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They Call It MADNESS
Dr. Hepworth dons a white coat and investigates …
FORTY FIVE dates the Two Tone Trek takes in. Forty five medium-to-large sized halls and just about every one of them is sold out well in advance. For three bands who would have had trouble getting arrested back in February, this is considerable progress.
Whatever the fate of The Chords, The Merton Parkas or any other bunch of moddybodys may be, Two Tone are taking Britain by the scruff of its neck and making it dance to their tune in a way that hasn’t been seen since the early days of punk.
The Specials top the bill because they have the best songs and they were the first. The Selecter fill the opening slot for the moment, but anybody who’s caught them in their stride recently will know that they’ll be bill toppers before Christmas. Madness, for a variety of reasons, play pig in the middle.
ALTHOUGH MADNESS’ debut shot, “The Prince”, came courtesy of Two Tone’s budding empire, the band have ended up on Stiff for their album and single, both rejoicing in the name of “One Step Beyond”.
Though they’ve tasted the sweetness of the top end of the charts they’re still novices on the boards, their live act as yet lacking either the crispness of The Specials or the jubilation of The Selecter. Their brand of ska jump and barrel organ swing is not yet as satisfactorily reproduced on stage as it is on vinyl.
Madness may have been labouring in obscurity in North London for five years now, but it’s only in the last couple of months that they’ve woken up to find themselves professional musicians. Bassist Mark Bedford admits that he would have been pleased initially just to hear “The Prince” played a couple of times by Mister Peel even if it had plummeted into obscurity straight from there.
The fact that they’ve, for whatever reason, ridden the ska gravy train this far is both a pleasant surprise and a slight worry. They admit that a proportion of their current success is just down to fashion, the fact that they’ve turned up with the right style at the right time.
But, as drummer Woody points out, they’ve been doing substantially the same thing for years now without anyone except their mates appreciating it. Keyboard man Mike Barson admits, however, that he did once wear flares and laughs at how ludicrous fashion can be.
Madness are realistic enough to know that they have to compete with The Specials while making sure that they’re not bracketed with them. Suggs, the front man and vocalist, admits that their album was put down in a hurry and rushed into the shops in an attempt to get it there before The Specials.
In the event they only beat them by a couple of days and, although “One Step Beyond” has charted very respectably for a debut, it hasn’t quite attained the dizzy heights of The Specials, whose own first try even beat The Boomtown Rats into second place, something that seemed inconceivable a few months back.
Suggs reckons it this way: “You’ve got to make it quick or else you go under …”
That’s why at the end of this tour they head straight for an American tour in order to be the first outfit to hit the New World with the skinhead moonstomp.
IT WAS Barson who started Madness off, gathering guitarist Chris Foreman and saxophonist Lee Thompson round the piano in his Crouch End living room and working up what he remembers as an awful noise.
Drummers came and drummers went, their current manager amongst them. One Carl Smith used to try his best to play the bass. This was to little avail, so he gradually mutated into Chas Smash, compere and amazing dancer, a striking feature of the Madness act.
“Nobody could really play anything and it went on like that for quite a long time,” recalls Mike. “We just played the records that we liked: a few ska records, lot of Coasters, things like ‘Love Potion Number Nine’ and ‘Poison Ivy’. We just heard all that from older brothers.”
(The Coasters connection is interesting, actually. The Coasters were a black rock and roll group of The Fifties who specialised in completely crazy humour. Every number was a situation comedy. Nobody’s done it half as well since.)
All this was happening around 1974. This loose grouping of characters, together with Graham McPherson a.k.a. Suggs, would go to gigs together, eventually zeroing in with much enthusiasm on an ensemble called Kilburn And The High Roads (lead vocals Ian Dury). The Kilburns were then dispensing their own peculiar cocktail of spidery R&B and seaside postcard humour around the London pub circuit.
The thing that impressed Barson about Dury was “he didn’t have any airs about him. He was just really good.” Woods also points out that their taste in clothing was fairly similar.
TAKING ENCOURAGEMENT from the attention that The Kilburns were getting, Madness (or The Invaders as they were then known) started to hustle gigs here and there.
“We played The Nightingale in Wood Green,” Barson remembers, “and it was near to the house across the road that they couldn’t hear the television.”
Very little happened for a year or so. Madness continued to plough their lonely furrow to little effect while continuing with their various day jobs – gardening, plastering, painting and decorating.
“At one point we just dropped all the blue beat numbers,” offers Suggs, “because they never got any reaction.”
“Then I started hearing a lot about The Specials through friends of mine. So we went down The Hope and Anchor one night when they were playing there but we missed ‘em. So we just grovelled round Jerry Dammers and gave him lots of bits of paper!”
Mike Barson was amazed when he first saw them because Jerry was using an identical Vox Continental organ to the one he favoured. Dammers was presented with tapes which apparently he didn’t listen to. The next thing Madness knew Jerry was mentioning them in interviews, saying they were the only band remotely connected with his own crew.
The upshot of all this loose talk was that when The Specials set up their own Two Tone operation, Madness were invited to contribute a single. For the A side they chose Lee Thompson’s tribute to Prince Buster, while the flip featured Buster’s own number “Madness”.
The idea of the single was to get their name around and hopefully result in a long term record deal of some kind. The fact that it was a hit was a welcome bonus. It was Stiff boss Dave Robinson who beat out the opposition to get them on his own label.
Mr Robinson blotted his copybook slightly later when he visited the band in the studio and heard a play back of their ska adaptation of Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake”. He enquired which of the band had penned it!
MADNESS’ ALBUM presents a fifty/fifty split between ska-inspired dance numbers and their own earthy tales of London low life.
Lee Thompson’s coarse sax is well to the fore as is Mike Barson’s pumping keyboard technique. The band have chosen to label it the “nutty” sound, a term thought up by Thompson to describe the noise of fairground organs. It’s a rough, lively sound, jaunty and old fashioned.
On stage Chas Smash does his strange ratchet dance to the real delight of a packed house. A few shortcomings in the vocal department and an over reliance on the same tempo apart, they’re enormously enjoyable. Family fun.
I put it to them that their act is rude and breezy rather than slick and sexy. More Frankie Howerd than smart ass satire.
“Mmm, yes,” says Barson. “But it’s not really Frankie Howerd. It’s more Les Dawson.”
Wonder what their next single will be about. Mothers-in-law?
- Contributed by Sean Gaskin
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