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I WAS stuck on a five hour train journey from Glasgow to London in the summer of '79 with no buffet and with only the company of ex-Pistol Paul Cook to keep me from crawling up a wall, and unless my memory deceives me he spent half the ride rabbiting on about this band called Madness who came from Camden Town and who were apparently a good laugh and well worth the effort of seeing.
As it happened one night a couple of days later I saw them advertised playing the Moonlight Club in West Hampstead and thought I might as well check them out. It was a decision I've never regretted.
It was just then that the hipper kids were waking up to the Specials and obviously the whole ska-ry thing was new to most ears. But Madness were different, they had the ska beat but there were snatches of Ian Dury in there as well, and the whole thing was altogether less intense, more, how else can you say it nutty than their Coventry colleagues.
Plus they were augmented by a dancer and chanter called Chas Smash who had all these loony chants and asides like 'Hey you, don't watch that, watch this, this is the heavy heavy monster sound, one step beyond' not to mention some decidely unique dance routines.
The Madness main man was Graham 'Suggsy' McPherson, their chirpy Cockney skinhead vocalist and he was abley backed up by Lee Thompson with his fairground sax sounding as fat and greasy as a motorway caff waitress; Chrissy Boy, the Barry Sheene lookalike guitarist; Mike 'Monsieur Barso' Barson with his dark glasses and scatty organ grinding and finally the fresh-faced rhythm aces Dan 'Woody Woods' Woodgate on drums, and Mark 'Bedders' Bedford on bass. All giving the New Ska sound an unmistakable stamp of their own.
They were the first band Jerry Dammers approached to appear on the young 2-Tone label, and their's was the label's second single and second hit with 'The Prince' a tribute to Prince Buster from whose song 'Madness' they'd nicked their name.
They were snapped up by Stiff in September and before you could say 'pop stars' their second single, a version of Buster's 'One Step Beyond' was bounding up the hit parade, while the album of the same name jumped into the Top Ten and stayed in the charts for yonks thereafter.
More than anything it was the album that thoroughly convinced me about the band, illustrating firmly and finally how the twin parentage of Buster and Dury could work, the pure dance numbers alternating with excellent Cockney vignettes with plenty of Duryesque twists in their tales.
Mark Bedford's 'Mummy's Boy' is a good example, a jerky jokey character sketch full of lines like: 'Once went out with a London girl/Dirty weekend in a hotel/Broke it off when she got shirty/She was 12 and he was thirty.'
Other songs concerned knickers-knickers, borstal boys, lodgers and a wealth of other comic book characters.
'One Step Beyond' seemed to capture the flavour of teenage working class London: a bluebeat base from too many Saturday nights beneath plastic palm trees mixed with breezy love songs and dodgy tall tales - the whole lot embellished by the band's constant striving after The Nutty Sound - the carefree cacophony of circus organs and summer holiday fairgrounds.
BY THE time I'd caught them on the first 2-Tone tour up in Scotland in November '79 they'd tightened up (a reggae pun) no end with the nutty visuals paired to the wurlitzer bounce of their yakety-sax musicals giving a more than fair hint of the teeny bop pop successes to come. But first, the history.
The band all hail from the Camden Town area of North London.
As young teenagers one of their earliest musical activities was following Ian Dury's first well-known band Kilburn And The High Roads, Lee especially becoming great mates with the Grand Old Raspberry and 'is legendary umper Fred 'Spider' Rowe.
That explains the comic Cockney connections of their sound. The bluebeat bite came via Lee, Suggsy, Chas and Chrissy's record collections. For Suggsy and Chas listening to ska music was an important part of being skinheads, which they'd been for years before the great Sham 69 inspired skin explosion of 1978.
And Chas developed his nutty dance routine while just 'pissing about' to 'Liquidator' at youth clubs.
The band came about through this group of kids, some mates, some mates of mates, getting into music and deciding to try and make their own.
In '76 they formed the Invaders, later the North London Invaders, and they progressed from playing bedrooms and parties to proper gigs before changing their name to Madness in January 1979.
'F*** Art, Let's Dance' was their slogan and philosophy, and their uncomplicated anti-grimness stance and easily digestable cartoon image - the Beano Bop - laid the basis for a stream of seven hit singles - 'The Prince', 'One Step Beyond', 'My Girl', 'Night Boat To Cairo', Baggy Trousers', 'Embarrassment' and 'The Return Of The Los Palmas Seven' - and two top thirty LPs.
THE SECOND album 'Absolutely' came out last September and it was just as good as the debut. The sound now was more polished and fleshier than before with those early Prince Buster roots barely audible in the overall perfect pop stew of the finished recipe, but it was still holiday packed with sparkle and stories and their irresistable dance beats.
Of all the 2-Tone bands Madness's future seems most assured, and even though like the Specials they spent a vast amount of time in 1980 playing America and Europe they've never seemed to lose touch with their London roots.
I remember seeing them once when they were drunk and doing a nutty train round some dodgy pub, and me thinking how the perfect metaphor for the band would be a couple of comprehensive kids bunking off school and dodging the fares down to Margate on the train and then spending the whole day messing about in Dreamland, pulling birds, pigging down chips and getting legless ......
That probably just about sums the nutty spirit up.
- Contributed by Judge Fredd
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