Terence Wilson, universally known as Astro, was the percussionist and part-time toaster in UB40, the unfairly maligned kings of UK reggae.

Somehow I missed the sad news that Terence Wilson – better known as Astro – from UB40 had died earlier this week, just as I had missed the equally sad news that sax player Brian Travers had died in August. 

I’ve always been dismayed by the sneering superiority with which so many music fans dismiss UB40, judging them only on their hugely successful career making bland reggae-lite cover versions of pop hits.

Which is massively unfair, not only considering what they achieved, abut also what they represented when they first appeared, as a multicultural band making radical political statements in their music.

Firstly, record sales of 70 million – including 50 hit singles – have earned them a place at the top table, whatever you think of them; all the more so for a bunch of black and white working-class youngsters from the backstreets of Birmingham, who recorded their debut album in a bedsit because they couldn’t afford a studio.

Secondly, and more importantly, when it came out in 1980, their debut album Signing Off was a landmark in British reggae. It still is. I’d go so far as to say it’s a landmark in reggae – full stop.

Naming themselves after the form that had to be signed by anyone who ever had to go to a dole office for unemployment benefit, UB40 formed at the dawn of the Thatcher era, filled with fury at the injustice of inner-city life in the late Seventies.

It wasa dismal and dangerous world of high unemployment, rampant racism, random police searches and beating, and a rising tide of racism in the form of the National Front, and one that disproportionately impacted a group whose members were a multicoloured mixture of English, Welsh, Irish, Jamaican, Scottish and Yemeni parentage.

In those early days UB40’s music matched the angry political fervour of punk bands like The Clash and their 2-Tone contemporaries The Specials and The Beat (I first saw them together in 1980), with uncompromising lyrics allied to dub-heavy roots reggae and – crucially – killer tunes. Tyler, King, Food For Thought, Burden Of Shame; every one is a classic.

I had no idea it was recorded in (and outside) the Birmingham bedsit of Bob Lamb, former drummer in the Steve Gibbons Band, who had been asked to produce the album because he was the only person they knew in the music biz at all. I’m astounded at the professional sound he achieved in such circumstances which included sax being recorded in the kitchen and drums in the overgrown garden, complete with birds singing in the background.

This track, an incendiary attack on Thatcher, seems the best one to honour Astro as it features his considerable toasting skills – something he didn’t get much chance to do once they became a pop act – and his percussion playing, recorded in Lamb’s overgrown garden, complete with birds twittering in the background.

It wasn’t on the album when it first came out on vinyl but appeared on a bonus disc that came with it – a three-track 12-inch EP that played at single speed (45rpm).

RIP Astro