UB40 featuring Ali Campbell brings reggae-pop to bergenPAC in August

bergenPAC will bring UB40 featuring Ali Campbell to Englewood on Friday, August 7, at 8:00 p.m., putting one of reggae-pop’s most familiar touring brands inside a 1,367-seat theater. For U.S. reggae audiences, the booking is more than a nostalgia stop: Ali Campbell is the founding-era voice most closely tied to the band’s biggest crossover records, the songs that helped make UB40 a household name far beyond sound-system culture.

That history still sits at the center of the draw. UB40’s official history places the nucleus of the band rehearsing in a local basement by the summer of 1978, and the group later sold more than 70 million records worldwide. The signature titles most often attached to that run are still the ones casual listeners know by heart, including Red Red Wine, Can’t Help Falling in Love and I Got You Babe. AllMusic has long described UB40 as a British reggae band from the West Midlands whose 1980s and 1990s crossover success came through cover versions of 1960s pop songs, a formula that made the band unusually accessible without stripping away the laid-back pulse that keeps it rooted in reggae.

That is why a concert billed as UB40 featuring Ali Campbell matters in 2026. Campbell’s lead vocal remains the recognizable marker for the records that crossed into radio, festival stages and adult-contemporary playlists, and the live show is likely to lean on the familiar material that built that audience in the first place. Ticketing for the bergenPAC date started at $69, and Ticketmaster listed an overall limit of eight tickets for the event, signs that the show is being aimed at both devoted fans and the broader crowd that still knows these choruses on first listen.

The venue fits the booking. bergenPAC describes itself as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that presents around 200 performances and events a year, with a main theater of 1,367 seats, plus a 70-seat cabaret theater, an 80-seat Black Box Theater and an 8-studio Performing Arts School. That kind of room is where legacy reggae acts continue to thrive on the American theater circuit: big enough for a multigenerational singalong, small enough to keep the set close to the band’s classic radio-era identity.

Nearly half a century after those basement rehearsals began, the Ali Campbell-led version of UB40 still stands for the same thing it always did, reggae rhythm translated through pop instinct, now carried into a theater night built for recognition, not discovery.