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When The Screaming Had To Start: Madness as the new Bay City Rollers by Pete Silverton
“’ERE, SUGGSY…’Ere, Suggs.”
The skinhead in the red Harrington over a swastika jumper leant back against the browser rack in HMV’s main Birmingham branch. He was too cool to show it anywhere except in his eyes but as he realised he’d caught the ear of the object of his attentions he basked in the warmth of the admiration spilling out quietly from his similarly dressed friend. Suggsy turned round.
“Remember me? In Aylesbury?”
Suggsy gave him a look which might or might not have implied recognition. From three feet I couldn’t be sure.
“Remember that chewing gum? I was the one that spat it out on the plate and then you signed it for me.”
Suggsy’s face was as neutral as possible in the circumstances. The skinhead carried on with ever more graphic details. I protected the contents of my stomach by examining the crude tattoo on his arm – a bull’s head with ‘Oxford Utd’ above it, matching the ‘Oxford Skin’ legend on his sweater.
Lee Thompson wandered up and the skin noticed him eyeing the swastika.
“Well, yeah … it’s only there because … like … well,” he blustered before side-stepping smartly into the real point of attracting Suggsy’s attention.
“Remember that chewing gum you signed … well, do you think you could put my name on the door tonight?”
Suggsy dutifully wrote the name down on a scrap of paper and I finally realised just what stardom means – putting your name on used chewing gum and other people’s on the door.
When I arrived in the Madness dressing room back stage at Glasgow’s Apollo, the band were half way through a mini tour of major cities, their first dates in England since before Christmas. The roadies were holding court in the dressing room.
“Have the Mo-Dettes been on yet? They are the support band, aren’t they?”
Like all roadies, they were stronger partisans of their band than the band themselves. “Yeah, they are … if you can call them a band.”
WALKING into the hall to catch the end of the Mo-Dettes’ set was like entering a world where all colours except black and white had been outlawed.
It seemed like the only people not dressed right for the night were the photographer and myself. If rude boy chic was the coming style when the 2-Tone tour wound down at the Lyceum before Christmas, now it had evidently reached epidemic proportions.
Every little girl in sight looked like a less sophisticated, less dramatic version of Fay Fife. Angular, even pinched, Scottish features. Eyes daubed with mascara by young, unsure hands till they looked like fuzzy bullseyes. Black shoes of a kind my mother would probably call sensible. And geometric patterned dresses that owed less to Mondrian than to the St Leger.
All the young dudes were fitted out in miniature black suits or long jackets over white shirts and chequered ties. Cropped hair, of course, but nearer an original mod’s French cut than a skinhead Number One.
If it hadn’t been for the smiles and the looks of wonder in their eyes (I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the first gig at a major venue for most of them), I might have thought I’d stumbled on a convention for midget undertakers.
Few of them could have reached puberty yet. I could tell that easily. I, dwarf that I am, seemed about the tallest person around. When they all got to their feet, I could still see the stage as clearly as if I’d been in the front row instead of halfway back the balcony.
Perched on the edge of their seats with excitement, they made the sweaty and seedy Apollo seem like it was playing host to a tea party for some three thousand well-behaved, conservatively dressed kids. Even the notorious bouncers seemed subdued by the atmosphere.
And then the screaming started.
WOODY, Suggs and Chas Smash had come on to provide backing vocals for the Mo-Dettes’ last number, ‘Twist and Shout’ (ironically enough). That was all the excuse needed. Up out of your seat and make a noise.
The screaming wasn’t the full-throated jet plane in reverse thrust roar I remembered from ‘The Beatles at Shea Stadium’ or the Bay City Rollers on the Nine O’ Clock News. It was nearer the whimpering my cats make when they want to be fed. A quiet, squealy noise that, for a while, had me wondering where it was coming from.
Then I realised it was the sight of Madness. Not only has 2 Tone (because Madness are still 2 Tone in all but record label) become the hippest sound around, it suddenly looks like it might be set to become the repository for a million pubescent dreams.
Hail Madness, the new Bay City Rollers?
The Mo-Dettes left the stage and the crowd, their appetite temporarily sated by a short glimpse of their heroes, quietened down, sat back in their seats or got in line up at the merchandising stall where the queue looked like a Moscow shop the day they had rump steak at a rouble a pound.
Badges, t-shirts (‘Fuck Art, Let’s Dance’ on a ten-year-old’s chest?), mirrors, you name it, they were being snapped up faster than you can lose a tenner playing Find The Lady.
And then the screaming started again. Ten minutes to go before Madness were due on stage and the whole hall echoed with a sound like a thousand little girls who all wanted to go for a piss. And I thought phoney Beatlemania was supposed to have bitten the dust.
The lights dimmed quickly but the crowd didn’t seem to realise what that signified. They only started to roar in earnest when THE BAND ran onstage one by one, Lee Thompson first, Suggs, I think, last.
Chas Smash opened his bruised throat. “Hey you, don’t watch that. Watch this. This is the heavy, heavy monster sound. The nuttiest sound around … One Step Beyond.”
A sax as fat and full as a greasy spoon waitress, the Hopalong Cassidy rhythm and the crowd went wild. I opened my W H Smith’s notebook and jotted down ‘Talk about playing the album!!’
Well, who can blame them and at least they didn’t follow it with ‘My Girl’. I even think they played a new number. Brave enough. As far as the crowd were concerned, I don’t think they’d have given a toss what Madness played as long as they heard the singles and it was all that heavy, heavy monster rhythm.
Which they tried to dance to. Mostly with a marked lack of success. Most of them looked like they were digging potatoes with their elbows while stomping grapes for the vintage with their feet. I certainly never knew Madness were so strong on 15/8 time before. But then I’d never before seen a clutch of girls trotting to the loo together in perfect 2 Tone shoulder-swaggering style.
Their approach to ‘Swan Lake’ made perfect sense. Chas’ finely-timed movements of precision angularity become rather like a dance lesson refresher course for all those who didn’t quite master the lesson on last week’s TOTP. He makes a great teacher. Even if he does sometimes look like a priest giving absolution with a bucket full of methedrin in his bloodstream.
SUGGS and Chas have the beginnings of a great double act. Chas’ gruff but kindly elder brother jerking around next to Suggs jogging on the spot, whose perfectly flat-topped skull and hunched shoulders make him look like a second-rate boxer – I can’t be the only one who reckons him as a dead spit for Terry Downes. If only Chas could sing and Suggs could dance they really would be double dynamite.
Hail Chas and Suggs, a potential Sam and Dave?
‘My Girl’ inevitably gets welcomed like Madness had just discovered a cure for cancer. A little later, Suggs looks at the ground in front of him.
“Fuck me, they’re throwing money … presents.”
Visions of jelly babies still in their tins flash through my notebook as the strobe lights go on, which has the crowd cheering wildly and me knocked even further sideways. What to me seems like the oldest double shuffle in the band book is fresh to them. They’ve obviously never seen strobe lights before. To them, it’s like Guy Fawkes Night. Only better.
And even I thought the exploding confetti at the start of the encore, ‘One Step Beyond (Slight Return)’, was a smart touch. Bands playing in what look like coloured snowstorms look much more interesting than bands playing in enough smoke for a couple of Hammer horror remakes, I decide.
They’re presented with the gilt trophy you get for selling out the Apollo.
“Thank you”, says one of the band, “The Specials haven’t got one.” The crowd are ecstatic for their band. I smile, remembering Beatles vs Stones rivalries.
WHILE this is happening, Jane, a Mo-Dette and also Woody’s girlfriend, is standing close by me. I couldn’t make up my mind whether her expression was closer to envy that she wasn’t there or to pride that her Woody was.
At some point, I make a note which reads ‘Ska as surf music with off-beat’. Apart from probably being a totally inept technical description of the ska beat, it was one of many flawed attempts that evening to come to terms with what I’d seen.
Ska I understood. I’ve even got a few memories of it first time round. Cockney banter and jolly stage shows I was familiar with. I’m as fond of Ian Dury as the next man. Even teenyboppers I could handle.
But all of that rolled up together?
What really threw me was that here was a hip – there really is no other word for it – band who were appealing to both me and kids I’m old enough to have fathered. The last time I can remember anything like that happening was the height of Beatlemania and, well, you just don’t drop phrases like that in willy nilly, do you?
The hipness quotient is the simplest part of the equation to handle. Madness made an excellent debut album, so good in fact that it maybe flatters them. Onstage, they’re nowhere near the potent force you’d maybe expect from hearing their records. Breathe thanks to producers Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley.
But quite why do they appeal to such young kids? Deep breath and a running list for starters. Chas Smash’s hat and elbows. Sugg’s smile. The nutty train. Chipmunks are go. Mike Barson’s suit and pork pie. Woody’s eyes. Bedders’ Bugs Bunny teeth. Lee’s sax and shades. The name. The London accents. The High Street simplicity of the basic clothing style. Their ‘safeness’ – nice boys that even Mum would smile at when they came on ‘Multi Coloured Swap Shop’. Their being part of a ‘movement’. The emotional complexity of ‘My Girl’ which wouldn’t go above the head of an eight year old; ‘Watching The Detectives’, it ain’t. And ska as surf with a lop-sided beat. ‘Tarzan’s Nuts’ (note the slight double entendre) as a ‘Tequila’ for 1980. Novelty records always did go down big with kids of all ages. Especially me.
As the band leave the stage, the audience seems quite happy to sing ‘Chipmunks Are Go’ all by themselves.
LATER that night, crossing George Square on the way from my hotel to the band’s, I talked to a couple waiting for a late bus. The vaguely sixties-looking clothes made it obvious they’d been at the Apollo that night.
David was 17 and a bookbinder. Helen, also 17, worked in the accounts department of a toolmakers. It was their first date. They’d met in the Countdown, a local mod bar. She wanted to see Madness but there were no tickets left. He’d thoughtfully bought a pair of tickets and …
They thought the concert was great. Although David said he liked the Stones and the Who, before he heard ‘Gangsters’ he’d been into disco. Probably, although he wouldn’t say it in front of Helen, because that’s where the girls were … up till now.
“It’s a change fae disco. That all started sounding the same. This is different. It’s new.”
Another good reason for Madness’ success. It gets you dates. Guaranteed.
Or, looked at from a different side, it gets you into hospital. Shortly after I’d arrived at the hall, a kid had fallen from a drain-pipe three storeys up the side of the building. At least that was one story. Another had it that he’d been ‘helped’ out of a window.
Nothing to do with Madness, of course. Just a symbol of what can happen when a band gets so popular that the only way in to the gig for some is a climb up the wall.
THE NEXT DAY, after a spine-crushing drive to Birmingham and a swift swoop on HMV for the Costello album and the Bad Manners single, accompanied only by that pair of skinheads, their tales of used chewing gum and a crocodile of young girls chasing autographs in their National Health glasses and grey school coats, I asked Suggs to repeat something he’d told me the night before when I’d been past the point of even wanting to listen to my own voice.
“It was outside the hotel. A load of kids must’ve found out where the hotel was or something and they were all after autographs and stuff and we turned the corner and I was first round the corner and all the rest of them stayed there and I walked across the road and suddenly I was surrounded with little kids.
“So I was running round and round the cars and this lot (he gestured to Mike and Woody, the only other members of the band in the room) just walked in the hotel. And I came back with all me shirt … me shirt had been nicked and I came out with one wrong shoe.”
“They ripped it off ya?” Mike had obviously been in a similar state of consciousness to me the previous night.
“And ran up the street with it,” Suggs continued, only a slight tone of bewilderment in his soft North London voice. “There was 200 of ‘em. I couldn’t get through to get the one ‘oo ‘ad it … I was shoutin’ me ‘ead off.”
Mike was doubtful. “I never saw 200 of ‘em.”
“Well, thirty of ‘em … whatever.”
“The rest of ‘em (the band) were just standing there on the corner while I was running round and round laughing their heads off.”
Mike’s laughing again but still under-impressed. “I thought you were just fucking about.”
So what’s it like to be the new David Cassidy?
Mike doesn’t pause. “No objections raised … We’re not David Cassidy anyway. We’re just getting a younger audience because we’ve had a few hits on TOTP. We’re all good-looking boys so it’s unavoidable really.”
He smiles like a Cheshire cat with paralysis of the upper lip.
But you’re not exceptionally good-looking.
“I’d dispute that,” says Suggs, not quite sure how serious I was.
“You don’t have to be exceptionally, do ya?” adds Mike.
“No, just clean, smart-looking.”
But why you?
“I think ‘cos we’re not very menacing. Sort of more funny …”
Mike picks up the thread “… people who’ve got an aggro image like the Stranglers or summink. Talk about fighting in their interviews and everything.”
I THINK back to the last time I’d seen Madness before Glasgow. At the Electric Ballroom when I’d left early because gang terrorism in a mixed sauna isn’t my idea of a good night out.
At the time, I thought Madness could easily get bogged down in the mire of their nastier, more stupid fans’ idea of a good night out. Maybe like Sham, their gigs would become an Armageddon you could set your watch by. In an understandable pique, they’d said they wouldn’t play London again.
The previous night in Glasgow had put that problem (hopefully) back in the past where it belongs. The bullet-heads with straight right arms would be swamped by 2 Tone tots now. At least, I hope they would.
And that success has been nothing if not rapid. Less than a year ago, they were turned down by Stiff.
“Paul Conroy from Stiff came down to see us at the Hope and Anchor with …” Mike fumbles for the name, “… what’s that little git’s name? … Kosmo, Kosmo Vinyl was his artistic director. He said we were a heap of shit and he kept saying to Paul Conroy, ‘No, it’s a wanky group’ and Paul said ‘We’ve got Ian Dury already’.”
“They left halfway through,” Suggs’ disappointment is only slightly mollified by time; “… We were a bit disheartened.”
Now Madness are doing so well they’ve got their own shop. Nut Inc. (geddit) in the Liverpool Rd., where you can buy anything short of a toilet roll with Madness printed on it.
Suggs liked the idea. “I’ve been in there a couple of times. It’s alright, loads of kids bunking off school and stuff, falling asleep in there, poncing fags…”
He drifts round to a wider view. “I used to think being successful was just playing gigs, being able to live off it.”
Mike takes over. “I thought you’ve made it once you’ve got adverts in the paper and are getting reviewed regularly and that was ‘making it’ as far as it seemed to me.
“The main thing you don’t realise is all you do is tour. It’s all we’ve done anyway. What you think of is going down the pub in a Rolls Royce and you don’t think of the work involved. However much money you’ve got, what can you do? You can go in a motorway caff and have twenty pints of lager and not worry about the price.
“We ain’t got much money yet (royalty cheques won’t arrive till April) but, even if we did have it, it wouldn’t do us much good. I keep thinking of buying a car but what am I gonna do? … park it outside my house?”
AND then there’s other people. Or rather the leeches. “It’s a bit bad, innit, ‘cos people wanna know you ‘cos you know someone else. My girlfriend got invited to a party the other day and they said bring Madness and she rung up and said ‘I can’t. I wanna bring me mate,’ and it was ‘Oh, if you’re not gonna bring ‘em…not in so many words, but don’t bother coming’.”
Suggs makes the point that they wanna know who he is not who he was. I wonder if they weren’t ever like that towards ‘famous’ people.
Mike answers. “Still are now. When we did that Who thing, all the Who were there and you’re sort of lookin’ at ‘em, you’re wondering what they’re like. It’s stupid but everybody does it.
“Just when they sell a lot of records, you think there must be something special about ‘em and there ain’t really.”
And so off they went to do the bit that makes them special to people, heroes in 4/4 time for an hour or so.
Just before they go on, a photographer friend who specialises in syndicating his pictures to Europe asks me what Madness sound like. He doesn’t need to know. He knows he can sell the pictures. He’s just curious, that’s all. Success is when people take your picture without knowing why they’re doing it?
I watch the set and make two notes. One says the start of ‘The Prince’ live sounds like something else. Only now I can’t read what I thought it sounded like. The other says Suggs pinches his nose like a boxer, like Marlon Brando in the taxi cab in ‘On The Waterfront’ when he’s rapping about how he coulda been a contenda.
Getting into the car for the drive back to London, the driver points to a crowd of 2 Tone tots running up into a shopping precinct.
“Did you see that? They just mugged them for their Madness flags?”
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