UB40 with Chrissie Hynde – I Got You Babe

Returning The Favour Five Years Later

Released on July 30, 1985, “I Got You Babe” entered the UK Singles Chart at number 46 and climbed rapidly through August. On August 31, it reached number one, where it stayed for two consecutive weeks. The single spent 14 weeks on the chart and became one of the summer’s biggest hits, exactly twenty years after Sonny and Cher’s original topped the same chart. In the United States, it peaked at number 28 on the Billboard Hot 100 and reached number 15 on the Cash Box Top 100. The collaboration reunited UB40 with Chrissie Hynde, who’d given the Birmingham band their crucial break back in 1980 when she saw them perform at a pub and invited them to support The Pretenders on tour.

The track dominated charts across the world, reaching number one in Australia where it spent three weeks at the top from late October 1985. It climbed into the top ten across Europe and became UB40’s third UK number one after “Red Red Wine” in 1983. The single’s success helped push the Baggariddim album to number 14 on the UK Albums Chart, though critics noted the album was primarily a showcase for Jamaican toasters and MCs rather than a conventional UB40 release. The song also appeared on The Pretenders’ 1987 compilation The Singles, making it a shared talking point in both artists’ catalogues. Record World praised the relaxed reggae arrangement and noted how Hynde’s husky voice contrasted perfectly with Ali Campbell’s smooth delivery.

Back in 1980, Chrissie Hynde had been in a London pub when she heard UB40’s distinctive reggae sound. She approached the band afterward and offered them a support slot on an upcoming Pretenders tour, launching them beyond Birmingham’s local circuit. Five years later, when UB40 needed a female vocalist for their cover of the Sonny and Cher classic, asking Hynde made perfect sense. Sonny Bono had written the original late at night in his basement in 1965, waking Cher up to sing the lyrics. She hated it and immediately went back to bed, convinced it would flop. Instead, it spent three weeks at number one and sold over a million copies. UB40 stripped away the folk-pop arrangement and rebuilt the song around a relaxed reggae beat with warm horn lines and deep bass.

The band recorded “I Got You Babe” at The Abattoir Studios in Birmingham, their home base, with UB40 producing the track themselves alongside engineer Roger Lomas. The production leaned into the breezy, radio-friendly side of reggae, replacing Sonny and Cher’s harmonic thirds and fifths with a simplified skank rhythm. Ali Campbell handled lead vocals alongside Hynde, with the band’s lineup including brothers Robin Campbell on guitar, Earl Falconer on bass, Mickey Virtue on keyboards, Brian Travers on saxophone, Norman Hassan on percussion, and Jimmy Brown on drums. Astro contributed toasting vocals on other album tracks but not on this single. The song ran just over three minutes and featured a playful, flirtatious energy between the two vocalists that felt less like a literal romantic duet and more like two personalities trading lines with affectionate irony.

“I Got You Babe” appeared on UB40’s sixth studio album Baggariddim, released in 1985 and featuring collaborations with prominent reggae toasters and DJs. The album marked a creative risk for the band, who’d built their success on politically charged originals like “One in Ten” and covers albums like Labour of Love. Other singles from the period included “Don’t Break My Heart”, which reached number three in the UK later in 1985, and “Sing Our Own Song”, written in support of black artists in South Africa during apartheid. The collaboration with Hynde proved so successful that UB40 reunited with her in 1988 for another duet, “Breakfast in Bed”, which reached number six in the UK and appeared on their self-titled eighth album. That second collaboration never charted in America but many critics considered it superior to their first pairing.

The official music video was directed by Jonathan Demme, who would later win an Academy Award for The Silence of the Lambs. The first half showed the band and Hynde during an afternoon rehearsal at a stadium, while the second half presented the concert at night with an enthusiastic crowd. The video’s live performance approach was unusual for 1985, when most pop videos relied on elaborate concepts and MTV-style editing. The song has been covered sparingly since, though Cher herself revisited it in 1993 as a duet with the animated characters Beavis and Butt-Head, reaching number 35 in the UK and the top ten in the Netherlands. The UB40 version knocked Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” off the number one spot, a fact that still rankles some music critics who felt Bush’s experimental masterpiece deserved longer at the top.

“I Got You Babe” remains UB40’s most divisive hit and a perfect example of how returning favours can create unexpected chart success. The pairing confused many fans who believed the song should have been performed by a couple rather than a reggae band and a rock singer with no romantic connection. Critics called it listless and empty, arguing it brutally simplified the original and removed everything that made Sonny and Cher’s version special. Others praised it as a breezy summer singalong that made the old hippie countercultural staple feel fresh again for the MTV generation. UB40 went on to sell over 100 million records worldwide and score two Billboard Hot 100 number ones with “Red Red Wine” in 1988 and “(I Can’t Help) Falling in Love with You” in 1993. Hynde continued leading The Pretenders through lineup changes and personal tragedies, becoming one of rock’s most respected frontwomen. The song proved that sometimes the best collaborations come not from romantic chemistry or artistic vision, but from simply paying back someone who believed in you when nobody else did.