“It’s not quite that easy. Except that for Brian, it seems that it was.” A few words on Brian Travers
It was Brian Travers’ former occupation – he trained as an electrician – that determined his choice of instrument for the fledgling UB40. Having spent far too much of his time trying to fix things that didn’t work without a mains supply (“I hated electricity”) informed his decision. Just blow into it and off you go. Well, of course, it’s not quite that easy. Except that for Brian, it seems that it was. UB40’s debut single Food For Thought was recorded just a year after Brian’s friend from Moseley School Of Art, Earl Falconer, told him about a band he’d formed with drummer Jimmy Brown and singer Ali Campbell.
Early rehearsals involved trying to play other people’s songs by singers such as Bim Sherman and Gregory Isaacs. But when Ali’s brother Robin – an actual songwriter – joined the group, the other members were able to make more creative contributions. None of them met the challenge as dramatically as Brian Travers, whose ability to create countermelodies that cut to the essence of Robin’s songwriting helped define UB40’s sound. His presence in the group asserted itself from the first few seconds of Food For Thought. Brian’s bleak, soulful saxophone hook is the very heart of a song inspired by news reports about famine in Africa. This was reggae, but not as we knew it. Brian’s playing seemed to evoke the graphite industrial skylines of the West Midlands far more readily than the Kingston streets where so many of the group’s primary inspirations were created. This was truly the sound of Birmingham in beyond the winter of discontent: the Chrysler Factory glistening in the rain on Coventry Road; the sulphurous yellow light of the subways underneath the Bull Ring; black kids and white kids hanging around on every street corners because there quite simply wasn’t that much else to do.
Those early UB40 songs were sonically heavy, and for that, not nearly enough credit goes to the stellar rhythm section of Brown and Falconer. But if you want to talk about emotional heaviness – well, that’s a conversation you can’t have without talking about Brian’s playing on songs like Dream A Lie and his desperately mournful melody at the start of Tyler, the song which ushers in UB40’s debut album and defining masterpiece Signing Off. It was a trick he managed to pull off time and time again. His keening, understated contributions to their version of Please Don’t Make Me Cry are the difference between a respectful tribute and a gently devastating one. His exquisitely lugubrious contribution to Don’t Slow Down is effectively what authenticates the sentiments of Robin Campbell’s words in the chorus: “Don’t slow down/Don’t touch the ground/For you know what you will find/That old grey man in dagger and cloak/Following behind.”
It was a sound that you couldn’t mistake for any other band – and that’s because it was a sound that you really couldn’t mistake for any other saxophonist. Which is why, when Ali Campbell left UB40 and in doing so, prompted onlookers to conclude that he had taken the sound of UB40 with him, you couldn’t help feeling that they’d forgotten what their ears would have told them if they chose to drop the needle at almost any point on those stellar early records. One In Ten. Don’t Let It Pass You By. Food For Thought. Tyler. Dream A Lie. The sweet soulful ache of Brian Travers’ saxophone. How on earth could you begin to replace that?
Written in memory of Brian Travers, 1959-2021
