super groovy delicious bite: signing off

UB40 employed themselves with homemade jazz-dub-reggae to give the world some food for thought. The multi-cultural collective formed in Birmingham, England around Robin Campbell and his younger brother Ali with some friends from Moseley School of Art: Earl Falconer, Brian Travers, and James Brown. Norman Hassan, Michael Virtue, and Astro were brought into the fold soon after. They took their name from the Unemployment Benefit, Form 40; which was used to apply for the dole at the time. Their first gig was on February 9, 1979 at Hare and Hounds pub in Kings Heath for a friends birthday party. Ali Campbell: “We were all so nervous, we were walking round with our instruments on for half an hour before we started playing...It was awful. We’d been used to playing in a cellar, without microphones or a PA system...We were lucky, we’d only done a dozen shows when Chrissie Hynde discovered us at the Rock Garden in London and asked us to support The Pretenders on tour.”

Brian Travers: “We were basically just a bunch of lads who hung out together! You know, we’d all started secondary school together when we were 11, we’d knock about together after school… And, because we lived in the middle of downtown Birmingham, of course we felt the waves of immigration before most people did. In that there were lots of West Indian and Asian people in our neighbourhood. And, because in the Seventies there was no black television or Asian television, to these people - who were our neighbours and friends - music was incredibly important! To the point where you even dressed like your album sleeves! So through school all our ambitions were really pointed towards becoming musicians. And so, by the time we left at 16 and found ourselves on the dole, being a musician wasn’t like the impossible, far-off dream that we’d once thought it was! I mean, we’d never had music classes and so we weren’t what you’d call ‘proper musicians’. But then what we started doing was playing records and spending our time copying them - until we could play them note-for-note! And what we discovered from that was that we all had an ear for flat and sharp, and we could hear tones! So, once we started realising we actually could do this, from there we wrote our first songs that we could perform at gigs - and so ‘Signing Off’ was literally our first collection of songs that we could play!”

'Signing Off' was produced by Bob Lamb, Ray "Pablo" Falconer, and UB40. The album was recorded over three separate sessions: four days in December of 1979 for "King" and "Food for Thought", and two longer sessions during March-April and June-July of 1980 for the remainder. The three tracks for the 12" record were cut 18–20 July 1980 at The Music Centre with Ray "Pablo" Falconer, bassist Earl Falconer's brother producing. The album credits Astro on talk-over vocal; Jim Brown on drums; Ali Campbell on lead vocals and rhythm guitar; Robin Campbell on lead guitar and vocals; Earl Falconer on bass; Norman Lamont Hassan on percussion and congas; Brian Travers on tenor saxophone and melodica; and Michael Virtue on keyboards, strings, organ.