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Why Stiff Records don't go out to lunch. How Madness made it to the top. John Walker talks to the band and their mentor Dave Robinson.
It seems so simple and effortless. Instant stardom. One day you can be a school-leaver with dim prospects - working, say, as an office boy, cleaning out GPO toilets - and the next you're a film star. Or you can begin as a beach photographer, scuffling through grim English resorts fixing the smiles of holiday-makers, and finish as the head of a company with a £6.5 million turnover.
Perhaps there is no business like show-business. And fame is within the grasp of anyone who can make or market a record. Was it really like that for Madness? You might think so from Take It Or Leave It, a movie re-creating the group's formation.
Was it like that for Dave Robinson, the former beach photographer who now heads Stiff Records and directed the film? "If you're working class, you have four options," he says, hunched over the purple-painted kitchen table, pushed into one corner of a large office, that serves as his desk. "You can be a sportsman, footballer or boxer. You can be a musician. Or a thief. Or a drudge."
Robinson views the rise of Madness, a group who account for up to a third of Stiff's turnover, with the easy amusement of a man who feels he had to force the door that led to easier living.
"The film shows how ridiculous it is," he says. "These guys ... most went to comprehensive schools and learned nothing. Now they've done very well. They've made more money in a year-and-a-half than their parents have done in a lifetime.
"But it was chancy. It has nothing to do with any real talent per se, but with chance and circumstance, having hit records, Madness understand that, which is why I don't think they've changed at all. The members of the group made no apparent effort to take part in anything.
"Their first demo went to number 16 in the charts. A demo! They'd never been in a studio, they knew nothing about nothing. And it goes to 16!"
Robinson, 38, is in the casual mode of the new entrepreneurs thrown up by rock music, who understand its connections with city streets. His offices are in a decaying backwater of West London, where he sits above what appears to be a graveyard where old taxicabs go to die.
With his heavy hands, the nails bitten or broken short, his smile which reveals crooked teeth, and his habit of tucking a biro behind his ear through a thick fuzz of black hair, he could be mistaken for perhaps a carpenter, called in to stop the kitchen table collapsing under its weight of telephone, intercom and piled papers.
The shelves in his office are stuffed with tapes. Resting among them is a solitary book, Proverbs and Sayings of Ireland. His floor is littered with equipment, boxes, posters and a brick inscribed Smash Up, a memory of Wreckless Eric, a former Stiff singer who is now without a record company.
Glistening on the walls are memorials to some of Stiff's hit records: Elvis Costello's My Aim Is True, Ian Dury's New Boots And Panties, Madness's One Step Beyond and Absolutely.
At the moment, Stiff has two singles in the Top Ten: Alvin Stardust's 'Pretend' and Madness's 'Shut Up', which was boosted by Robinson's inventive video of the group being shown on Top Of The Pops.
But Robinson's progress has been indirect, that of someone looking for the main chance and missing it. His first ambition as a 12-year-old, the son of a Dublin signwriter, was to be a jockey, but he grew too tall and heavy. His parents gave him a good Irish Catholic education - "it's taken me 30 years to be able to talk to them again" - and, at 16, he began working at a photo-engravers.
He left after six months. "I sussed quite quickly that in two years we'd be replaced by machines," he says. But, having been exposed to the rudiments of photography, he bought a camera and began taking pictures of weddings and children before moving to England to work the seaside resorts. "That was quite an interesting way to learn about life if you were an Irish boy."
After a while he reached London and worked as a publicity photographer, snapping away at press receptions. The big city provided him with some polish and motorised Nikon cameras, intimidating professional equipment capable of taking more pictures then you'd want to develop. He took both back to Dublin.
"I was Ireland's leading photographer within a fortnight," he says. "The other photographers accused me of cheating because I took so many photographs. The Irish system was to take one picture every hour or so. I did all the up-and-coming bright young photographer stuff."
Inevitably, he found himself photographing Ireland's show bands, which stimulated his mild interest in music. There were young groups without managers, so he moved in; there were clubs which he ran. Then he returned to London, where the big fish were.
"I'd found that I was good at the kind of jobs that required people to talk and to be diplomatic and know what's what," he says. "I'm a good talker."
Fortunately, it was the beginning of the pub-rock scene in London, that time when young groups could work up a fanatical local following and yet be thought of as no more than a fascinating sociological phenomenon by the big record companies, who were searching for tamer talent that they could groom as 'the new Beatles'.
Robinson honed his talent for improvisation and persuasion. "I went round pubs and showed the landlords that if they gave me their worst nights of the week I could bring a crowd in, drinking beer like crazy."
The Hope and Anchor in Islington became the focus of his efforts. He turned an unused room there into a recording studio, spending his money on equipping it. The tapes he made in those days still fill two rooms of Stiff's offices and it put him in touch with most of North London's young musicians. "I kept great lists of them. You were always having to patch together a band in a few minutes."
There were setbacks. It will take Robinson a long time to live down his association with Brinsley Schwarz, a group he helped launch with the confident aplomb of a man pushing out the Titanic.
The group were to have made their debut in New York, watched by a load of British journalists flown over especially for the occasion. But the plane left London six hours late, had to make an emergency landing in Ireland and arrived in New York ten hours behind schedule, just before Brinsley Schwarz were due to play.
The journalists - bad-tempered, tired and emotional - were rushed to the concert at Fillmore East, only to discover that they couldn't get in, because no one had thought to book seats for them. An accompanying film crew was also turned away. The few who did squeeze in to see the band perform either ignored them or savaged them.
Robinson is unrepentant, believing that the bad press boosted the group as much as rave reviews would have done. His own success dates from 1976 when he formed a management company with another veteran of the pub-rock business, Jake Riviera. He managed Graham Parker - "he was my equity" - and Riviera had a former Schwarz guitarist Nick Lowe.
As a sideline, they decided to form a small record company - called Stiff after American slang for a record that flops - and issue occasional records by their artists. Their first release sold 15,000.
"We couldn't press enough. All we had between us was £400. It was a question of spending that on pressing records, selling those and then pressing £600 worth and so on. In those days it was hand-to-mouth all the time."
But Robinson had had his revelation. "Running a record company is where the money is. It's much more exciting, much more creative and much more yours than managing someone. Trust between a singer and manager is a very tenuous thing. He always feels that the percentage he pays you when he is unknown is too much when he's famous.
"Stiff got a lot of promotion and publicity very quickly. Jake and I, it's always been our forte, shouting loudly. The English music press like to think that they turn the public on to groups. Once you are aware of that, everything is easy."
Robinson remembered from his pub days Declan McManus, a Liverpudlian who was backed by a band too incompetent to play the songs he wrote. By this time, he'd left the band. "We got hold of him and sat him down. Declan McManus wasn't exactly the kind of name we were looking for. So we had a rethink and came up with Elvis Costello.
"Quite honestly, there's not a lot of people who would stomach changing their name to Elvis Costello but he did. And he had the stuff. I still think he's probably the best songwriter in England."
Stiff lost Costello when Robinson and Riviera ended their partnership. But Robinson came up with Ian Dury and, when he lost him after three albums, found Lene Lovich and then Madness. "I've always been keen on people who write songs," he says.
"We usually have bands who are connected to the ground. They play a kind of folk music which is relevant to the city we live in, to London in particular and England in general."
He signed Madness after inviting them to play at his wedding two years ago. The group were being wooed by several big companies. Stiff had checked them out and been unimpressed. But people Robinson respected kept urging him to listen to the band.
A record company, Robinson knew, is only as successful as its hits. After Costello left, he found Stiff owed £150,000 and had to persuade creditors to hold off. Then Ian Dury was a hit and morale lifted.
"That's what record companies are about, having hit groups," he says. "The days when major companies could rely on the sales of their big catalogues of old records are over. People are buying what's now. A company has to have bands that sell in some quantity.
"The only way I could hear Madness was to invite them to the wedding. They came to take the piss. But I thought they were wonderful. They even got Elvis Costello to dance, which is a thing you don't do. They literally dragged him on to the floor.
"There were eight or nine A&R men from other companies there and none of them liked the band, which I thought was a good sign. We went into a quick discussion in a pub and made a deal the next day."
Robinson's only doubts were about Madness's singer Graham 'Suggs' McPherson. Their success has changed his feelings about that. "They're great. Great fun, very, very talented and they haven't changed from the guys who played at my wedding. We've continued to get on well. They were working class and they've kept working class and I'm quite working class so everything fits together nicely."
Mike Barson, the group's keyboard player, ponders this the next day. "I can't stand it when people seem to think there's something special about being working class," he says. "There's nothing special about it and there's nothing not special. Some people are and some people aren't. I'm not. I see myself as lower middle class.
"Somebody wrote the other day that we was all working class boys guilty at losing our roots. That's a load of crap. We aren't guilty about anything. I haven't lost any roots to be guilty about. Maybe Dave has had a hard time in his life and sees himself as someone who has made good."
But Madness enjoy their relationship with Stiff because it keeps them down to earth. They distrust glamour. Last week, on a trip to Holland to pick up an award for their high sales there, they refused to travel in sleek limousines from the airport. They liked the fact that when they arrived back at Heathrow after an overseas tour, Stiff sent an old van to pick them up. They had to push it along the road to start it.
"A lot of record companies were really interested in us before we signed with Stiff," says guitarist Chris Foreman. "But the way they manifested their interest was just disgusting. It was just money that they were offering. Some offered us twice the money to sign with them. I don't like the way with big companies that you have to wait in a reception area to see the assistant manager."
Madness's life, judging by their movie, was once limited to a few streets and pubs in Camden Town. These days, they are experienced tourists, having visited most British cities and America, Australia and Japan. They're just back from a return visit to Japan. "It's great there," says Chas Smash, the group's dancer-vocalist. "Unlike here, if you shouted in the street you'd feel an ill-mannered lout. Britain seems to have lost its sense of identity somehow."
Madness is an extraordinary group. There are seven of them, for a start, without an obvious leader. "It makes me sick when one person is quoted as if he spoke for everyone," says Barson. Each has his own vociferous views, which do not spoil their enjoyment of each other. Each, for instance, has a share in the royalties of their songs.
Industrial psychologists have identified the personality types who together form the most formidable team. One is known as The Shaper, a Brian Clough-type of individual, impatient and argumentative but vital to success. Barson seems Madness's shaper.
As he strides into a photo session more than an hour-and-a-half late, restraining a large dog with one hand while his Dutch wife Sandra clings to his other arm, he appears aloof and arrogant. On stage he wears the disguise of dark glasses. In the early days he was the best musician, able to point out to the others which chords they should be playing.
Madness's music is Cockney Caribbean, with its rock steady beat beefed up by the rudimentary r&b foghorn sound of Lee Thompson, who plays the tenor sax as if it were a blunt instrument. They provide 'good time' music for dancing.
Their sense of fun - 'Madness, I call it gladness,' sings Suggs on their first album - reveals itself in a love of parody. But with it goes a talent for writing story songs about the sad and lonely and defeated ('In The Middle Of The Night', 'Bed And Breakfast Man', 'Mummy's Boy', and the new single 'Shut Up') in which sentimentality and sympathy is kept at bay by the upbeat melody.
It is these abilities that make their movie something of a fraud. For the film's message is that there is nothing special about a hit group. Take It Or Leave It de-mystifies the myth of the pop process, demolishing the distance between the group and those outsiders, its audience.
The film is a more-or-less documentary account of the group's beginnings, filmed by Robinson in a straightforward hand-held camera style far removed from his surrealistic videos. Stiff and Madness shared the £400,000 costs, with each group member putting in around £20,000 each. Robinson taped interviews with them to form a narrative which was used as a basis for improvisation on remembered incidents.
Robinson's involvement with video began after he paid £5,000 for one that turned out to be a waste of money. "They're commercials," he says. "You have to be able to shoot it in a day and cut it in a day, otherwise it's no use. Audiences don't want anything too clever; they just like a laugh."
The movie had a shooting schedule of 15 days. There were problems at the start when the laboratory over-exposed the film, ruining the first three days shooting. "I couldn't believe it," he says. "This was the film business! There were huge sums of money being spent."
There were difficulties on the set. "I wanted to create a situation and put Madness in it. I knew within five minutes they'd do some blinding thing. But the crew has to be ready or it's lost. You'd find that on the first take - the inspirational one - the guy didn't have his focus together or the sound man had his machine off.
"That's why English films are so boring, what you're seeing is the eighth or ninth take. The fact is the crew weren't interested in what we were doing. Between shots they'd pull out the Daily Mirror and start reading it. They weren't focused on us. It was the English workman at work. They didn't care, even though they were earning £600 or more a week."
(At Stiff Records, no one goes out to lunch. "You lose two hours that way," says Robinson, removing the cling-film from his unappetising salad, all damp tongue and beetroot bleeding on limp lettuce.)
But the film has the authenticity of felt experience. It is like a superior home movie, blown up to 35mm. It has a narrow focus: there is scarcely an adult in the film; this is an adolescent dream world where fantasies can come true.
Chris Foreman bought his first guitar for £20 with a tax rebate at the urging of Thompson so he could join rehearsals in Mike Barson's bedroom. "But I never took lessons or tried to play it except when we were together," he says.
Barson remembers having a piano lesson when he was 14 and deciding that he didn't like classical music. "It never sounded any good even if you could play it properly. Beethoven and the rest seemed out of tune to me. You only need to read music if you want to play other people's tunes," he says.
Suggs had wanted to be a commercial artist but hadn't the qualifications to go to art school. He disliked the comprehensive he went to in Swiss Cottage. "I had less and less respect for it until in my last year I hardly went at all. But if I had children I'd still want them to go to a state school. I'd rather they started off on the same footing as everyone else.
"I wasn't even thinking of becoming a member of a group until I met the people in the band. I wasn't really asked to join, either. It was just that there was nobody else around so I thought I'd have a go."
Thompson left the group for a year. Suggs wandered off and returned. Chas Smash took up bass guitar but was soon replaced. But John Hasler proves that you need more than willingness or being there to succeed. Hasler, a lean, blond enthusiast, is the film's running joke: the eternal loser.
Hasler was Madness's first drummer, but he couldn't keep time. Ever enthusiastic, he was the first to start writing songs, scribbling lyrics to Barson's phrases "they weren't very good," says Foreman - and he abandoned drums to become the group's singer. He wasn't good at that, either, and became their manager. Now he's gone to Stiff as an A&R man.
It was Foreman who worked for the GPO, making tea and cleaning toilets. "I used to slosh disinfectant over the floors," he says. "In a couple of weeks I used six months' supply because you were meant to dilute it, but no one had told me."
He worries about whether his five-year-old son Matthew should go to a State or a private school. Madness are experiencing the onset of responsibility. They have all become taxpayers and ratepayers with mortgages.
"It's just a natural progression," says Mark Bedford, their bassist. "A lot of people were living at home when the band first started. When you've got some money it's normal to want to buy your own house."
They still live close to Camden Town, within a couple of miles of each other. "Camden has so many memories for me," says Dan Woodgate, their drummer. "A lot of people say it's rough and violent. But I've lived there all my life and never seen any trouble. I feel very safe in Camden Town."
There is little sign of conspicuous consumption about Madness. Lee Thompson has just bought himself a secondhand bike.
"They're still Jack-the-lads," says Robinson, whose one extravagance is racehorses. He owns one, his wife owns another and one is shared with Chris O'Donnell, manager of Ultravox. Otherwise, he drives a Mazda Estate, lives in Clapham and worries about where his three-year-old son, Max, should go to school. "He won't go to a comprehensive. Not in London if I can help it."
Says Suggs, "It gets harder to write songs. I used to write a song about anything that came into my mind. Now I feel I should be aiming in some direction. I feel the lyrics should be subtler or more socially aware.
"Of course, the reason I'm in this group is because I really enjoy it and I make money at it and it's what I want to do.
"But I do feel more socially aware. I read a newspaper now - the Daily Express - and am more affected by what happens in the world. I'm writing songs about nuclear disarmament. The trouble is, the more you know, the more difficult it is. And the more and more confused you get."
'Take It Or Leave It' opens at the Gate 3 on October 14.
- Contributed by Graeme Sharpe
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