As the exuberant MC with UB40, Astro helped to put the multicultural into British reggae.
In the late 1970s there were white British reggae acts such as The Police and black British reggae bands like Steel Pulse. Then there was Birmingham’s UB40, a rainbow-hued coalition that included the black offspring of the Windrush generation, white British musicians who had fallen in love with the hypnotic dance rhythms of Jamaican music and even a percussionist of Yemeni descent.
Taking their name from their unemployment benefit cards, Astro and the bass player Earl Falconer represented the British-Jamaican contingent while the singer Ali Campbell and guitarist Robin Campbell were the sons of a well-known British singer of traditional folk ballads.
Together with the percussionist Norman Hassan, sax player Brian Travers (obituary September 9, 2021), keyboardist Mickey Virtue and drummer James Brown, they became the world’s most successful reggae act after Bob Marley, selling an estimated 70 million records. In total the group scored 40 UK Top 40 hit singles including three No 1 singles, among them their 1983 version of Neil Diamond’s Red Red Wine, to which Astro added his own “toasting” lyrics. There were also 15 Top Ten albums.
Astro’s toasting, a kind of Jamaican forerunner of rapping, was an integral part of the group’s sound on record but it was on stage that he came into his own. He was, Robin Campbell said, the group’s “entertainer”, the front man who encouraged audiences to get up and dance. “I live to be on stage,” Astro said. “I have got the attention span of an ant when we are in the studio. I crave a reaction from an audience.”
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While many of the group’s best-known hits such as the No 1s I Got You Babe (1985) and (I Can’t Help) Falling in Love with You (1993) were melodic love songs, Astro offered a more militant edge, rapping about the social injustice and systemic racism that he encountered around him.
“I went through the same rigmarole as most black people in the late Seventies,” he said, citing discriminatory practices such as the “sus law”, an ancient provision of the 1824 Vagrancy Act, which until its repeal in 1981 was routinely used to stop, search and arrest black youths on flimsy pretexts.
“It was a weekly occurrence and it was a lot easier to write about stuff you had witnessed. It seemed natural to us,” he said.
Even after UB40 had become one of the biggest-selling bands in the world the discrimination continued, although he took it in his stride. In Robin and Ali Campbell’s joint 2006 autobiography Blood and Fire, the brothers recalled Astro being refused entry to nightclubs because of his dreadlocks while white band members were welcomed. On tour he was jailed and deported from the Seychelles in 1990 when police claimed to have found marijuana in his hotel room and he was refused entry into Hawaii, where the band were forced to perform without him.
The son of Jamaican immigrants, he was born Terence Wilson in Birmingham in 1957 and went to school with the future UB40 keyboard player Virtue. His nickname was acquired in his teens from the Doc Marten boots he wore everywhere and which were known by the brand name “Astronauts”. By the late 1970s he was DJ-ing and toasting with Duke Alloy, one of the city’s top reggae sound systems, playing at parties “that would start on a Friday night and finish on a Monday morning”.
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It was while DJ-ing that he met and bonded with the Campbell brothers over a love of Jamaican music. Robin Campbell wrote: “We got along so well that it was decided there and then Astro should join as our MC. Soon he was toasting over the instrumental section of our songs in his inimitable British style.”
He was one of several members of UB40 declared bankrupt in 2011 after the acrimonious departure of Ali Campbell three years earlier. Astro followed in 2013, when he joined Ali and Virtue in a rival version of UB40.
Astro, who is survived by his wife, Dawn Wilson, explained that he had quit due to the original group’s decision to record a set of country songs.
“We spent our lives trying to promote reggae music and my mind and my body just wouldn’t let me be part of a country album,” he said. “I didn’t wanna have nothing to do with it. I wasn’t prepared to stand on stage singing those songs.”
Yet at the same time he had no truck with what he called “the purists” who held that only Jamaican Rastafarians could play true reggae. “It’s just music,” he said. “The Rasta faith uses reggae to preach. But that’s not all reggae is for. It started out as pop music and that’s what it still is. And we’re still on the same mission to popularise reggae around the world.”
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Astro, UB40 toaster and MC, was born on June 24, 1957. He died after a short illness on November 6, 2021, aged 64