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Brett Kavanaugh and English reggae band UB40.
Left, by Erin Schaff/AFP; right, from Popperfoto, both from Getty Images.
English reggae band UB40 made a sudden appearance in the ongoing media reports about Brett Kavanaugh’s past, and they’re as surprised as anyone. Lead singer Ali Campbell wrote in The Guardian on Tuesday that when he first heard that his band was obliquely involved in Kavanaugh’s alleged 1985 bar brawl mentioned in a police report, the story was completely new to him.
“I first found out that my name was being dragged into the biggest news story of the year when I woke up and my wife came in and said: ‘What’s all this about you and Brett Kavanaugh?’” he wrote. “I said: ‘I have absolutely no idea.’ Then people started ringing up asking for a comment on this supposed ruckus in a bar between him and someone who looked like me in 1985. My obvious comment is: ‘It wasn’t me!’”
The New York Times reported Monday evening that, as a Yale junior in 1985, according to classmate Chad Ludington, Kavanaugh threw his beer in the face of a man who was annoyed that Kavanaugh and his friends were staring at him. The then-21-year-old man accused Kavanaugh of throwing ice on him “for some unknown reason”; Ludington, who says he witnessed the fight, said in a statement that Kavanaugh and his friends thought that the man looked like Campbell, who had just performed in New Haven.
Campbell, touring at the time with the band’s 1983 hit “Red Red Wine,” wrote in The Guardian that he knows the look-alike man in the bar wasn’t him. He also mentioned that he was shocked to hear that Kavanaugh was there at all, because “you don’t expect a right-wing Republican to follow a left-wing reggae socialist band from Birmingham.”
“I don’t know the bloke, so I don’t know whether he’s innocent or
guilty, but I wouldn’t support anyone assaulting women. But I do know
that nobody bumped me on the head with a block of ice in a bar. I
would remember that, wouldn’t I? I don’t remember the gig in question
[in Connecticut], but we did more than 1,000 shows in the U.S. in the
80s. They blur into one another, but the last thing I would do is go
to the bar over the road after a show—I jump straight into a car and
go back to the hotel.”
Campbell said in his Guardian piece that he and his band members welcome both Democrats and Republicans to their shows, “so long as they leave their politics at the door.” But the band won’t necessarily do the same. “We used to sing about really heavy stuff and wrap it up in frothy, happy tunes, so a lot of people got into us who had no idea what we were singing about. Maybe he just loves reggae . . . and didn’t listen to our lyrics.”
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