Album dossier / 1980

Signing Off

UB40 · Reggae/Dub

UB40 couldn't afford a real studio, so Signing Off was tracked largely in producer Bob Lamb's ground-floor Moseley bedsit -- nicknamed 'Home of the Hits' -- on an eight-track machine, with Lamb's bed famously raised on stilts over the mixing desk below it. Space was so tight that parts were recorded outside the flat entirely: Brian Travers cut saxophone in the kitchen and Norman Hassan recorded percussion in the back garden, close enough to the microphones that, as Hassan put it, 'if you stripped my track down, you could hear the birds in the background.' The DIY sessions (December 1979 through July 1980, finished at The Music Centre) produced the double A-side single 'King'/'Food for Thought' -- radio DJs favoured the poppier 'Food for Thought' B-side over the intended lead track, turning it into the era-defining hit -- and the album's politically blunt look at unemployment, racism and famine under Thatcher-era Britain took it to #2 on the UK Albums Chart, eventually going platinum. Lamb used the money the album earned to build Birmingham's Highbury Studio, which later hosted Duran Duran's earliest demos.