Madness (band)

Ska (/skɑː/; Jamaican Creole: skia, [skjæ]) is a music genre that originated in Jamaica in the late 1950s and was the precursor to rocksteady and reggae. It combined elements of Caribbean mento and calypso with American jazz and rhythm and blues. Ska is characterized by a walking bass line accented with rhythms on the off beat. It was developed in Jamaica in the 1960s when Stranger Cole, Prince Buster, Clement "Coxsone" Dodd, and Duke Reid formed sound systems to play American rhythm and blues and then began recording their own songs. In the early 1960s, ska was the dominant music genre of Jamaica and was popular with British mods and with many skinheads.

Music historians typically divide the history of ska into three periods: the original Jamaican scene of the 1960s; the 2 tone ska revival of the late 1970s in Britain, which fused Jamaican ska rhythms and melodies with the faster tempos and harder edge of punk rock forming ska-punk; and third-wave ska, which involved bands from a wide range of countries around the world, in the late 1980s and 1990s.

UB40 are an English reggae band, formed in December 1978 in Birmingham, England. The band has had more than 50 singles in the UK Singles Chart and has also achieved considerable international success. They have been nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Reggae Album four times and were nominated for the Brit Award for Best British Group in 1984. UB40 have sold more than 100 million records worldwide. The ethnic make-up of the band's original line-up was diverse, with musicians of English, Welsh, Irish, Jamaican, Scottish and Yemeni parentage.

Their hit singles include their debut track "Food for Thought" and two Billboard Hot 100 number-one hits, "Red Red Wine" and "Can't Help Falling in Love". Both songs also topped the UK Singles Chart, as did the band's version of "I Got You Babe", recorded with Chrissie Hynde. The band's two most successful albums, Labour of Love (1983) and Promises and Lies (1993), both reached number one on the UK Albums Chart. UB40 and the English ska band Madness share the record for the most weeks spent by a group in the UK singles chart during the 1980s, with 214 weeks each.