UB40 are opening the second leg of their 2014 British tour at York Barbican tomorrow – and they are not to be mistaken for UB40’s Ali Campbell, Astro and Mickey Virtue, who are booked in to Hull City Hall for a second night on January 15 next year after their January 16 show sold out in two hours.

Brummie reggae stalwarts UB40 last performed on North Yorkshire soil in June 2006 at Dalby Forest, since when original lead singer Ali has left the long-running band, citing management issues, to pursue a solo career. After 30 years, eldest brother Duncan took over Ali’s role alongside brother Robin in 2008.

The initial marketing of next year’s tour as UB40 Ali - Astro - Mickey has not gone down well with Robin.

“We just continued as we were after Ali left but it’s now a most unpleasant situation,” he says. “He hasn’t spoken to me since he left; I can live with that but what I can’t deal with is his taking the band name. Unfortunately we’re going to court over it and he’ll have to back-pedal and drop the name.”

Robin made these comments to The Press on September 18, when he also said: “In fact, this morning I’ve been told his lawyers have told our lawyers that he’s dropping the name, but he’s had mileage out of it.”

Log on to Ali’s website, and you will find it now introduces him as Ali Campbell, The Legendary Voice Of UB40, Reunited with Astro and Mickey, while his latest album, Silhouette, came out on October 6, under the same name.

“It’s been frustrating but all we can do is carry on. We’ve done over 40 sold-out shows in the UK, so the fans are judging with their feet and their wallets,” says Robin, whose long-running band will be playing 18 dates in October and November, having promoted their September 2013 album, Getting Over The Storm, in the spring after its Top 30 success and BBC Radio 2 Album of the Week status last autumn.

Explaining how that album came to fruition, Robin says: “Sometimes we want to do another Labour Of Love covers’ album, and we’ve done four of those now, and sometimes we have enough ideas for an album and I think, ‘oh, we should do an album of original material now’.

“For Getting Over The Storm, we thought, wouldn’t it be nice to do a bunch of country songs because of the links between reggae and country. We wrote six songs in the country style for the album, and though I don’t even know if we pulled it off, we enjoyed doing it and that’s the important thing; keeping it fresh, because otherwise you become a cabaret band.”

Cabaret would not be the description that comes to mind for a band that formed in Birmingham in 1978, naming themselves after the unemployment benefit form. UB40 released their debut album, Signing Off, in August 1980 and have since achieved more than 40 UK Top 40 hits and sold 100 million records, and this year’s tours have sparked memories of their early days.

“We’re playing all these towns we haven’t played for 20 years, because we were playing the ‘enormo-domes’ since the 1990s, and that’s made it such fun. It reminds us of why we formed the band in the first place, why exactly we all loved music and reggae in particular,” says Robin, 59. “Seeing Bob Marley in Birmingham, on the tour when he played the Birmingham Odeon and Stafford Bingley Hall was the moment. I was in my early 20s at the time.”

UB40 stood out as a band of British musicians playing the music of Jamaican roots, but they did not see it that way.

“All the 2-Tone bands like The Specials,The Beat and The Selecter were the same. We were the product of where we grew up and the music we heard,” says Robin.

“All we heard was reggae in the clubs, the pubs, and sometimes English music and Indian film music in the cafés, and when we formed we never had deep discussions; it was always going to be reggae. All we wanted to do was play reggae.

“People couldn’t think of why white guys would play reggae but we were a gang of mates who had grown up together, of all shades of colour. We had grown up as sons of immigrants, whether West Indian, Indian or Irish; my dad was Scottish and had come down to Birmingham.”

Robin recalls being bemused when journalists first asked questions about why they played reggae.

“But to us it was a no-brainer; we only realised it was unusual when we first went outside our home environment, but the reason it created interest was the music,” he says.

“It was different. It was music that most mainstream listeners hadn’t heard, There’d been Jimmy Cliff, Ken Boothe and Desmond Decker, but what we were doing was multi-racial. That’s what made it different. It was music that reflected where we came from and where our parents came from.”

• UB40 play York Barbican tomorrow, 7.30pm; doors open at 7pm. Box office: 0844 854 2757 or at yorkbarbican.co.uk