UB40 Had No Idea Their Signature 1983 Hit Was Written By Neil Diamond

Neil Diamond has had a long and stellar career with more than a dozen top 10 hits, including "Cracklin' Rose" from 1970, which proved that year was the best of Diamond's career. But another of his early songs was only a minor hit, stalling out at No. 62 in 1968 before nearly being forgotten. The slow acoustic ballad — "Red Red Wine" — about dealing with heartbreak got a second life after the reggae band UB40, from Birmingham, England, covered the song for their 1983 album "Labour of Love." Yet the band had never actually heard the original and had no idea it was written by Diamond.

The multi-racial members of UB40, named for a British unemployment form, grew up in Birmingham's Balsall Heath, an economically disadvantaged neighborhood.  There, they were surrounded by reggae and fell in love with this Jamaican style of music. The band formed in 1978, and by 1983 UB40 was Britain's most popular purveyor of reggae when they decided to release a cover album of their favorite reggae classics. One of these was a 1969 rocksteady version of "Red Red Wine" by Tony Tribe that they believed had been written by an obscure Jamaican artist. "We had to go looking into the center of seven-inch vinyls, and there was 'N. Diamond,' so we presumed that was obviously Neville Diamond or Negus Diamond," UB40's singer and toaster Astro told Billboard in 2018. "You could've knocked us out with a feather when we found out it was actually Neil Diamond."

It's not that strange that UB40 had no idea "Red Red Wine" was a Neil Diamond song. Although his version, featured on the 1967 album "Just For You," had charted in the U.S., it didn't chart in the U.K.. That didn't stop the tune from quickly becoming a popular cover song for other artists. In 1968, the Jamaican group Jimmy James and the Vagabonds' version reached No. 36 on the U.K. charts. Other artists soon followed.

Then, in 1969, Tony Tribe's faster, rocksteady version reached No. 46 in the U.K. It was this version that the members of UB40 loved. "Nobody was as shocked as we were to find out that Neil Diamond wrote 'Red Red Wine'... To me, it was always a Tony Tribe song. He sang it," the band's singer Ali Campbell told Billboard in 1984.

UB40's version also had a strange chart history. While it was a hit in the U.K. and Europe after its initial 1983 release, the song took another five years to reach the No.1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100. Virgin records re-released "Red Red Wine" after UB40 performed the song at Nelson Mandela's 70th Birthday Concert at Wembley Stadium, televised to a worldwide audience of 600 million, and it began receiving airplay on U.S. radio stations. It reached the top of the U.S. charts in October of 1988 and became an instant classic.