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Top Comments: UB40 Epiphany [1]
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Date: 2022-10-02
NOT UB40, this is Katrina and the Waves
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Some weeks ago, I was watching a reaction video of the song “Red Red Wine” performed by the British reggae band UB40, and I recalled a song that mentioned UB40. The line I remembered was “Where’re you going with that UB40 in your hand?” A little Googling yielded the video of the Bangles performing the song “Going Down to Liverpool.” It was released in 1984, and was not a hit, but I was listening to progressive, “new wave” radio that played the song fairly regularly, so I became familiar with it.
x YouTube Video
The verse mentioning UB40 was:
Hey, where’re you going with that UB40 in your hand? Hey, where’re you going with that UB40 in your hand? I’m going down to Liverpool and do nothing, I’m going down to Liverpool and do nothing, All the days of my life.
Given that my only reference point for UB40 was the reggae band, I figured that the person asking the question saw that the other person was carrying a UB40 album, but I was puzzled by the prospect of the person with the album going to Liverpool to listen to the album “all the days of my life.” It didn’t make a whole lot of sense.
The Bangles were, of course, an American band, but knowing that Liverpool (the original one) was in England, I cast around and discovered that the song was originally recorded by the British band Katrina and the Waves in 1982:
x YouTube Video
To cure my puzzlement, I returned to Google and discovered what a UB40 was in reality:
UB40 (in Britain, formerly) n 1. (Government, Politics & Diplomacy) a registration card issued by the Department of Employment to a person registering as unemployed 2. (Social Welfare) a registration card issued by the Department of Employment to a person registering as unemployed 3. (Social Welfare) informal a person registered as unemployed.
And then I understood. The UB40 was a form used in the U. K. to apply for unemployment benefits. This was in the Thatcher recession that killed so many union jobs, so the UB40 would have been ubiquitous, and the younger generation did not expect to ever have decent employment (“For the rest of my life”). If it wasn’t readily identifiable, a reggae band wouldn’t have chosen it for the band’s name.
And it only took 40 years for me to figure it out.
Comments are below the fold.
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