Where Did I Go Wrong

One Part Reggae, One Part pop, All Parts Britain

I have always had a penchant for variations on reggae. In the 1980s, I fell hard for the stellar Ska sounds of bands like Madness, The Specials, Bad Manners, The Beat (later the English Beat), Amazulu, The Police, The Jam, and today’s focus, UB40. Earlier sounds of hardcore reggae out of the islands were always intriguing and enjoyable in festivals and clubs. Reggae was different than anything I had grown up with. Its characteristics were distinct, with a wildly different tempo and rhythmic patterns. When I first encountered Ska (in my recollection), I learned that it was the original sound and that reggae was based on it. Ska originated in Jamaica in the 1950s and was known for its fast-paced rhythms, singers, electric guitars, and bass accompanied by saxophones, trumpets, and a trombone.

I especially liked and gravitated towards the Ska sounds from Britain in the 180s because they felt like an appropriate outlet for dancing as if nobody was watching. I never had an issue with most different music styles if the sound produced a winning beat and I could dance to it. With Ska, I found myself unable to stop dancing to it. It was everything for a period. It always got me out there on the dancefloor. It often stopped me in my tracks to move around wherever I might be standing.

The band UB40 leaned more into reggae than the Ska side of the sounds of the time. However, it was still quite danceable, and overall, they managed to put more than 50 singles in the UK charts, many in the 1980s. They also spent a record 214 weeks in the British charts in the 1980s, tied with my other favorite ska band, Madness.

Part of the appeal for UB40 (named after the attendance cards issued to people claiming unemployment benefits from the UK government) was its lead singer, Ali Campbell. The red-headed Scottish singer made his way into my awareness through videos, many of which I would first see through MTV or the Revolver Club in West Hollywood, California. I believe the first time I heard UB40 was their song “Food For Thought” in 1982. The band had been out prior to that, forming in 1978 and charting since 1980.

In 1983, the band did a cover in their English Ska Pop style of Neil Diamond’s “Red Red Wine.” I remember spending hours waiting to hear the song again before I was able to buy the album Labour of Love. It was released in August of that year, and I likely heard about it sometime in September with the video. It was not a big hit in the United States for Neil Diamond, initially only making it up to number 62 on the Billboard Charts. In its first UB40 run, it reached number 34 in March of 1984, when Americans got their first taste of the English band. The song was the number 3 single of 1983 in the UK, reaching the #1 pinnacle.  As a result of the band performing the song at Nelson Mandela’s 70th Birthday Concert in 1988, the song was re-released in the United States and made it all the way to the top of the Billboard charts, seeing number one on the October 15 chart. “Red Red Wine” is easily one of my favorite songs of all time.

UB40 was not to be stopped. Throughout the 1980s, the band continued to release favorites one after the other, all of which brought me tingles and fond memories, and they fell neatly into my Musical Trigger category. There was “Cherry Oh Baby,” the beautiful & smooth cover of Elvis Presley’s “(Can’t Help) Falling in Love With You,” the duet with Chrissy Hynde covering “I Got You Babe,” The Jimmy Cliff classic “Many Rivers To Cross,” “I Think It’s Going to Rain Today,” “ Kingston Town,” “If It Happens Again,” “Don’t Break My Heart,” and “Breakfast in Bed,” again dueting with Hynde.

Today’s focus is a lesser-known beauty called “Where Did I Go Wrong.” The band wrote the song, and it was not a cover version like most of their other earlier songs. It’s the illustration of the ending of a relationship and the questions of regret by the singer. The song was released as a single in the UK in the fall of 1988, eventually reaching number 26 but never to be released in the United States. The album it arrived from, UB40, was released on July 11, 1988, in both the UK and the United States. The album’s first single release was not released in the United States but made its way into clubs like Revolver because of the continued star-wattage of The Pretender’s Chrissy Hynde (Breakfast in Bed.)

Today, when I hear “Red Red Wine,” it remains timeless because of its ranking in my all-time list of favorites. Still, my musical trigger for “Where Did I Go Wrong” serves as a notice to a year where I could have been and likely was asking the very same question about the crumbling of my life. In 1988, I was 30 years old, and I came to a place where a lot of what had worked for me previously throughout the 1970s and 1980s no longer made much sense. I was succumbing to a lot of the issues that I had been denying since the first DUI began the streak of problems in 1983. Since that time, I had been attending AA meetings in West Hollywood with supportive friends, court cards, a morbid curiosity, and a need that I was not fully aware of and could not fully face. I never once stopped my drinking or drug use. It was almost a little “Looking for Mr. Goodbar” in how my existence split into two separate realities.

In 1988, there was still light. It wasn’t until March of 1989 that I really fell into the darkness, where I remained solidly through my eventual arrest and psychic change into sobriety on May 22, 1991. You could say that 1988 was the part of the movie where everyone was living their lives before the disaster occurred. It was the “before” picture. The song “Where Did I Go Wrong” illustrated in its intent my starting to recognize things were not the same and were about to change.

There’s nothin’ worth sayin’, I know you’re not staying

Might as well face it, it’s out of my hand

No point pretending, I know that it’s ending

I just wanna know where the ending began

Where did I go wrong, to make it like this?

No warmth in our body, no touch in your kiss

Holding you know hursts more than it should

If I let you go, girl, you’ll be gone for good.