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The Importance of Being Nutty by Mike Stand
THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING NUTTY - Smash Hits 17.4.80
Mike Stand diagnoses Madness …
SUGGS JERKED his left fist up and pressed it to his temple. Frowning intently at him, Bedders raised his right fist to his forehead in matching style.
“What’s going on?” I asked (a classy bit of interviewing technique I picked up from Robin Day).
Bedders checked that no undesirables were listening – we were in the BBC canteen – and murmured,
“Camden Town Liberation Front secret salute!”
With different hands?
Bedders didn’t break stride:
“That’s because Suggsy’s a more senior member than me.”
Madness! It’s true. I’d met them some two minutes earlier and already their comic fantasy was flying. Nuttiness really is their lifeblood.
I HAD almost missed my appointment with them because I’d got lost in the maze of corridors leading to Studio 6 at the Beeb’s Wood Lane centre where they film ‘Top Of The Pops’.
It was lucky I spotted Suggsy because I didn’t recognise the others off-stage, not even Chas Smith. If you think that he’d stand out in the Cup Final crowd, you should meet him minus shades and pork pie and wearing denim and see if you believe it’s the same bloke!
Madness had flown back from Paris the previous day and spent the night mixing some new tracks before finally getting to bed at five. Then, because ‘Night Boat to Cairo’ was up a million places or so, they had to drag themselves to the Beeb by 10am for a quick rehearsal and five hours of hanging about until the director got back to them.
Still, just now Madness can enjoy circumstances which might cause more jaundiced veterans to throw a temperamental wobbler. Interview? Sure. Up to the bar, unbolt the doors to the roof garden and there we were, gathered like a family picnic party in the spring sunshine.
It wasn’t that they’d all sit still and pay attention like it was some kind of seminar, but through all their comings and goings they maintained a quorum and everyone said their piece, apart from Monsieur Barso and Woody who apparently were asleep in the dressing room.
What’s more, if the band got distracted roadies Chalky and John were ever ready to take up the verbal torch, continuing their bid to become The Most Famous Crew In The World, a campaign which Madness are behind 100 per cent.
I began by suggesting that all his exotic travel might be quite upsetting to people with their roots so deep in North London but they professed themselves not bothered. It wasn’t as if, before Madness existed, they’d been the sort of Cockney stick-in-the-muds who never voyage north of Watford or south of Croydon. Most of them had been abroad several times in their teens.
However, there was no denying that America had proved a problem.
Suggs: “It was a lot more foreign than we thought.”
Chrissy Boy: “The trouble was they couldn’t understand the way we talk.”
John: “I put it down to them being a bit hyperventilated – too much air between their ears.”
Suggs (or ‘Sluggsy’ as one Yankee DJ called him): “America is so big it’s like a lot of separate countries. The 2-Tone thing goes down well in ‘hip’ places like New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco but go to Detroit or Cleveland and they have no idea.
“When we played in Portland, Oregon, the other band, who were some kind of heavy rockers, got so angry about our music they were telling us to get out of the country.”
Apart from the resistance to musical change, Madness were staggered by the wealth of the USA.
Chrissy: “At a San Francisco gig for a bit of fun we tried to drive a car away – an estate with 2-Tone stripes which our American label Sire had got hold of – and nobody wanted it! All the kids had got their own cars anyway.”
No wonder they needed what group lore describes as The Three Blank Days in Los Angeles. With some time off they set out to see how many clubs they could get themselves banned from. Although there’ll be no Guinness Book of Records entry because they were too drunk to count, Suggsy does remember falling out of the back of a truck speeding along the freeway. He landed on his head, so he was all right.
MADNESS ARE the stuff of legends all right, naturals. If they exaggerate occasionally, well, it’s not the “Six O’Clock News” and it doesn’t worry me. However, I did want to ask them about the seamless join between Madness reality and their image/publicity/myth.
For instance, I’d never even seen their ages in print. Fresh-faced as they are, might they be Gary Glitter types with a good plastic surgeon?
Sorry, no scoops. They’re all around 20 and Chrissy Boy is the old man at 23.
What about another blank, school days? As you might guess these look-sharp lads were bright but didn’t take too well to straight education. Between them they totted up quite a score of O-levels and CSE’s before bidding the scholar’s life farewell (apart from Barso who put in a year at art college).
That reminded me of a different kind of “academy” portrayed in their album track “Land of Hope and Glory” – approved school or Borstal. Kix was the author. He’d been sitting quietly to one side, his rather more weathered looks accentuated by a few days growth of whiskers.
He groaned as soon as I looked his way: “It was a personal experience. All I want to say is in the song.”
His reticence provoked mockery from the others, especially Chas, who started to improvise a dramatic monologue about the horrors of doing porridge: “It takes me back to the closed rooms, the smell of the toilets, delousing on Fridays, the 13 naked bodies standing to attention by their beds every morning …”
Eventually this got up Kix’s nostrils.
“Spoken by a man whose life has been a bed of roses”, he taunted and Chas stopped at once, seeing he’d inadvertently touched on a sore spot. We moved on hastily to “Razor Blade Alley”, another song showing him as the creator of the tougher end of the Madness repertoire.
Again it’s a true life adventure and he didn’t mind elaborating on that one, although it’s about an ignominious encounter with a, erm, loose lady.
Kix: “The thing was, up to that time my friends thought I was a bit … you know, about sex. So I sort of jumped in the deep end. And was it deep! I’ve still got a reputation that when I meet a bird I talk and talk instead of getting down to the action. They always fall asleep on me.”
A man who can say such things about himself must have a pretty healthy soul. Likewise Suggs who, unprompted, told me about his night as a Dirty Old Man studying the background for “In The Middle Of The Night.”
“I was going home late a bit drunk and disorderly and I ran through a few gardens nicking underwear off the lines. At the end of it I’d got a cut foot and a pair of knickers on me ‘ead. I put it down to research.”
“Deceives The Eye”, from the “Work, Rest and Play” EP, is also almost pure reportage.
Kix and Chrissy did operate as a shoplifting team in their teens (“Only for things we wanted, not for selling”) and Chrissy did get caught, try all the usual excuses including “I’m from a broken ‘ome”, and finish up at the cop shop despite it all. Influenced by Ian Dury’s “Razzle In My Pocket” (the B side of “Sex And Drugs And Rock ‘N’ Roll”), they made a song of it years later.
Not that it describes the Chrissy of today, as he stressed in his serious way:
“I wouldn’t do it now. It used to be really easy to nick anything but they’ve started putting these bleepers in clothes and records. And I’m getting old, I can’t run so fast. The song doesn’t have a moral though. We’re not telling people what they should or should not do.”
So Madness songs are a mingling of fact and imagination. They’re not good little boys dreaming of being naughty, nor are they whining about the hard times they’ve been through.
AT THIS point rainclouds were threatening so we scuttled into the bar. This left me alone with Chas Smash for a few minutes and his MC chatter was soon in full flood.
My problem was that even without his shades his eyes disappear as his face creases into that total smile and it’s very difficult to spot the leg-puller’s twinkle. It’s also hard to suss out the streak of fierce determination which must lie behind his cheery-chappiness.
Consider how he left the band once (when he was an L-plate bassist) after a row with an unnamed member of the present line-up then re-established himself as a unique visual focus, the nutty dancer.
He said that he’d officially rejoined Madness after an Aylesbury gig when his late arrival lead to a lame “One Step Beyond” followed by a tumultuous reception when Chas did come looning on to the stage. Even though he was a non-musician and non-singer he had made himself indispensable.
He doesn’t intend to trade on “character” forever though. He’s co-written a couple of tracks for his own heavy heavy monster vocals and, along with Suggs, he’s learning trumpet to beef up their horn riffs on some numbers.
Chas was just telling me straight-faced that Madness planned to revive a lot of Ian Dury’s Kilburn And The High Roads material when Suggs popped back to deny it all. They both stuck to their stories so vehemently I didn’t know who to believe, though I’d put my money on Suggs.
I surrendered on that one and tried a key question: why had Madness dropped the soul ingredients from their set? Six months ago they were covering songs like Smokey Robinson’s “Tears Of A Clown” and “Shop Around” alongside the ska. So had they just gone with whichever fashion took off first?
Chas: “No, Suggs just couldn’t reach those high notes.”
What emerged is that Madness have no purist devotion to any particular style. A couple of years ago they even stopped playing ska because at the time there was no audience for it.
As Chas said simply: “If we don’t get people moving it’s terrible.”
Suggsy wasn’t embarrassed to show that he reacted to fashion in much the same way as “fickle” public taste:
“Once things go out of fad I find I don’t like them myself.”
So did that mean they had no commitment to any ideals, musical or otherwise?
Chas: “We’re committed to fun. We stumble blindly on, but that’s one thing we are sure of.”
Suggs: “Being nutty is what we think about. That’s the Madness sound no matter what outside influences there may be.”
“Life is a bowl of cherries if you have a giggle,” concluded the philosopher Smash.
TIME TO go: a business meeting then togging up for the TOTP slot in which, for “Cairo” atmospherics, the ever-resourceful Beeb costume department kitted them out in flowing Arab robes. All except Suggs that is. He looks a true Brit twit in baggy khaki shorts and a solar topee helmet – but then everyone knew he was just taking the pith.
- Contributed by Mister B
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