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ONE
THE concerned campaigner in the neatly-creased suit cottoned on quick that these chaps – the kilts, the crew-cuts, the cases – must be celebs. Kitchen staff and kiosk attendants converged and chattered over signed paper napkins – extraordinary animation from a species hitherto deemed devoid of all human response. The bar had been opened especially, the private planes were fuelling … a VIP buzz.
He approached, cautiously at first, then more boldly with the gait of a man with right on his side and – just in case – a fresh-faced snapper before him.
“Excuse me, I’m from the local press, petitioning signatures for blah de blah de blah.” Polite, if strained, compliance. Slow recognition on his part …
“Er … before you go, would you, um, do something nutty for my photographer?” Seven scowls, a mock-up scuffle, Lee darts forward and the intruder exits, chuffed with success.
As the automatic doors glide shut behind him, I just spot the sticker, there, undetected, smack between his shoulder blades for all the world to see. No-one, but no-one, messes with the Maddy boys.
TWO
MADNESS are in a Belgian TV studio – a two day breach in pre-tour rehearsal – to promote their new single/album/film and accept awards for past achievements.
Carl (Chas Smash to you) is dressed in armour, brandishing a sword and charging a miserable stuffed tiger with frightened glass eyes and a tacky old tail. Lee (Mr Sax) is beating pots full of bamboo bushes with the butt of a rifle. Woody (Mr Skin) is togged out like the Artful Dodger hitting on a large cigar.
Bedders (Mr Bass)is collecting sink-plungers into a Habitat bag. Suggs (“7 foot 4 blonde Apollo”)is flat on his back toking fags chanting “Om!” Chris (“King Of The Sydney Mods”)is bellowing mild obscenities down a megaphone and chalking gross inanities on a snazzy revolving blackboard.
Meanwhile oblivious to all, be-spectacled, be-suited Barso (ivory-tickler and flash bastard)is deep in page 12 of his paperback novel.
Suddenly the cry goes up: “Bring On The Wimpy Walker!”
Tom “The Chief” Sheehan, obliging with shamefully little encouragement for a man of his age, staggers before the cameras in a re-run of last night’s dance-floor triumph, attempting something painfully reminiscent of a balding bell-dancer doing a vertical back-stroke. He promptly pulls a muscle.
The presenter, a two-legged powder-puff with vaselined hair, looks suitably terrified as ten minutes of “free-form nuttiness” has just put paid to his fact-finding interview. The Belgian producer’s lapping it up, loving every minute.
Cut. The boys stop dead and silently knock off for lunch.
THREE
HEY Woody! I reckon the new album’s the heaviest thing you’ve ever done. Is it gonna harm your … um … nutty image?
“It’s got to cos it’s tiring me out. Everytime we go to Europe it’s ‘Nutty … you put on your ska suits … yes?”
Do you regret you ever manufactured the idea in the first place?
“No, not at all. We ‘ad a great sense of naivety in the early days of what the music business and the world in general was all about and onstage it didn’t matter. It was exciting for us all to get up and enjoy the music with everyone dancing their bollocks off and ‘avin’ a good time. That’s what ‘Nutty’ was about …
“Now we’ve just done a really good classic example of nuttiness – all these interviews, we just act stupid and take the piss out of people because it’s so ridiculous, the whole pose and smile and look this way and do this and do that. You feel like a puppet and you’re not a puppet, you’re a musician.”
But the more you do it, the more you encourage it:
“Well, we’ve gotta live, we’ve gotta earn money and we’re in the rock ‘n’ roll business.”
Did you ever dream it would turn out like this?
“No way. Never ever. But I’m beginning to realise the more money you get, the more you have to sacrifice yourself.
None of this band likes to be trapped at all – we’re all quite rebellious – that’s why I think we act nutty – it’s just a way out of it really.”
Do you feel trapped then?
“Not recently – no. I mean, in the early days I thought it was the thing to do, like ‘ave the image, wear the clothes and say what I was supposed to say, but I discovered after a while that I was only lying to myself and to the band as well, although the media loved it.
“I thought if I turned up the way I wanted to look, the band would say ‘Oi! You scruffy-lookin’ twit – wear this! Wear that!’ But they didn’t. They respect people for being themselves.”
“We’re all individuals at heart. It’s only the music that keeps us together really – I mean there are obviously friendships but it just shows that you can’t put a label on us. That’s why we decided on ‘Nutty’ ourselves, we put ourselves in it really by calling our music ‘The Nutty Sound’ cos we couldn’t stand people saying ‘Are you a ska band or are you a rock ‘n’ roll band or are you a jazz band …’”
FOUR
MADNESS storm Amsterdam in extraordinary style – tams, kilts and Doc Martens. The dope dealers don’t know what to make of it but the boys in the gay bar are more than delighted. We should be in Brussels right now but threat of an out-and-out mutiny secured a night off in Europe’s sin city.
Monday though. The lucky seven luck out. The Paradiso’s closed, The Milky Way (“The club you can sup in between bars without ruining your appetite” – TS) is shut – no action.
Bedders is worried his mum would kill him if she could see the club he’s about to enter. Chrissy Boy tries to deposit me in the path of a speeding tram, we eventually get horrendously drunk, hail a cab and head hotelwards to bed – a disappointment.
Chas: “You fly in, you’ve ‘ad some crap on the plane and all you wanna do is ‘ave a look round, send a few postcards ‘ome … but you get pushed into a studio and someone says “Eeer, de nutty skanks, nutty dis, zany, zany, nutty, great!” and you think ‘Fuckin’ hell, can’t wait to get ‘ome’. Know what I mean?”
Barso: “They don’t ave a clue what it’s all about.”
Chas: “It’s beyond a joke because when you’re abroad people don’t actually know what you’re doing. To me, Madness in London is MADNESS madness. There’s loads of ways of madness, right? But to them it’s just a laugh and a giggle but that ain’t what it’s all about …”
FIVE
THE interviewer looks nervous. Virginia or Vanessa or someone from Radio Veronica has met this lot before. Here, in the empty cinema, five rows from the front after a farcical platinum disc presentation (“Do we have to look surprised?”)she tries to eke a little sense out of a desperately stupid situation:
“Vot ees your f …” The script disappears from her hand and reappears from her hand and reappears two rows down and travelling furiously. “Vot!...” She shrieks as something grabs her ankle and tickles her ear simultaneously.
“Vot,” she composes herself, “is your feeling about?”
“It’s about ‘ow we started …it’s about ‘ow we started … it’s about ‘ow we started …”
One voice builds to seven, to chant, to a roar to the premature end of the interview.
“Great,” grins the cameraman. “Cut.”
“Take It Or Leave It” is about how Madness started. Each band member invested “something like a thousand quid”, Stiff met the other half of the bill, and they made the movie.
Why?
Chris: “Cos it’s better than ‘avin’ a Rolls innit?”
Suggs: “Well, we ‘ad two albums of music from the early days but nothing recorded visually and it was important to us, the visual side of Madness was important to our success, to the position we stand in now. One of the reasons we did it was because no-one else had done it. Most rock films are about how you’re on the road, y’know, and it’s all success, success, success …”
Bedders: “We just decided to show people what it was like before we got any records out at all. Actually I think if you look at the movie, at the very beginning when the band started up and hardly any of us knew each other, you’ll find it will reflect the most recent album now.”
Exactly – a distinct drop in nuttiness in favour of what? Social conscience? Realism? Honesty?
Bedders: “Honesty. It’s very honest. I think that’s the main thing about the film …”
Woody: “It’s so true. When I first saw it – when it was just being put together – I was really worried it would be the most boring film that was ever put on this planet – I couldn’t imagine anyone would wanna see it. But it’s our lives …”
Bedders: “Yeah, it got to the stage where you started remembering what it was like, started getting those feelings.”
Woody: “It really was an uncanny experience. I walked onto the set where there was Mike, Chris y’know, the real old band, and I felt completely out of place. I felt as though I was a traveller from the future coming into the past. It was really weird even saying hello to everyone …”
Suggs: “When you look back at things, they always seem better so, obviously, everything we did in the film I thought ‘God that was brilliant in those days’. But then you realise things change and that in five years you’ll look back on this – a TV show in Holland, doing fuck all – and think ‘That was really good fun’.
“Making the film, I realised we had a really good time but it wasn’t really all that great playing the Nashville and Dublin Castle (pub in Camden Town) on the same night, or being scared by a load of skins at Acklam Hall …”
Barso: “It’s a different thing right? Cos when you’re startin’ out, it’s a whole different vibe about the group – you think you’re doing something right different, it’s you against …”
Chas: “When you’re starting out, you’re the bollocks y’know and you do it, play it, prove it to people, show ‘em what you can do.
“You’ve got the buzz, there’s no-one else like you. But now it’s harder, the buzz is different – you’ve done it for a couple of years.”
Suggs: “Word soon gets around, y’know, ‘Madness aren’t as interesting as they were, they used to be nuttier and funnier’.”
Barso: “I used to get right sick about it, really worry about it, I used to think ‘we’re all washed up, we’re past it’, but I don’t really worry anymore – we’ve passed that point now.”
What keeps you going?
Chas: “Cos we get on. I couldn’t stick it with a band that was one person leading, who had all the ideas, did all the writing and you were just sort of like an image for him. We do get on and I don’t think there’s many people I can get on with.”
Suggs: “ … And we try an’ ‘ave a laugh, I think, on the whole …”
SIX
WHILE the cameraman loads up another roll of film, Kelloggs – the band’s manager – grimaces, embarrassed that his boys have to be put through this degrading rigmarole. Just then Chas appears from the costume department dressed as GI Joe and launches into a hilarious Jimmy Cagney routine.
Those who understand literally fall about laughing, the rest just gape in awe and panic.
Madness is infectious and in their movie, their new LP and their present attitude, they display a heartening new maturity. That “Take It Or Leave It” and the new album are released in rough tandem may be coincidental (except of course, commercially) but both take great pains to perpetrate diversity, and individualism over strait-jacketed image.
Barso reckons the newie’s different “cos everyone can play better now” and Suggs puts it down to more ideas kicking around and being followed up.
Bedders claims: “There ain’t much funny goin’ on these days to write about and I think everyone’s becoming more and more aware now that maybe we have to comment on things. At the start we wanted to steer clear of commenting on anything really but I think now we’re being drawn into it more and the people in the band are getting more opinionated.”
Whatever, Madness songs are suddenly the best about; bouncy, unpretentious dance tunes set to “sneering” (Bedders) lyrics. “It’s like Motown songs,” says Suggs. “They’re really happy but the lyrics are all ‘Oh you’re an only child, you’re an illegitimate …’”
An example of new Madness Motown is “Day On The Town”. Here’s how it works: Suggs: “When I wrote the lyrics to that, I just wrote all about when you bunk off school ‘n’ that – the emptiness y’know?
“The main objective of the day is to not pay the fare and anything else that ‘appens is a bonus. You get on buses, you go to Hyde Park, the West End …”
Chas: “And there’s fuck all there. You’ve gotta pay to sit down – there’s no seats nowhere. You wanna sit down you gotta go and buy a cuppa tea somewhere. When you’re a kid, you just go down there and play the tube, bunk buses … it’s depressing, the West End, any city centre is just for tourists and that’s what it’s all about.”
Suggs: “It was just meant to be empty, just memories of me goin’ round Hyde Park and Oxford Street, getting’ on buses, getting’ off buses, walkin’ up and down, people nicking things, tourists … that’s it.”
Chas: “I mean, I bunked in to see ‘The Sting’ five nights out of seven down the Muswell ‘ill Odeon cos we ‘ad nothin’ else to do. If I wrote a song about that it would be pretty borin’ because it was pretty borin’. Really borin’.”
Suggs: “We try and find a happy medium between everything, y’know. Try not to be too banal and not just do it for the sake of humour and not just do it for the sake of seriousness and not just do it for the sake of the money and not just do it for the sake of trying to prove yourself.
“We can do everything with a certain amount of good intention, a certain amount of trying to make some money, and a certain amount of trying to enjoy it while we’re doin’ it.”
Hey Suggs. Do something nutty for my photographer!
Answer unprintable.
SEVEN
Is the name of the Madness album. It is this year’s finest. BUY!!!!
- Contributed by Sean Gaskin
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