It’s been more than four decades since UB40 last played at Glastonbury, but the band would love to return to the stage at Worthy Farm, Somerset in the Sunday afternoon Legends slot.
The Birmingham group previously headlined the festival – this year featuring performances from Dua Lipa, Coldplay, Shania Twain and more – back in 1983 as part of a line-up that also featured Marillon, The Beat, Curtis Mayfield and King Sunny Ade, among others.
This year, the Red Red Wine hitmakers are celebrating their 45th anniversary with the forthcoming ‘UB45’ album and a massive UK arena tour in the autumn – and they’re keen to keep the celebrations going.
Speaking in RETROPOP’s April 2024 edition, founding member Robin Campbell reflected on a potential return to Glastonbury, admitting: “It would be lovely to do that again – when we did it in the ‘80s it was a much smaller event, but it was great fun.
“We’d love to do the Legends slot – that’s the one we want to do!”
Over the years, the band has sustained success in five separate decades and the musician says that’s reflected in their audience too, which spans generations at their live shows.
“We gain new audiences all the time and especially with things like social media, YouTube and Spotify, we’re constantly shocked when we go out at how many young kids there are in the front row, singing along to every song that was recorded before they were born,” he admits.
That’s the same internationally, too. “We go back to places like South America, where we haven’t been for years, and all of a sudden we’re playing enormous venues and they’re selling out,” Robin continues, adding there’s one place they’d still love to perform.
“We haven’t played mainland China and that’s something I’d love to do,” he adds. “We did Hong Kong, which was great, but it would be lovely to go and play China.”
Out April 19, UB45 features a combination of new original material and re-recordings of the band’s biggest hits from across the years with new frontman Matt Doyle.
“They’re obviously songs that we still play live and that was the whole point, really. We’re celebrating 45 years and we wanted parts of the album to showcase the band as it is now, with Matt singing those old songs,” Robin reflects.
“The audiences and our fans have already reacted so positively to Matt and the way he does those songs, so it was great to be able to record the songs the way we do them now – still very similar to the originals, but with a few slight changes.
“We wanted to show how well Matt fits into UB40 and how it still sounds like UB40. Even though he’s not doing an impression of Ali [Campbell, former frontman], he’s singing the songs as he singles them and they sound great.
“I’m sure there’ll be criticism and some people will go, ‘Why did you bother?’, but for me it’s obvious why we’ve done it and it’s all part of the 45 year celebration.”
