Signing Off


Signing Off is the debut album by British reggae band UB40, released in the UK on 29 August 1980 by Dudley-based independent label Graduate Records. It was an immediate success in their home country, reaching number 2 on the UK albums chart, and made UB40 one of the many popular reggae bands in Britain, several years before the band found international fame. The politically-concerned lyrics struck a chord in a country with widespread public divisions over high unemployment, the policies of the recently elected Conservative party under Margaret Thatcher, and the rise of the National Front party, while the record's dub-influenced rhythms reflected the late 1970s influence in British pop music of West Indian music introduced by immigrants from the Caribbean after the Second World War, particularly reggae and ska – this was typified by the 2 Tone movement, at that point at the height of its success and led by fellow West Midlands act The Specials, with whom UB40 drew comparisons due to their multiracial band line-up and socialist views.
Still considered by many fans and music critics to be UB40's best album, Signing Off was reissued for its 30th anniversary in 2010 as a "collector's edition" containing bonus tracks and a DVD of the videos for the singles plus television footage of the band from the time of the album's release.

Recording

After forming in 1978, the members of UB40 made an agreement to spend the next year doing nothing more than learning their instruments and practising their songs until they felt they were good enough. Saxophonist Brian Travers said, "We commandeered a cellar and started rehearsing every day, nine till five. Our first experiences of playing an instrument started together, and we'd humiliate each other over mistakes. But we were very serious about our music. It was a year before we played our first gig. It was in an upper room at the 'Hare and Hounds' in Kings Heath, Birmingham. We played the whole of Signing Off because they were the only songs we knew."
Towards the end of 1979 the band felt confident enough to start recording their songs, and approached local musician Bob Lamb as he was the only person they knew with any recording experience. Lamb had been the drummer with the Steve Gibbons Band for much of the 1970s and was a well-known figure within the Birmingham music scene. He remembered that "'King' was the very first song they ever played to me, and it just blew my mind basically, to realise a bunch of kids could make a sound like that... it blew me away. And that was it for me, I was hooked, it was a bit like Elvis walks in or something, you know, it was one of those moments." However, as the band were unable to afford a proper recording studio, the album was recorded in Lamb's own home at the time, a ground-floor flat in a house on Cambridge Road in Birmingham's Moseley district that later became affectionately known as the "Home of the Hits". Lamb would later use the money he earned from the album's success to build a proper recording studio, Highbury Studio, in an old cricket bat factory in nearby Kings Heath, which remained under his ownership until his retirement in 2010 – during the 1980s and 90s he would go on to produce the early demos for Duran Duran and work on the debut albums by fellow Birmingham natives Ruby Turner, The Lilac Time and Ocean Colour Scene. However, in an interview to mark Signing Off's 30th anniversary, Brian Travers recalled just how basic the recording facilities of the original Cambridge Road "studio" really were:
Producer Lamb described the somewhat relaxed recording process:
and also remembered how easy it was to make the album:
The LP album was recorded in three separate sessions: four days in December 1979 just before Christmas which produced the songs "King" and "Food for Thought" for the debut single, and two longer sessions in March–April 1980 and June–July 1980 when the bulk of the album was recorded. The three tracks for the 12" record that came with the album were recorded during 18–20 July 1980 at The Music Centre with Ray "Pablo" Falconer, bassist Earl Falconer's brother, handling production duties. Falconer would go on to produce the majority of UB40's subsequent records until his death in a car crash in 1987.

Musical style and composition

Signing Off featured a mix of reggae and dub material which was lyrically politically charged and socially conscious, while musically it was reverb-heavy, doom-laden yet mellifluous, best exemplified in the hits "King" and "Food For Thought" as well as the searing "Burden of Shame". Four of the album's thirteen tracks were instrumentals—"Adella", "25%", "Signing Off" and "Reefer Madness"—all heavily influenced by dub reggae rhythms and effects such as reverb and echo, and led by Mickey Virtue's keyboard and Travers' saxophone melodies. Two tracks were cover versions: an early Randy Newman composition "I Think It's Going to Rain Today" and the blues classic "Strange Fruit", two songs that dealt with compassion for fellow humans and racism respectively. The main theme in "Burden of Shame" is copied from Van Morrison's "Moondance". This track and the remaining five self-composed tracks were all concerned with social and political issues:
  • "Tyler" was written about the young black American Gary Tyler, who at the age of 17 was convicted by an all-white judge and jury of murdering a 13-year-old white boy, despite serious irregularities in the prosecution case and the lack of a murder weapon ever being found. UB40 intended "Tyler" to be their first single in the United States. The band revisited the subject on the song "Rainbow Nation" on their 2008 album TwentyFourSeven.
  • "King" was about the late Martin Luther King Jr., questioning the lost direction of the slain leader's followers and the state of mourning of a nation after his death.
  • "Burden of Shame" recounted the misdeeds performed in the name of British Imperialism.
  • "Food for Thought" was an attempt to publicise and condemn the famine in north Africa, comparing it with the Western over-indulgent celebration of Christmas, nearly five years before Band Aid brought the subject to widespread attention. Subsequently, it was also a prominent feature of UB40's 2005 Live 8 appearance in Hyde Park, London, 25 years after the song had been first released. Bob Lamb later revealed that the song's original working title had been "The Christmas Song" until one of the band's roadies suggested "Food for Thought" would be a better title.
  • "Little by Little" highlighted the growing inequality between the rich and the poor.
  • "Madam Medusa" was a vivid description of Margaret Thatcher's rise to power depicted in a grotesque style, featuring some of the band's most impassioned and bitter lyrics.

    Release and promotion

The album's release was preceded by two double A-sided singles. The first, "King"/"Food For Thought", was released as UB40's debut single in February 1980. It topped the independent music chart for three months, reached number 4 in the main UK singles chart, and went on to sell nearly half a million copies, having been certified silver for sales of 250,000 copies in May 1980. It was the first single on a completely independent label without the backing of a major record company to reach the top 10 of the UK singles chart. Upon the single's release "Food for Thought" gained more radio airplay than "King" – speaking about the single in 2010, Bob Lamb said, "'Food for Thought' was actually the B-side of 'King' originally: although it was a double A-side 'King' was always going to be the main song, but the DJs picked up on 'Food for Thought' because it was quicker and chirpier, more dancey, more of a radio track. So they played that a lot, and really that became the hit, 'Food for Thought', but whenever you bought the record it always said 'King'/'Food for Thought' – 'King' was always, like, the first name on the record, which I thought was pretty cool."
The follow-up single "My Way of Thinking"/"I Think It's Going to Rain Today" peaked at number 6 on the UK charts in June 1980. Although this was the band's second single before the album was released, "My Way of Thinking" was not included on the album, despite gaining far more radio airplay and television exposure than "I Think It's Going to Rain Today": however, by the time of the album's release the group had come to dislike "My Way of Thinking", with singer Ali Campbell describing the song as "awful".
The original 1980 vinyl release of Signing Off consisted of a ten-track LP plus a three-track 12" record which contained the tracks "Madam Medusa", "Strange Fruit" and "Reefer Madness". On the cassette version all thirteen tracks were split over the two sides of the cassette. When the album was issued on CD for the first time in 1984, it contained all thirteen tracks of the LP and cassette versions.
In 1985 the album was repackaged as a double album under the title The UB40 File, with the addition of "My Way of Thinking", "The Earth Dies Screaming" and "Dream a Lie", thus collecting together on a single album all of UB40's output on Graduate Records, before the band's subsequent releases on their own DEP International label. The latter two songs were released as UB40's third single two months after the release of Signing Off, and were written and recorded at the same time as the album. For a short time in 1981–82 in Australia, the original album was released with a bonus 45 rpm single containing these two tracks, packaged in an identical smaller version of the album cover. The UB40 File has subsequently also been released on CD.
In 2010, to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the album's release Virgin Records reissued the album as a three-disc "Collector's Edition", with extensive liner notes by Birmingham-born journalist Peter Paphides. The bonus tracks on the second CD included the 12" versions of all four sides of UB40's second and third singles, and the two sessions the band recorded at the BBC's Maida Vale Studios for the John Peel and Kid Jensen shows on BBC Radio 1. The DVD contained the videos made for five of the six songs on their first three double A-side singles, the band's first ever appearance on the BBC television programme Top of the Pops performing "Food for Thought", and the concert recorded at Keele University for BBC2's television series Rock Goes to College. To tie in with the 30th anniversary reissue, the band announced a concert tour where they would perform a first set of the album in its entirety, followed by a second set of other hits.