Early next year, Dave Wakeling and his ska band, the English Beat, will head into the studio to put the finish touches on their new album, “Here We Go Love.”

The last time the English Beat put out an album, Ronald Reagan was president, the terrorist menacing France was Carlos the Jackal and Time Magazine’s “Man of the Year” was “The Computer” (“Oh sure, Leonid Brezhnev is important and all,” the magazine’s editor-in-chief undoubtedly reasoned at the time. “But does he have 64 kilobytes of RAM?”)

Thirty-three years may seem like an awfully long break between albums, but that’s only because you aren’t aware of the extenuating circumstances — those unpredictable paving stones in a path that will lead to a performance at the Magic Bag in Ferndale, Mich., on Sunday, Nov. 29.

The original incarnation of the English Beat (called merely the Beat in the United Kingdom, where it formed) splintered in 1983 into two bands: General Public and Fine Young Cannibals.

Both groups scored hits, but neither was particularly long-lived.

Thereafter, Wakeling released a solo record and formed a band called Bang and his co-frontman, Ranking Roger, released a solo record and helped form a band called Special Beat.

At some point, Wakeling and Ranking Roger began a long feud and Wakeling took a break from music to work for Greenpeace.

Eventually, it was Elvis Costello (of all eminences) who successfully entreated Wakeling to return to the musical fold.

Given Wakeling’s relatively low profile in the 21^st century, it is easy to forget that he is a songwriter of prodigious gifts, greatly admired by Costello and Pete Townshend and once considered by many their equal.

The version of the English Beat that will perform at the Magic Bag on Sunday is the result of a compromise between Wakeling and Ranking Roger: Wakeling fronts a band by that name that tours the United States and Ranking Roger fronts a band by that name that tours the UK.

Generally, neither man is allowed under the agreement to perform in the other place.

As if this ointment doesn’t already have enough flies, another pest got stuck in the salve when some members of Ranking Roger’s Beat (including the band’s original drummer Everett Morton) broke away and formed a like-minded tribute act called Beat Goes Bang.

“I used to resent it,” Wakeling said in a phone interview. “But now I get a small, warm and private glow from it. I kind of like the fact that there are now two bands in England that are singing my words whilst I am doing the same thing in California, or as is the case today, Florida.”

Wakeling describes it as “a high-handed compliment.”

“I take it as an accomplishment,” he said. “Over and above the personalities involved, I’m really glad my lyrics still mean a lot to people in England.”

At this rate, it probably makes sense to start an English Beat franchise, Wakeling said.

“I could hold an open audition for blond fellows who resemble me in my mid-20s and who are interested in becoming a part of this new franchise,” he said. “I fancy launching it in Holland.”

The new album was made possible by crowdfunding, which was the best method for a number of reasons, Wakeling said.

Wakeling said he’s never been one for putting out new music unless it can be proved that an audience actually exists for that music.

Having fans pay for a record changes the whole artist-audience equation considerably, he said.

“Working with fans’ money rather than a record company’s money makes you treat it a little bit more seriously and have a bit more respect for it,” Wakeling said. “There was something cavalier and blasé about the way everybody acted when it was record company money. You lived under this cloud of denial that it wasn’t your money when, in actuality, it was your money plus 40 percent interest.”

Securing funding directly from fans turns a formerly professional transaction into a personal one, he said.

“You get to have a fan send in some money with a lovely message about having all the other records and what it’s meant to them and how excited they are to get a chance to help fund the next project and it puts a different face on it, which I like,” Wakeling said.

The recordings that the English Beat made in the early 1980s sound as fresh today as they did then, and the reason for that is that they never tried to sound fresh.

Wakeling said he can’t take any credit for it.

“That was Bob Sergeant’s production at the time,” he said. “He was a purist. He would only have classic instruments, amps and microphones. And no synthesizers.

“We railed against it a bit at the time,” Wakeling said. “But what you realize listening to those recordings now is that they could have been recorded anytime from the ‘60s to today and it helps. I didn’t realize it at the time when there was a debate, but that made the music more accessible to people after the genre itself had passed.”

Wakeling said his band has been averaging from 160 to 180 shows a year and that means this almost 60-year-old grandfather has to repeatedly sing with sincerity lyrics written by a 20^th century incarnation of himself.

This is not at all awkward, he said, because the meaning of the songs has changed for him over the course of 30-plus years.

“If there was 30-year jump from the person I was then to the person I am now, that might be uncomfortable,” Wakeling said. “But it’s been a continuum.”

The lyric that seems truest for him after all this time is from the General Public song, “Faults and All:” “I can’t take my own advice.”

“I would say this after 30 years of reciting my own lyrics,” Wakeling said. “I am really good at spotting the flaws in others, but I have always had a bit of a blind spot about myself.”

Wakeling said he always writes songs when he feels he is “in a position of comparative strength, I think, or determination.”

“Then having to come back to the real world and live up to your own lyrics as a frail, horrible human being,” he said. “That puts a bit of irony into it too as you’re singing them.”

The human frailties of Wakeling and Ranking Roger have kept those two men apart for a long time, but Wakeling said that situation is finally improving.

“You’ve caught me at a good time,” Wakeling said. “We’ve been talking. We’ve talked about doing shows together and doing recordings together.”

The obstacles now are managerial, not adversarial.

“Now we’re just currently having to fight through the wave of management opposition which Roger warned me about at the time,” Wakeling said.

“(Roger) said, ‘You know our people are going to want to stop this,’” Wakeling recalled, laughing. “And they showed up pretty quick. There’s two organizations. There’s two sets of pay to make out at the end of the weekend. When Roger and I start talking about getting back together, it’s natural for some people to worry that they’re not going to be working that weekend.”

Because of this, he said, any reunion would likely lead to a series of special events rather than to some extended musical alliance.

“But, honestly, even if this doesn’t happen, the fact that Roger showed he was interested — that he showed no objections to it happening — that was kind of good enough for me,” Wakeling said.

There is enormous fan interest in a tour that would revive and reunite bands that recorded on the 2-Tone Records label in the ‘80s, he said, but there seems to be no matching interest among the people who organize such tours.

“We need to do Dance Craze 2,” Wakeling said, “while we all still have one good knee left apiece, while we all still have one good leg apiece that we can bounce up and down on and look like we’re dancing.”

Wakeling said he’s been a California resident for 28 years and now thinks of himself as more Californian than British.

But one aspect of living there has become almost intolerable of late.

“I used to be disappointed when I’d bring my mother over,” he said, “because I’d want to show off how beautiful California was and she’d always say it was too hot — ‘Too hot to go anywhere.’”

“Now I can hear my mom echoing in my head when I find myself sitting on shady patios with a fan,” Wakeling said. “I like looking at the sun. I like knowing that it’s over there — just over there. But I don’t like it beating its radiance down on me.”

He is thinking of moving to a “more temperate” place, but doesn’t know where yet.

“I’m not quite sure,” he said, “Even Portland, although I can’t believe I would live somewhere where it rains a lot on purpose. I believe there is something in my genetic makeup that would prevent me from signing a lease.”