UB40 featuring Ali Campbell will play live concert dates in Ireland in November 2026.
UB40 featuring Ali Campbell bring their Big Love Tour to TF Royal, Castlebar on Friday 27 November and 3Arena, Dublin on Saturday 28 November, 2026.
Fuelled by the voice that powered UB40 to 70 million record sales and over fifty UK chart hits, Ali Campbell is again bringing some much-needed reggae cheer into the world as he takes the latest incarnation of his extraordinary band to the world’s biggest stages. Building on a legacy that dates back 45 years to his formative years in inner-city Birmingham, singer and guitarist Ali’s touring ensemble remains the most authentic realisation of UB40’s original aim of advancing reggae in all its guises.
For Ali, who began a new era when he left the band’s original line-up in 2008, there’s no shortage of material to sing live. A typical show will include classic reggae covers such as Cherry Oh Baby, Please Don't Make Me Cry, Kingston Town and Red Red Wine – all from the hugely successful Labour Of Love series – plus more recent originals such as Unprecedented, from the 2021 album of the same name.
This current flurry of activity is part of a story that goes back to 1979, when UB40 began putting their own, roots-rocking slant on Jamaican reggae. Taking their name from the official form given to individuals claiming unemployment benefit in the UK, the multi-racial band played their first show at the Hare & Hounds pub in Kings Heath in February 1979. After reaching number four in the charts with their double A-sided debut single, King / Food For Thought, the band released the Signing Off album in 1980. They went on to top the UK singles chart on four occasions – with Red Red Wine in 1983, I Got You Babe (a duet between Ali and Pretenders singer and long-standing UB40 champion Chrissie Hynde) in 1985; (I Can't Help) Falling In Love With You in 1993 and Baby Come Back with Pato Banton in 1994. Two of those hits, Red Red Wine and (I Can't Help) Falling In Love With You, also topped the US charts. Paying homage to the songs that inspired them, UB40 went on to release three volumes of the Labour Of Love series.
Ali’s rich, honeyed vocals gave the band’s music a sweet, melodic sheen, but the songs written by the group themselves were often iron fists in velvet gloves – gritty snapshots of the 1980s. Food For Thought attempted to draw attention to famine in North Africa five years before Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas? aimed to do likewise, contrasting Third World poverty with the conspicuous consumption of the Western world at Christmas. King, inspired by the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., looked at racism in America. One In Ten, a UK Top Ten single in 1981, was a harrowingly brutal account of a Britain blighted by chronic unemployment, teenage suicide, homeless refugees and lonely pensioners. ‘The saddest thing is that some of those songs are still so appropriate,’ says Ali. ‘We wrote King 44 years ago, but the song still says something about America today, and it’s the same with One In Ten in the UK.’
By the time Ali left the original band, he had already released two successful solo albums in Big Love (1995) and Running Free (2007). He went on to make two more, Flying High (2009) and Great British Songs (2010), before he and original UB40 keyboardist Mickey Virtue reunited with Astro on 2014's Silhouette, an album featuring covers of songs by The Beatles, Bob Dylan and others alongside a handful of original tunes. Silhouette was followed by 2016's UB40 Unplugged – on which Ali, Astro and Mickey performed iconic UB40 tracks acoustically for the first time – and A Real Labour Of Love in 2018. The latter updated the ethos of the original Labour Of Love trilogy, which focussed on songs from the 1960s and early 1970s, by embracing the late 1970s and the digital reggae and dancehall styles of the 1980s.
'The 1980s were such a fertile decade for reggae, and new technology meant the genre was moving forward at an incredible pace,' says Ali. 'By 2018, enough time had elapsed for us to investigate that era properly, which is what we did.' The band’s fans agreed, and the album was only held off the UK number one spot by the soundtrack to the Hollywood blockbuster The Greatest Showman. It was the highest charting album by any incarnation of the band since 1993's Promises And Lies.
‘We're really blessed in that we get such a mixed audience at our shows,’ says Ali. ‘We still get the original fans, but we’ve also picked up a younger, festival crowd who are into grime and dance music. The influence of reggae on today’s music is huge. If you listen to grime, hip-hop, drill, jungle, or drum and bass, so much of it has come from dub and dancehall. Reggae music is a perfect antidote to these dark times. It’s music that unifies. You might not change anything by singing about it, but you can at least travel the world and try to bring people together.’
