UB40 – (I Can’t Help) Falling in Love with You

The band didn’t like it, a film rejected it, and they nearly scrapped it. It spent seven weeks at No.1.

UB40 wanted rid of this record. They had cut it in 1992 for a film that turned it down, they were not happy with how it sounded, and they were in the middle of making an album they had specifically decided would contain no cover versions. The plan was to scrap it. Guitarist Robin Campbell argued them out of it, more or less alone. What they had been about to throw away spent seven weeks at No.1 in America, sold in numbers nothing else in their catalog approached, and turned out to be the last big hit any of them would have.

Keep watching: Elvis Presley – Can’t Help Falling in Love · UB40 – Red Red Wine

The song they were reworking was already thirty years old and not originally Elvis Presley’s either. Hugo Peretti, Luigi Creatore and George David Weiss built it on the melody of “Plaisir d’amour,” a French romance published in 1784 by Jean-Paul-Égide Martini, and Presley recorded it for Blue Hawaii in 1961. Here is the detail almost nobody knows: his version never reached No.1 in the United States. It stopped at No.2 on the pop chart. It topped the Easy Listening chart for six weeks and it closed his shows for the rest of his life, but on the Hot 100 the definitive Elvis ballad was a runner-up.

UB40’s involvement began with a phone call about Honeymoon in Vegas, the 1992 Nicolas Cage film. They were asked to record an Elvis song for it and agreed. What nobody told them was that the producers had asked a great many acts to do exactly the same thing, and that the soundtrack would be an all-Elvis covers album. When they brought their version in, Campbell later said, they thought the filmmakers would love it but the band themselves weren’t pleased with it. It was passed over: a Clarence Giddons and Bruno Hernandez recording went into the film, and Bono’s version took the slot on the soundtrack album.

The album that wasn’t supposed to have covers

UB40 had spent a decade being the band that covered things. The Labour of Love records were built on other people’s reggae, and “Red Red Wine” — a Neil Diamond song they had thought was traditional — had given them a US No.1 in 1988. Promises and Lies was meant to correct that. It was to be their own material, and the rejected Elvis recording did not belong on it.

Campbell’s argument was practical rather than artistic: the recording existed, it was likely to be heard anyway, and leaving it off served nobody. He has said most of the band thought it wasn’t representative of the album, and he persuaded them it would be pointless to exclude it. Virgin released it on May 10, 1993. It went onto the soundtrack of Sliver, the Sharon Stone thriller, which arrived on June 1, and onto Promises and Lies when the album followed on July 12.

Seven weeks, and then nothing

It entered the Hot 100 at No.100 and climbed the whole way. By the time it reached the top, Sliver had been out of cinemas for months and had nothing to do with the song’s success. It stayed at No.1 for seven weeks. It went to No.1 in Britain for two, and topped the charts in eleven other countries — Australia, Austria, the Netherlands, and New Zealand, where it was the biggest-selling single of the year. Promises and Lies reached No.1 in the UK and No.6 in America and has sold over nine million copies, making it comfortably the best-selling record of their career.

Then it stopped. The follow-up single, “Higher Ground,” peaked at No.45 and was the last time UB40 appeared on the Hot 100 at all. The record they nearly binned was both the biggest thing they ever did and the end of their American run. Both of their US No.1s were songs written by somebody else — a Neil Diamond album track they mistook for folk music, and an Elvis ballad they thought they had ruined.