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The Italian Nutty Brigade by Paolo Hewitt
The Italian Nutty Brigade
All aboard the trans-Europe express as Madness go from Rome to Amsterdam by Paolo Hewitt
“What’s so funny about love, pizza and misunderstanding?”
Our taxi driver picks up Tom Sheehan and myself from Rome airport, courteously packs our bags, and then guns off like a homicidal maniac on a half-hour drive that would’ve left the most sturdy constitution retching with nausea and fear by the end of it.
The first inkling of this man’s sheer craziness came on the motorway into Rome. He recklessly stomped his foot on the accelerator and literally tried to pass through the car in front at 90 miles an hour, rather than going round the damn thing.
I laughed out loud (always do when I’m scared witless).
Next thing I knew, we’d shot into the city, were heading full on for a stationary car that had pulled across the road and was waiting to turn.
He must stop for this, I thought.
He didn’t. As the car edged forward, he yanked the car to the right, rammed through the tiniest of spaces, straightening out again, bombing vicariously for the traffic lights.
We circled a roundabout at breakneck speed and finally screeched to a halt outside the Le Claridge Hotel.
This hot blooded, passionate, recklessly crazed man turned off his engine, and in a daze Tom and I clambered out clutching ourselves, not really understanding fully what had happened.
The journey had gone by so fast, so wildly, that after paying the man a wallet-busting 30,000 lire (15 quid), I wandered out across the street towards the hotel, dazed and confused.
Suddenly Tom was shouting, there was a screech of brakes, a burst of car horn loud enough to wake the dead, and another taxi had missed me by about two millimetres.
SHATTERED
We dumbly checked in to our hotel room, located the spirits and four drinks later our shattered nerves were returning to normal.
“I was seriously going to ask that taxi driver to stop,” mused Tom, “but he was going too fast.”
We lounged back on our hotel beds, not even caring that we were in Rome, and waited for Madness to return from the Italian television show they were recording.
Two hours in Rome, I thought to myself and I’ve nearly been killed five times. Three hours later we met Madness.
They were in the dining room seated around a table waiting for food to arrive. Woody, the drummer, was the first to recognise us. We had first met when I went to interview his wife’s band, the Mo-dettes (his wife’s Jane the bassist).
“Have you still got those awful shoes on?” Woody teased, leaning across the table. “You were wearing real scruffy boots the last time.”
I flash him a new, clean pair of heels, and he laughs, “Is that where your tape recorder is then?”
The rest of the band lounge about, are just as cordial in their greetings. Lee, the saxophonist, and Mark, the bass player, wander off briefly, Suggsy and Chas ensure that Tom and myself get a meal, against the waiter’s wishes.
What’s Italy like then, I asked?
Woody groaned. “Everything is either 300 metres away, or 20 minutes away,” he told us to a background of laughter.
The waiter returned, confused by the orders he’d just received. He scowled at Tom and myself for the extra work.
Suggsy meanwhile seemed restless.
He got up, walked out of the room, returned five minutes later, sipped at some cold soup, got up again, took another walk.
He wasn’t uptight, just kind of fidgety and maybe even anxious, waiting for something to happen.
Eventually the meal was finished.
Tom, still shattered by his recent harrowing experiences, decided to retire. I elected for a night out with the band. As we gathered in the hallway, Chris Foreman, the guitarist, started chatting to Woody.
“I keep on having this dream,” he told Madness’s small, slim drummer. “I’m running away from the cops, they’re chasing me like hell and just as I reach the door of my home … “
“They grab you!” Woody shouted excitedly, recognising immediately, the whole surreal scenario.
“That’s it!” Chris shouted back. “So you’ve had them too.”
Outside Chas and Suggsy were already revving up the tiny scooters they’d hired for the day, and as Woody and I hit the warm, balmy air of Rome in search of the club (“300 metres away”) they roar off. Two minutes later they flash past us.
The club’s closed.
“Ah but I thought it would be open tonight,” says Alfredo, the overweight record company man.We decide to go to a club called “Much More”. Alfredo drives Woody and myself, while the rest of the band take taxis to one of the most over-priced, garish clubs I’ve ever been in.
It’s divided into two floors, with the upstairs crammed full of Space Invader machines, while downstairs, in a blaze of lasers and flashing lights, an expensively-dressed Wednesday night Italian crowd dances slowly to a stubborn disco beat.
From the upstairs, thanks to the huge mirror planted on the back wall, you can watch it all and as the band move gleefully from machine to machine, I stand trying to take it all in.
Suggsy wasn’t impressed.
“Every night club we’ve been to in Europe is like this,” he explains in his North London accent, before turning away to another pinball game. He should know.
In England, Madness may have a number two album straight in and a delightful single knocking on number one’s door, but that hasn’t stopped the rest of Europe trying to muscle in.
In Italy alone they’d already played to an estimated 40,000 screaming Italians and their album had chalked up a healthy 60,000 sales. Fine stuff indeed, but already one could detect a sour note in the proceedings.
“You see I can’t tell whether people like it for the music,” Lee, their sax player, tells me, “or the nutty image we’ve got.” It clearly worries him.
FLASHING
Ah! But what the hell? This is the band’s last night in Italy, and, well, we might as well make the most of it. OK lads? We descend to the flashing lights and lasers of the disco. Drinks, of course, are expensive, so we sip ours slowly by the bar watching and laughing as the Italians move robotically on a round platform without any sense of real rhythm to the mindless music. After 20 minutes of taking in this absurdity, I float back upstairs, leaving Suggsy and Chas by themselves.
Two minutes later, the unmistakeable sound of “One Step Beyond” fills the air. The manager has recognised the band, and subsequently “The Prince” and “Baggy Trousers” are also played.
I hurry downstairs again and Suggsy greets me with a grin. “That soon cleared the floor,” he smiles.
“The manager’s asked us to play here,” he continues, starting to jerk his body into the last, fading rhythms of “Trousers”. “You come here and play for us,” he mimics in a perfect Italian accent. And then he grins widely.
Woody and I decided that enough was enough, located Alfredo and blagged a lift back to the hotel.
As we passed out of the entrance an old Italian woman, acting as a cloakroom attendant, gazed mournfully at us.
“You know my big struggle at present,” Woody said as we climbed into Alfredo’s expensive car, “is just trying to stay normal.”
Tomorrow we would be catching a train that would take us through half of Italy, Germany and into Holland. A 20-hour epic, and Woody didn’t even know we were catching it.
“I never know about these things,” he laughed, “I don’t want to.”
Tom was already in bed when we got back. After bidding Woody goodnight, I crawled into bed for some much needed sleep. Four hours later, in a sleepy, almost unconscious state, I was aware of an urgent rattling on the door. Tom, half naked, groped his way towards it.
He opened it slightly, shouted, “No you don’t” and then slammed it quickly, locking it before rushing back to his bed. I didn’t know what was happening and furthermore I didn’t particularly care. The next day I found out that Suggsy and Chas had stayed up all night, and that round about five, with the help of a fire extinguisher, they decided we should join their nocturnal party. Thanks a lot, chaps.
When Madness tore us apart with their vital, joyful rendition of “The Prince”, they’d already enjoyed what Chas Smash will later describe, as the “best days of the band.”
By this he meant that then the band hadn’t been picked up fully by the re-emerging skinhead cult sweeping London, but were playing to a mixture of everyone from punks to students, to skins. All together. No bother.
Gigs were cheap and chaotic, but above all good fun. It wasn’t till the band contacted 2-Tone that events moved swiftly and almost disastrously.
NUTTINESS
They’d already established an individual image with their suits and nuttiness, and with the release of their first single, they immediately came to the attention of the Mods and Skinheads, who latched on to their ska sources (even if the band did insist against that label), which they recognised as “their” music.
Ugly scenes followed as their new fascist following insisted on “seig heiling”, preventing bands like Red Beans and Rice, who are led by a black singer, taking the stage as support on one London gig.
“Most of them are just led by fashion,” Chas explains over a pizza. “So we felt it best not to draw attention to it. It’s the ones at the top who need sorting out.”
An infamous interview the band gave compounded the problem further, even if they felt they were completely misrepresented.
“What we’d do,” explains Mark, or Bedders as he’s better known, “is to actually go into the crowd and just ask them what the **** they were playing at? It seemed a much better way, because instead of running away from the problem, we were actually trying to confront it.”
Thankfully the band’s tactics seem to have worked. Their audience is branching out incredibly as everyone begins to see and hear their magic, and the band themselves welcome anyone who’s got two brain cells to rub together.
If it hadn’t been for the band’s strength to get through such harrowing days unscathed, then I doubt if we’d be eating pizzas and pasta outside this Italian café, let alone preparing for a train journey through most of Europe.
Rome’s train station is a massive, impressive symbol of Italian architecture. It rises to the sky in a colour of appealing vermillion, and its atmosphere is one of cleanliness and efficiency.
Madness bounce happily along its clean floors, all except Suggsy and Chas who are beginning to feel the effects of the night before. (Serves the buggers right.)
They’d decided to go driving on their scooters after the disco and eventually ground to a halt. (“I think there were two people left when we went,” says Suggsy). They spent about four hours trying to get out of Rome.
“I kept on wanting to go to the hills,” Suggsy says.
“But it was all one way,” finishes Chas, the second half of the duo now known as the Coco Brothers.
After about an hour on the train both retire to their cabins and aren’t seen till the next day. As Woody would have it, “they’re sparko,” or Solid Gone.
The cabins themselves are a wonder to behold. As small as a bird’s cage, they fold up and around into three tier bunk beds, with even a little sink in the corner, replete with, uh, potty.
After about five minutes of checking them out, I stand with Chris Foreman, the guitarist, with our heads out of window, watching the incredibly beautiful Italian countryside, spotted with ancient villas and misty hills in the background, slowly drift past us.
I comment on its beauty.
“Yeah, when I retire, I’ll buy a house here,” he remarks dreamily, his eyes still gazing out at the passing colours.
“Or Switzerland. Have you ever been there? The air is so fresh and clean and the water in the river so clear you almost want to drink it.”
SUPERTRAMP
Chris has got a house in Camden Town.
Lee has got about 40 tapes with him, which he’s now inserting into his cassette player and blasting out, before settling back on the seat in the cabin he will share with Chris.
The music is Supertramp; intrigued I go next door to see if I can borrow some tapes for myself.
He has everything from the Supremes to Roxy, to Linton Kwesi Johnson and Elvis Costello. I borrow some Motown (Italian as well!) and rejoin Tom. Soon its time to meet Salvatore.
Rotund, with glasses and a uniform, Salvatore will prove to be the most important man alive on this trip. He sells the beer, the wine, the coffee and the food.
An hour out of Rome and we’re all standing in the carriageway, sipping beer, wondering what to do when five American girls pass in the corridor, talking loudly.
At last! A source of amusement! When they return for drinks contact is made and we find out that they’re from wealthy backgrounds, studying in Italy and heading for Amsterdam.
Eventually the questions are reversed.
Now what do you do for a living, one of them asks.
We’re in a band called Madness, the chaps Woody, Lee, Mark and Chris – reply.
“Oh,” says one of the girls. They’ve never heard of them.
The chaps understand. They’ve been to America twice, and know what it’s like. Without record company backing you’re lost there, Woody and Mark explain to me later.
“We did eight dates in the end,” says Mark enthusiastically. “And basically Sire (their US record company) didn’t put anything into it. We had to do our own publicity and turn up at radio stations and generally get the vibe going ourselves, because Sire, they were so sparked out …
They got posters from Stiff and cut out the bottoms!”
“Kellogs, our manager,” continued Woody, “actually discovered one of the girls from Sire records on her knees with a great pile of Madness posters from Stiff, cutting out the bottoms.”
Be that as it may, it’s our friend Salvatore who’s on his knees right now searching in the fridge for another beer, and imploring us to keep quiet for the thousandth time, as we stand outside his bar gently poking fun at the Americans.
“What did you do at college then?” Mark asks a tall red-headed girl.
BARGAIN
“Well, I just did English government,” she giggles. “So I can tell you all about it.”
“Good,” retorts Mark. “Because we don’t know anything about it.”
“What’s that music playing?” asks another with glasses and standard student dress of jeans and checked shirt. “Have you got a cassette player?”
“We sure have,” says Mark, and a bargain is quickly reached.
We take the cassette player to the girls’ compartment and Woody takes one of them on at backgammon. Two minutes later we’re in the girls’ carriage with Bruce Springsteen on the player, an Italian sun setting, the train slightly rocking, a couple of beers and Woody getting a comprehensive thrashing from his American opponent. “This girl is so lucky,” he wails as he concedes the first game.
I turn to the girl sitting opposite me and ask what English new wave bands she might have heard or seen. Or come to that, liked.
“Oh well, I really like Elvis Costello,” she says. “I think he’s great but … he’s American isn’t he?” Behind Woody’s back, Mark and I curl up with laughter.
Over in the corner of the carriage there’s another source of amusement. He’s male, about 35 with jeans and glasses, holds a degree, and is rabbiting on to one of the other girls, who’s staring at him with mouth open, taking in every word, about his “profession and well-deserved degree”. He’s the teacher. The girls are his students.
Two hours later they lock the carriage door and climb into bed. Takes all sorts.
As Mark, Woody and myself make our way back to the cabin after Woody has lost for a second time (“she kept throwing doubles. What could I do?”) Mark tells me what the teacher graduated in.
Physical psychology.
It makes sense, and after stopping briefly at Salvatore’s Saloon (he tells us once more to sssshhh!), for some food and drink, we retire to my cabin for a formal interview.
It turns out to be probably one of the most informal conversations I’ve ever had with a band. Completely relaxed, and glad of something to break up the journey, the instant appeal of the girls having worn off, Woody and Mark began talking as the train rolled into night-time.I reminded Woody of his “fight to be normal”.
“Yeah, it is,” he concedes. “In other people’s eyes. Just to be accepted as a normal human being.”
“It’s like record companies over here,” interjects Mark. “And television shows. They go ‘ahhh! You act nutty, yes?’ Like yesterday we did ‘One Step Beyond’ sitting down didn’t we? For one take, and it didn’t work,” Woody says grinning.
“We just sat there,” continues Mark, “just to sort of say ‘look! We can do it sitting down if we want’.”
The fact is, of course, that while we’ve been watching and anticipating nothing from Madness except Chas Smash’s funny dances and the rest of the band’s zaniness backed up by some irresistible dance music that has fun spelt all over it, we’ve forgotten conveniently that we’re dealing with seven human beings with emotions, completely individual from each other, with different intentions, too.
‘Absolutely’ divides itself into two distinct sides. The first side is primetime Madness, best exemplified by the closing track, ‘Solid Gone’, a Chas Smash rock ‘n’ billy inspired romp, with meaningless words and lots of smiles.
The second side is more personal, more serious and shows Madness capable now of wearing their influences, Kilburns, Motown as well as Ska, with pride and honour, but not letting them dominate.
But how do Madness wish to be represented in their new found mood?
“I’d like it to be that we’re changing. Moving on,” says Mark firmly.
Woody, as articulate as ever: “It’s much more aware. I think we’ve become much more aware of our surroundings and our actual feelings inside of ourselves. I think side two does show it more. Much more. We don’t mean to be deep and meaningful, it is us,” he gesticulates. “And it’s much more realistic than the common image that we have. It’s the closest to us now.”He stops. “I think that’s all I can say.”
This new found honesty, and ability to think clearly about what exactly Madness and its members are about, was forced upon them by the gruelling nine month tour they completed last year, which took them here, there and everywhere.
Night after night they found inspiration from somewhere to play the Nutty Boys, and not once did they fake it for the audiences.
THE HUMP
This tour, though, will be different.
“Last year,” explains Lee, “we could go onstage time and time again and you wouldn’t see anyone with the hump. But now, I don’t know if people still expect it, but if I’m in a real bad mood and I go out there, I won’t try and put a smile on.”
Even if your audience expect fun and games?
“That’s what I mean,” he exclaims. “If the British audiences are expecting fun and games, poppers and balloons, they’ve got another thing coming.”
A train suddenly rushes past the window filling the cabin with noise and flashing light.
In the cabin behind us Chas and Suggsy are sleeping peacefully, recuperating slowly, as indeed the whole band had to last November, at the end of that exhausting tour.
They all took holidays.
“And lots of drugs,” says Woody, laughing with the rest of us. Until Lee turns serious.
“And that’s another thing, the drugs bit. Everyone’s got over that, because a couple of us went through it and thought we’d never pull through.”
There’s a silence until Woody reveals the cause and effect.
“It gets so bad that you’re doing solid work more and more and each member of the band has his own way of pulling through. They either drink, or they smoke a million cigarettes, or they smoke dope, take coke or speed or whatever. But the thing is, is that in the music industry it’s very easy to get hold of and you turn to those things and it’s great for a week or so. Then you have to take more and more and more,” he says, slowly emphasising his words.
“Until it goes in a complete circle, where you’re taking them because you’re depressed about taking them and it gets to the point where you become a semi-addict. It affects the music and it affects the whole band. But I’ll tell you this now, this is the point now that the band have got over the hurdle and we’ve got fresh eyes to see through it.”
He pauses. “It was bordering on the fact that we were beginning to make a bit too many fluffs,” he states candidly, “than we normally did. Then it got to the stage where I thought, ‘I’m going to bugger my whole career up’.”
“I think it frightened everyone,” states Mark simply, and indeed Lee is the living proof of that statement.
“One time this girl in the States,” he remembers, “chopped out about six lines and had this handful of tuinol. Said ‘here you are’. I said, ‘what are those?’ she goes, ‘downers’. I said ‘Leave it out’, and she said, ‘It’s alright, I’ve got some coke, you can come back up again when you want’.”
The compartment dissolves into laughter at his story, but it’s more the laughter of relief.Especially Woody, who, not being the largest of chaps to put it kindly, scaled down to a terrifying 7 and a half stone, before grabbing hold of his senses.
He agrees totally with Mark’s statement, collared from Chas, that the band are now their own best friends. They have to be.
An hour after Mark and Lee leave to rejoin Chris, Woody, Tom and myself buy our second bottle of Salvatore’s awesome wine and settle back to stories and memories.
We finally fall asleep in Italy. And wake up in cold, desolate, uninspiring Germany.
Salvatore had decided to talk in German today, at least for the morning. He tells me ‘ja! Capuchino will soon be ready,’ and then prices the earth for a tray of synthetic biscuits, small portions of cheese and pate and pineapple juice. This passes for breakfast.
I take a tray back to Woody, who’s a vegetarian, and then bump into Chas and Mark in another cabin where they’re listening to rockabilly tapes.
Chas looks well after his long sleep and sings along enthusiastically to his tapes, observing the desolate German scenery outside, which alternates between industrial wreckage and plain scenery.
Suggsy in still in bed sleeping, but the rest of the band are slowly emerging as Salvatore turfs everyone out, demanding their sheets.
Chas, in the meantime, has got bored of the obscure rockabilly songs he’s playing, and hunts in his bag for something new.
Everything from Diana Ross to the Undertones is discarded, before he finally decides on, what else? Madness.
The punchy rhythms of ‘Absolutely’ beat out, and I ask Chas whether he’s read the article I’d brought over on the band, that had hinted cryptically, if not one-dimensionally, at a dark side to his character.
He laughs a little and says it’s rubbish. He’s got woman trouble at present and is consequently on a downer because of that. There’s no deep side, only natural feelings coming through.
Suddenly there’s a shout from Tom gazing out of the window. He’s just seen an old lady with her skirt down crapping in the middle of the road.
Lee grabs his camera and decides to take a photo of the sleeping Suggsy. He enters the cabin stealthily, lines up the shot and is just about to click, when Suggsy moans and turns over.
VISUALS
Lee makes a noise and Suggsy wakes up.
He sees me, winks good morning, and I tell him I’ll get him a breakfast and an interview to go with it. He smiles wryly and agrees.
Five minutes later, we’re back in my cabin, with Chas and Woody.
As frontmen, and in Suggsy’s case, chief lyric writer, a lot of the Madness direction comes from the Coco Brothers, in the form of visuals and stance. Were they, like their mates, beginning to have doubts?
“It’s always been the same,” answers Suggsy. “It’s fun when you’re doing it, but it’s not fun when people want you to do it.”
“It’s not put on,” continues Chas, in his deep, distinctive accent. “It’s what we’ve been doing and what we were like before the band, most of us, so when you get these arseholes going out in your ska suits …”
His voice trails off in disgust.
“Whereas if they hadn’t asked you,” interjects Suggsy, “you’d probably put on your suit, that kind of thing. It’s either going to be spontaneous or not at all. It’s more depressing to be funny, when you don’t feel funny.”
He grins a little. Like Chas he’s well built and smokes a lot.
He explains that his lyrics have become a bit more self indulgent, even though he’s trying hard not to be, and then he reveals the reasoning behind ‘Baggy Trousers’.
“It was a pisstake of us, baggy trousers and all that shit, but also it was about kids and how hard it is, but it was about teachers as well. How boring it is for them. It was after reading something about how hard schools were, but there’s nothing you can do about it.”
How did he get on at school?
“Not very well really. It was alright, I just couldn’t be bothered, really. It wasn’t that it was hard, it was boring, but I didn’t come out of it with much.”
So you feel lucky to be doing this, I suggest, to which a shout of “you’re not kidding!” comes from all three band members.
“Especially me,” continues Suggsy, after the noise has died down “and I suppose him a bit really (pointing at Chas), because we probably wouldn’t have done anything really. I would have never thought of singing.”
GARDENING
“Then,” he continues, referring to his schooldays as the train speeds towards Amsterdam, “I had all these images of Art college with no academic things at all. ‘Yeah I’m going to be a commercial artist, I’ll worry about it next week.’ And then just doing nothing. Then in the end I’d left school and I was poncing about gardening and other things. ‘But yeah,’ he looks round at the carriage. “Very lucky, very fortunate.”
Madness however, do feel strongly, especially Chas and Suggsy, that other people can attain their positions just as easily as they did.
They talk strongly about previous members of the band, who could have stayed, but chose not to, preferring either work or crime, to “two bob rehearsals” as Suggsy puts it.
But then, is it an enviable position to be in when all’s said and done? Being the Coco Brothers, and all it entails. Chas accepts it all.
“The image has been pushed into too much of a commercial type image,” he concedes, “which we don’t really want to be in. But it has helped us a lot. Put it this way, if you ain’t very popular you can’t really go your own way first. You’ve got to accept it, before you can start going the way you want to go. It is a bit bad when you’re not taken seriously at times. Like some of the stuff is serious, some of it is amusing, and we want people to take it both ways. Not just as the funny ha ha bit.”
The door slides open and Salvatore tells us Amsterdam is near just as Chas explains the single Madness "ideal.”
“Entertainment,” he states unequivocably. “The nearest thing you can say is that all we want to do is have a good time, get better at what we’re doing, people enjoy it, make some money and be successful. We’re not trying to read anything into it,” he wearily explains.
SOCIOLOGICAL
“It’s all observations mainly. Like this friend come up to me and what’s that song, eh, ‘Overdone’, the words to that, and he was saying that was so true. He wrote to his mum and dad and found out they’d been divorced and died. And that’s what people identify with. People say there’s no social statements. There is, but we’re not trying to give any answers or solutions.”
“Like we had this problem,” interrupts Suggsy, “with all this ‘You don’t have any sociological meanings.’ But half the bands you talk to,” he reports, “like the Specials and the Clash, half the time their taking the piss.” He pauses. “I’ve got no affiliation with anybody politically or anything, so any social sayings we have are in our songs, and there are some if you listen to them. It’s just that we don’t go waffling on about them.”
I tell them I think it’s also good that young bands don’t go waffling off on the star trip too much these days.
Suggsy and Chas nod their heads in agreement.
“It is a load of bollocks,” says Suggsy, “because I’ve had, well I’m being candid now,” he states, turning fully to the tape recorder “I’ve had £33,000 which is the royalty cheque that I’ve got and I’ve always wanted to have a house or somewhere to live. I’ve lived with my mum all my life, or my girlfriend, so there was this house up the road for £33,000, so how am I going to afford a Roller or a mink?”
He tuts in amazement.
LAUGHTER
“Half the time,” he adds, “I think, ‘bollocks I’m going to be myself now. Give all my money away.’ I do think it seriously. I can’t stand it anymore, I’m going to make a big announcement and quit. Then other times, you think, ‘Right, Pete Townshend’s got this. Right I’ll go and buy that!’”
Chas Smash’s only ambition at present is to tour America with the Specials in January. Suggsy didn’t mention his.
But just as this train will eventually reach Amsterdam (“Twenty minutes,” says Salvatore), so it’s inevitable that all Madness are composed of is seven natural individuals, each one as complex and as simple as you. In two days I saw ambitions behind the painted smile frustrations, laughter and boredom, all bandied about, but I could never attempt to sum it, or them up, in just two days.
“I just know it’s better than gardening,” said Suggsy. And everyone within earshot agreed.
Meet Craig, a 12-year-old Madness fan, whose brother I share a flat with. I knew damn well that I could never have returned without the band’s autographs for him. So dutifully I asked, and cheerily they all signed. All except for Chas Smash, who later added in block letters, “MADNESS ARE ABSOLUTELY SURE.”
After these two days, that’s more than a possibility.
- Contributed by Lee "Loobyloo" Buckley
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