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MADNESS - Hurrah, New York
THERE's no tradition of ska being popular in America. Millie Small and Desmond Dekker each had one novelty hit a piece, and that's it. But Madness have enough of the classic R&B crunch in their sound to make an American audience feel at home.
The Madness album is great, but this group has to be seen in the flesh. The music and the motion are inseparable - watch this, feel the pulse and get swinging. Madness are speed, rhythm, unbridled motion and a great time.
So they come to Hurrah for their US debut. No record out here yet, but the place is packed full, and not curiosity seekers, but with fans; it's the making of a cult. People shout out the group's name, mob the stage and jump around.
Madness get the best, the wildest, the loudest reception I've seen any band get at this particular club.
Chas Smash does the intro and they're off into 'One Step Beyond'. Purely on the basis of prejudice, I'd have thought a bunch of white yobs playing ska to be an unlikely proposition, but they do it. Speed it up a bit maybe, but the feel is there, it sounds right and irresistable.
There's nothing tentative about this lot - they jump right into the groove and give everything: plenty of muscle in that chunka-chunka guitar; classic Farfisa organ sound, tinny and sweet; drums kicking right in there. Lee Thompson's sax has echoes of King Curtis - or some other great unknown hero of the instrumental dance-rock of the '50s, like the guy who played sax for the Rockin Rebels - lending an air of a hot sock-hop band blowing out some juke joint Saturday night dance party.
Super-charged ska is their speciality, but this isn't a one-trick band and the set did have the virtues of pacing. 'Razor Blade Alley' was a particularly good reggae-fied break, slowed down, sexy and insinuating.
Front-men Suggs and Chas are a non-stop visual treat - lively, funny and captivating.
For 'Night Boat to Cairo', they remove their pork-pie hats and put on fezzes. During 'Swan Lake' - a Tchaikovsky reworking that is itself a great joke - they engage in a comic display of head bumping and mock-aggro shoving with arms and feet swinging in time. They're natural comics, rooted in the best Laurel and Hardy or Three Stooges slapstick tradition.
The only trouble is that if Madness gigs here were threatened by the kind of violence that disrupts gigs in London, this mock-aggression of Suggs and Chas wouldn't seem quite as funny. Our distance provides a certain innocence; the concerns about National Front audiences that figured prominently in Deanne Pearson's recent Madness article wouldn't ordinarily arise here, so it's possible for us to accept Madness as exactly what they profess to be: a good time dance band.
All that incessant motion onstage radiates onto the dance floor, where it is picked up as a cue to let loose, but with more good-natured energy and abandon than is usual for a New York audience. This - following the tumultuous reception accorded Buzzcocks a few weeks back - means that New York audiences had better watch out or they'll lose their reputation for having a hard-assed attitude.
Madness are one of the most appropriately named bands I've encountered. That's what they projected; that's what they inspired.
- Contributed by Fredd Boeuf
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