was like going back in the day and bringing your crew and making some beats and rhythms and stuff and banging an underground album out. That’s what they did. That’s why I’ve got a lot of respect for them. Even though they had a lot of commercial success they always stayed pretty connected to where they came from. They had a sound system background. There’s a video they made that went with Labour Of Love – that was one of their more commercial albums – but there’s a 20-minute video that’s got four songs on it and it’s a short movie. It’s all in black and white and it’s got some of the best footage of reggae sound systems in it, you know, like going to a blues or going to an after-hours – it’s got all footage of the proper sound systems. It’s really funny as well because a lot of it is set in a scrapyard. I’d recommend for anybody to watch that as well.
