The acts at tonight's Bermuda Music Festival 08 will take you on a journey stretching from British reggae with UB40 to Bermuda and the Island's own Collie Buddz.

Other performers are the Jam Signal Band, formerly known as Home Grown, Rikkai and Mitchell, Raymon Clarke, gospel reggae artist Troy Anthony, Tiny T, Jules, H & H Gombeys, local comedian Nadanja Bailey will emcee the earlier acts, and comedian Bill Belamy will emcee the later.

On the Onion's Stage Bermuda's newest mixed genre group Secret Po-Po are first up before Collie Buddz's performance, Corvin Melody and Mohawk Radio.

As one of the biggest bands in Britain, UB40 have enjoyed being one of the country's leading musical exports. Their combined single and album sales are in excess of 70 million, which puts them in that elite category populated by the stellar likes of Oasis, The Police, Robbie Williams and Muse.

The have had a staggering 51 hit singles, which is more than any other British outfit apart from The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, U2 and Status Quo. They've had number one smash hits in virtually every chart on the planet, including the notoriously hard-to-crack American market.

They have played in the former Soviet Union, Tonga, New Caledonia and Australasia and have broken numerous attendance records with the largest-ever attendance at a show in South Africa. And add to that a one billion-plus TV audience at the Bollywood Awards and you've got a seriously popular band on our shores tonight.

For almost three decades they have been ambassadors of a musical form that is barely four decades old, seeing it through virtually from its infancy in the mid-'70s to maturity today.

The band has done as much to popularise reggae globally as Robert Nesta himself. Bob Marley would be proud to witness the way UB40 have continued his legacy and programme of bringing together races and creeds.

The band members are boyhood friends from the inner-city areas of Birmingham, and UB40 are self-taught musicians of English, Scottish, Irish, Yemeni and Jamaican parentage, whose multi-raced line-up has always seemed like a microcosm of modern, multi-cultural Britain.

They started off by refusing to 'play the game' and kow-tow to the suits and big-wigs, and they aren't exactly going to start now.

UB40 is named after the unemployment form given out by the DHSS (Department of Health and Social Security), and they combine musical excellence with social conscience in a way that remains unrivalled in this or any other era. They provided a dissenting voice in former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's Britain, with its record of high unemployment, and they're still doing so today, a lone voice in the wilderness, railing with indignation against overseas adventurism and insidious policies.

Long may they continue to do their own thing and sing their own song.

Bermuda's own, Collie Buddz, will hit the stage immediately before the British act with his own style of Reggae.

Born Colin Harper, in New Orleans, he spent his formative years as a budding musician working with Jam Signal (the Home Grown Band), before hitting the big times.

Collie Buddz has one of the most firmly grounded voices you may ever encounter and with ease he incorporates influences from hip-hop to soca.

But his music has a rock-solid foundation in reggae.

The singer was born in 1981, at the dawn of the turbulent era signalled by the twin omens of Bob Marley's passing and Ronald Reagan's election. He was immersed in the sound system culture of Bermuda aka "The Rock" since the age of six.

"I used to come home from primary school and my brother would always be on the turntables, playin' his new 45s an' I'd just be there vibesin'," he said.

The evolution of dancehall and sound-clash culture into a movement of its own in the late '80s and early '90s set the backdrop for Collie's discovery of his own sonic identity, and the dancehall kings of that generation such as Buju Banton, Bounty Killer and Beenie Man served as his primary influences.

"Back when Beenie and Bounty used to war lyrically, seeing clashes with Kilimanjaro an' all the sound-man and everything, the whole music scene for me took on a new meaning.

"Clash thing and lyrical war became a part of my daily life from early out."

The daily operation of trading lyrics in schoolyard clashes quickly gave way to more serious combat as people started saying, 'Ay, Buddz got some lyrics!'

"From an early age, some of the local sounds on the Island wanted to get me on dubplate," says Collie Buddz, who stepped into the first of many vocal booths at the age of 16 to voice customised dubs for some Bermudian sounds.

"Sounds was always trying to buss local artists in Bermuda."

Consistent encouragement from the various soundmen and engineers he encountered on those dub excursions led him to maintain a musical focus and eventually trek to Florida for a degree in audio engineering, a path that ended behind the boards of his own Bermudian studio, jointly run with his older brother Smokey and Sneek Success from one of Bermuda's founding sounds, Newclear Weapon. Building 'riddims' for other artists only expanded his love for writing and voicing his own lyrics however.

"I used to make these beats and none of the tunes came out how I pictured an artist sittin' on de riddim, so I decided to start to get in the booth myself again and spit some lyrics," says the artist.

"Unless my brother engineerin' for me, I'm runnin' from the board to the booth, back to the board!"

Like boot camp for a one-man army, that experience moulded the signature vocal style that defines Collie Buddz – a songwriter who can lay his own riddim, sing the hook and chat on the verse.

"I build de riddim first and while I'm building it I don't try an' think about lyrics 'cause I'm tryin' to focus on the riddim, yunno?

"I make it sound as best I can and then for a day or two I rest my ears then start de writing process. I come up wif a melody firs' and get that down, then start with the lyrics."

The skill with which he compartmentalises multiple roles in the studio also extends to his easy movement between styles.

A falsetto that combines the singsong lover's rock appeal of a carnival crooner like Rupee with the deeper emotional catch of Bob Marley or Sizzla, Collie's voice sits with equal comfort over the jump-up pace of ragga-soca, four/four hip-hop beats or an achingly slow one drop.

Most strikingly on tunes like "My Everything" he finds both the drive of dancehall and the bluesy edge of roots in a frenetic polyrhythm built around the Latin horns of David Bowie's "Let's Dance", an up-tempo track that could be just at home in a Trinidad carnival as a UK discothèque.

"Some tunes I create are just to show that I could do anything I put my mind to," he explains. "To show the versatility of my style."

For many artists such versatility can be a curse and only a select few can maintain a distinctive voice when so many styles come so easy. But on tracks like "Moving On", the layers of competing influences seem less like contradictions and more like necessary stages in the development of a larger persona, something like the succession of roles from pimp, to preacher, to something like a revolutionary that formed Malcolm X.

Instead of pulling the song apart, the warring elements are all somehow essential to a larger vision reflected in his lyrics.

"Nowadays when I go to put on a CD, its old tune: Alton Ellis, The Meditations, The Heptones, Skatalites, Jacob Miller, Eric Monty Morris; love the rockers music.

"From that I start to teach myself some of the history of this music, that's where I started to come a little more versatile with the singin' the foundation just straight reality, yunno.

"I like dancehall, but de foundation and conscious tune is really what me love."

Tickets are still available for tonight's offerings and can be purchased by visiting www.bermudatourism.com.