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Ali Campbell from UB40 chats to I Like Music

ILM: And they're all good songs…

ALI: Thank you. There's been an album a year for the past 25 years or so and we do put ourselves through it a bit, when we're writing an album. We've got a standard that we've set ourselves and we don't want to slip beneath it, when we're not covering songs, we don't care about covers. If it's a great tune we'll cover it, but lyrically we've set a standard. People have accused us of selling out and going soft, but that's not the case at all. If you listen to my last album, Who Are You Fighting For? It's just as vitriolic, and as cynical and miserable as our first one, Signing Off. [Laughs] So, what we pen, we suffer for, because music comes easily but the lyrics, we demand a high standard. And the new UB40 album 24/7 is some of the best lyrics we've ever done.

ILM: So you've kept on raising the bar?

ALI: Yeah, although we were quite happy to stay at a certain level. With our early albums we thought they were f***ing good lyrics. In fact our first single, there's "I dream of Donna, dying in the dust, waiting for the man coming from the west," which nobody at all understood because of my accent. And then you get to the verses, "skin and bones is creeping doesn't know he's dead, ancient eyes are peeping from his infant head," which is serious stuff. But we got away with it by rapping it up in cute tunes.
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