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Their condition as carriers of a fast reggae hybrid, ska, was first diagnosed in 1979. This nutty sound was then transmitted to an increasingly larger audience until the success of their first 2-Tone single, The Prince, prompted Stiff Records to commit them (to a long-term contract). Since then three platinum albums and a number one video bear witness to the epidemic proportions of their popularity to which, happily, there seems to be no known cure.
Rock journalist Mark Williams, a former Melody Maker and New Music News staffer and contributor to Rolling Stone and LA Weekly feels that they are a suitable case for treatment and herewith presents his prognosis.
Madness. Seven good North London boys. Graham 'Suggsy' McPherson, Lee 'Kix' Thompson, Mark 'Bedders' Bedford, Chris 'Chrissy Boy' Foreman, Mike 'Monsieur Barso' Barson, Carl 'Chas Smash' Smyth, and Daniel 'Woody' Woodgate. Musicians, of course, respectively vocalist, saxophone, bass guitar, guitar, keyboards, vocals, dancing and trumpet, drums.
A band. Which you should know by now, but they'd probably be knocking around together even if they couldn't play a note, as indeed they were before they could. Regular pals at parties and discos, football on Saturdays, hopping a free ride on trains and doing a spot of "liberation" in the high-street shops, having a laugh. Essential behaviour if you're young and growing up in a big city.
The boys in Madness went through their adolescence in the Seventies mainly, but were listening to the sounds of the Sixties - American music too; Tamla Motown, soul; and a fast reggae hybrid called ska. Chrissy Boy and Kix both lived in Kentish Town during their schooldays, and worked around North London together as gardeners for a while. Kix used to hang around at the Aldenham Boys Club with his neighbour, Mike Barson, who'd been relieving the boredom of art college by drifting into the main hall and learning to play the piano. Kix introduced Mike to Chrissy Boy and that's when all the bother started. Kix picked up a sax for £20, inspired by Roxy Music amongst other people, as was Chris, and they co-opted another chum, John Hasler, on drums. But Hasler was soon replaced by the somewhat more proficient Gary Dovey and Hasler tried his hand, or rather his mouth, at vocals.
At this stage, they were playing what was really a Cockney version of black American music, a formula adopted by many British bands over the years. Some would take off on their own more original path as they developed musically, like Madness' early idols, Kilburn And The High Roads (prop. Ian Dury). And, of course, Madness themselves.
But in those early days during '76 and '77, our fledgling heroes were more preoccupied with stabilising the line-up than getting smart with home-grown tunes and lyrics. History has it that Barso was the driving force behind what was then called the Invaders, or the North London Invaders, if you want to be really proper about it. Suggsy heard the Invaders playing at a party, thought they were rather good and that his was the voice they needed to give them a bit of class.
The Invaders heard him singing in the street, as you tend to do if you're young and it's late at night and you're having a good time, and on the strength of that, advised him to turn up for a rehearsal. The only thing Suggs knew the words to was See You Later Alligator, so that's what he sang. He himself says it was pretty terrible, but since all the other contenders for the job were even worse, they could hardly pass him up.
Somehow or other, Carl was plonking around on bass guitar in the Invaders but, like Suggs and Lee, had his fallings-out with Barso who, in his determination to keep the show on the road, often tried to impose a little discipline on the rest of the band. When Suggs left after a disagreement with Barso on the relative merits of football and music, John Hasler tried singing again. Gary Dovey sat down to the drums and things weren't much better than tenuous. Eventually, Suggs returned to the fold, presumably having sorted out his priorities and Dovey got into a punch-up with Lee due to what we now politely call "musical differences". Since Dovey had only just got his mate Bedders into the band at the time, the rhythm department was still as shaky as ever, even though Bedders could actually play bass properly. Fortunately, Bedders knew a real drummer, with whom he'd occasionally jammed in a heavy-metal outfit called, wait for it, Steel Erection! That was Woody, and when Woody joined the firm, the Invaders were at last ready to take on the world.
The first gig anyone remembers the Invaders playing was at their friend Simon 'Si' Birdsall's party in Islington in June 1977. Si's dad, the designer Derek Birdsall, had a big house in Compton Terrace and the gig was in the back garden. The neighbours must have loved it.
A year later they'd got their personal problems sorted out and the line-up, now with Carl in his 'Chas Smash' persona, Si Birdsall and ubiquitous mate/roadie Chalky were dancing around on stage in the nutty fashion that eventually launched a mini-movement. Half of this image of pork-pie hats, smart suits and amphetamine dancing-on-the-spot were derived directly from the Jamaican "rude boys" of the Sixties. Rude boys, or "rudies" were basically young, high-spirited spivs and trouble-makers. They'd never hurt their own kind though and always got away with their vaguely illegal actions behind a veil of quick-witted charm. Updated for the Seventies and a new generation of ska and bluebeat fans, the rude boy image, according to Carl was, " ... being smart and not looking like a trollop."
And that meant dressing like a mod and behaving a bit like a skinhead, the social divisions blurred by the music and the football. The way Carl saw it, Madness were his mates, and they had to stick together, perform together! And that meant jumping onstage, doing the intros, and dancing.
As Chrissy Boy explains it, "The nutty sound's something that Lee Thompson thought up. It's 'cos our music sounds like fairgrounds and organs and things. It just sounds nutty."
Thommo elaborates, claiming that the idea was to keep everything "fun and humorous, almost as a rebellion against the punk thing. We've always wanted to keep music away from politics. Music should be fun, and above all, loving."
Lee cites the Kilburns' sax man, Davey Payne, as a big inspiration in this respect, but although the Kilburns understood and practised the fine art of rock 'n' fun, they were essentially of a different, older generation. The North London Invaders were keen to play it on the kids of their own age - and indeed lower - but by early '79 when they were getting ready to pounce, their name didn't really seem to suit their music. Madness fitted the bill better and besides, it was the only one they could all agree on!
Its origin, as is fairly well-known by now, is in the title of a Prince Buster ska song which they recorded for the B-side of their first single. In the spring of '79, the newly monikered Madness was sweating it out on the London pub 'n' club circuit, prime focus of which for this writer's money were the regular mid-week gigs at the Dublin Castle in Camden Town. They held forth in a small, squarish back room with the acoustics of a packing case and ventilation to match. When Madness cooked, the audience cooked but they didn't mind because they were so close to each other, in every sense of the expression, that a welter of laddish exuberance more than compensated for any slight discomfort.
Odd collections of people used to turn up at those early Madness gigs. Art students catching on to the natty mohair suits and mod outfits of the genre, a few disaffected (or possibly confused) punks, and a lot of mods and skinheads who were rapidly making Madness their musical figureheads. Also on the ear'ole were Jerry Dammers and his Specials, who were just starting to surface in rather a big way as the prime movers of the mod/ska/op-art revivalist 2-Tone label. The Specials invited Madness to support them on one of their early Nashville gigs, which conflicted with their first Dublin Castle gig, so they just doubled up, arrived late at the Dublin Castle and kept everyone happy. After the Nashville, Dammers again asked Madness to support them, this time on Madness' home territory at Camden's Electric Ballroom. You can imagine how the atmosphere lived up to the venue's name, and if you can't, then you've never lived.
The 2-Tone connection was very soon to bear more tangible fruit, in the shape of the band's first single, produced by Clive Langer as a demo! Clive, who'd been in a band called Deaf School, got up the money to take the band into the tiny Highbury studio (where Elvis Costello somehow cut his first album) and the first song they recorded was The Prince. This was Lee's tribute to the man generally regarded as the father of ska, Prince Buster (ne Cecil Campbell) and was backed with the eponymous Madness, written by Buster himself.
In the flush of record company signings that were going on around the 2-Tone phenomenon, the release of The Prince brought every A & R man in town to Madness gigs even though the record itself took several weeks to reach the top twenty. Almost simultaneously with its arrival at its highest ever chart position - the 16 spot on October 2nd - Madness put their names on a contract with Stiff Records, having been heavily courted by Chrysalis (who handled the 2-Tone label) and Virgin in particular. Indeed the only way that Stiff Records' boss Dave Robinson, could get to them was by hiring them to play at his wedding. "They came to take the piss," recalled Dave, "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 onto the floor."
The ink hardly dry on the contract, Stiff rushed out the first Madness album on October 22nd. One Step Beyond was produced at break-neck speed by Langer and Alan Winstanley. "It only took us three weeks to finish all the recording, mixing, artwork and cover," said Mike Barson, "but we'd already been playing those songs for two years .... so things worked really quickly in the studio."
To shamelessly repeat an over-used word, One Step Beyond is the seminal Madness album, clarifying the band's songs - cover versions too - for what they are but with the zits of live performance squeezed out, and the instrumental sound punched up with whatever it is producers use - probably fists in Madness' case. Testimony to this claim is the fact that One Step Beyond was the first (so far) of three platinum albums (the others being Absolutely and Complete) and has been in and out of the charts for over sixty-five weeks in all!
Stiff issued the title track as a single simultaneously with the album, setting a pattern for which the company has occasionally been criticised ever since - taking too many singles off Madness albums. "We want people to listen to our LPs," said Suggs, "but because they are pretty varied, Stiff like putting out a couple of singles from each one, just to give people an idea. The record company has proved to us that this is the only way to sell an LP of new songs ..... If we didn't agree to it, we'd probably have flopped by now .... we always put on a different B-side at least."
The One Step Beyond single in fact contained two tracks on the B-side, the second being the instrumental Nutty Theme and was, toward the end of the summer of '79, as much a battle cry as it was a signature for Chas, Si, Chalky and anyone else who was around to do the onstage gyrations. Madness were finding that the skinhead audience who had raised them shoulder-high to stardom, were being infiltrated by the mindless yobs of the Young National Front and the British Movement. Although outwardly similar to their shaven-headed, braces and Levis die-hard fans these quasi-fascists were a tiny, but unfortunately very troublesome, minority. They'd already been causing trouble at various Specials gigs, but since the Specials were a multi-racial band, they were a more obvious target. With Madness, the YNF was trying to create a force in its favour, adopting the band as its own musical catalyst and distributing fascist, anti-racial literature at gigs. This led to ugly confrontations with the band's mod following who were traditional adversaries of the skinheads.
Typical of the times was another gig at the Electric Ballroom, just after the all-conquering Specials/Selecter/Madness tour that had been steaming around Britain for the best part of six weeks. Barso takes up the story: "It was like a bloody rally. They (the YNF) were passing out leaflets at the Lyceum the week before saying 'We want a good turnout at this gig'. And then all the mods were going round saying, you know, 'Should be a good bundle, lads'. What could we do?"
At the gig itself, Suggs was forced to go on and try to quell the mob who were preventing the multi-racial support band, Red Beans & Rice, from starting its set. Throwing his hands up in despair at the debacle which confronted him, he eventually could do no more than storm offstage in a rage of sadness and frustration. Eventually Chas and his brother, Brendan, the then members of the Madness entourage who most openly identified with the skinhead cult in those days, went onstage and managed to calm everyone down, but it was a mammoth task in which not a few heads were cracked.
The problem was in a sense worsened by the band's desire to take no sides, no political stance; and for that reason they initially found it was hard to exclude anyone from their gigs. However, the pop press was not willing to let Madness' non-partisanship go unchallenged, especially after Chas made some unfortunate remarks to a New Musical Express reporter in the thick of the YNF/BM controversy. "They're just a group of kids who, like any kids, have to take out their anger and frustration on something. Some it's football, some it's music. NF don't mean very much to them. Why should I stop them coming to our gigs? That's all they've got."
Whilst this may have been true, the rest of the band quickly pointed out that this was Chas' personal opinion, not band policy. But within a few weeks, thorough policing at the door and a firm warning that pea-brains were not welcome at their gigs, the trouble died down. As Mike Barson said: "All that bloody right-wing stuff is just fashion. Half the kids down the squats at Kings Cross where I used to live are looking for a bit of excitement, they're just bored. One week they're in the NF, the next it's the BM. If you try and 'ave an intelligent conversation about it, they've no idea what they're talking about."
The violence at their gigs did bring home to the band the inescapable fact that many fans were becoming too scared to come and see them perform, especially the younger ones to whom Madness had become a sort of street-credible Bay City Rollers. Their response was to establish a precedent for matineé and early evening concerts for under-16 year olds, kicking off at the Hammersmith Odeon on Saturday morning, February 15th 1980. Their canny sense of unity with these young fans was further cemented by reviews and features that subsequently appeared in the pop weeklies - all written by thirteen to sixteen year olds!
A month later, Stiff re-released the first Madness EP, Work, Rest and Play with a new version of their rollicking stage favourite, a one-verse song (or semi-instrumental) called Night Boat To Cairo. The EP went to number six in the single charts and Madness went to America.
It was in fact their second trip to the States. They'd adventurously gone there off their own bat the previous year, just after they'd signed up with the American label, Sire Records, who had no product to promote at the time. "We wanted to beat the Specials to America," quipped Woody. In '79 they'd been playing small clubs for a few hundred dollars a throw but the Anglophile faction amongst America's teenagers had not been slow off the mark, and now they were filling ballrooms with hordes of op-art garbed punters who still identified Madness with 2-Tone.
"The only thing they know about reggae in America is Bob Marley," claimed Woody, correctly as it happened. "They don't know the difference between ska, bluebeat and dub. All black music to them is either soul or disco."
"Yeah and it's the same with what they call 'rock music'," jeered Barso. "They put Chuck Berry and some band like Toto into the same category. I had to explain to one of those radio people that Toto is not rock 'n' roll." "And tell him it was rubbish," exclaimed Carl.
Despite their disdain for the music biz establishment in America, the band were in little doubt that they could make an impact there. "We are going to crack America my son," said Suggsy. "We can do it. We're bloody good. And everyone wants to start dancing again, don't they?"
Perhaps they did but the Yanks' congenital inability to get their limbs around a skank rhythm rendered the band's best efforts pretty meaningless as far as record sales were concerned. The nuttiness which the boys exude almost as naturally as they draw breath was lost on most Americans too. If anything Madness' problem was that they were simply too British. Not that it seemed to matter in the spring of 1980, for back home the band could do no wrong. Madness Mania had reached such proportions that it was " .... just like the Beatles wasn't it," said Woody, looking back with evident disbelief. And it was.
Compounding a prevailing street-sharp business acumen, Madness formed a company to market their own badges, t-shirts, pork-pie "Nutty hats" and other paraphernalia, staffing a retail shop with Si Birdsall and other members of the entourage. They also started their own publishing company and signed up other artists, including the Mo-Dettes, whose singer, Jane, married Woody in September of 1980.
Taking time off from touring in Britain, Europe (where they were, and still are, enormous stars) and America, Madness managed to do some recording, the first evidence of which was a single Baggy Trousers. A wonderful, slightly wistful anti-school song ("I had less and less respect for it," recalls Suggsy, "until in my last year, I hardly went at all ... I suppose I was a bit of a hooligan."), which went to number three in the charts that October and has since become a gold record. The album on which Baggy Trousers would appear as the opening track was called Absolutely, and The Business, it's instrumental B-side even had lyrics added to it and appeared as Take It Or Leave It on the album as well! Rather a fitting attitude, in the nicest possible way, for the album was, as usual, well-received by the public, achieving platinum status and peaking at number two in the LP charts in October.
Embarrassment, the second single from the album was even more controversial, a story of a white girl's predicament when she becomes the mother of an illegitimate black baby. And as with many of Madness' original songs, sharply observant lyrics were almost insidiously bound up in the catchiest of pop melodies. Increasingly deft distancing themselves from the traps of working class life that they revelled in as feckless teenagers, the writers in Madness - and that includes virtually all of the band - gently parody what they see. But there is no aloofness or sarcasm in their musical cameos, rather a feeling of reassurance born of empathy.
Despite its additional muscle, Embarrassment didn't do quite as well as Baggy Trousers, staying in the charts for "only" eleven weeks and reaching a peak position of number four, in November 1980.
Earlier that same month, Madness played a hush-hush gig in the tiny Hope and Anchor basement ... except that members of the press somehow found their way along to report favourably on what was otherwise virtually a "family 'n' friends" knees-up. Another bit of naughtiness followed a week later when Carl managed to escape from hospital, where he'd had a tonsilectomy the previous day, just so he could catch Ian Dury's performance at Dingwalls in Camden Town. He'd hidden in the toilet during visiting hours and slipped out as the bell rang! The Hope and Anchor gig was really a warm-up for the 12 Days Of Madness tour featuring both evening and matineé performances, culminating in a highly successful charity concert at Hammersmith Odeon on Christmas Eve.
Many of the fans who turned up during this December tour were lucky enough to receive free copies of The Nutty Boys, a Beano-style comic originally prepared for the band's burgeoning fan club. The comic featured a story called One Step Before, written by the band themselves and repeated in 1981 when they enclosed a poster-cum-comic in the Take It Or Leave It book.
Tempting providence a bit with both Trousers and Embarrassment still in the singles charts, Stiff released a third single from the Absolutely LP. The Return Of The Los Palmas 7, the title subtly confirming that Carl - who'd been learning trumpet and "real" singing - was now a fully-fledged band member. Perhaps because of its own competition, it wasn't too much of a surprise when The Return only made it to number seven, on February 11th. As a bonus for their fans, however, the single was also released in a 12-inch form which included a demo of My Girl and a live recording of their irreverent version of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake.
Mike Barson celebrated this entrepreneurial effort by marrying his long-standing girlfriend, Sandra, at Finsbury Park Registry Office and having his wedding breakfast at George's Caff on the Holloway Road. He invited his mum, a photographer from the pop press, but not the rest of the band who were merely told that he'd be a bit late for practice that day!
With a ring on Sandra's finger, Barso became the third member of Madness to get hitched, the others being Woody and Chrissy Boy, who also has a son called Matthew. A month after Barso's nuptuals, Madness began to work on an ambitious project film, conceived as a musical documentary of their early years, up until signing with Stiff. Early members of the Invaders were brought back to life, as it were, and the band was filmed at some of the original venues although Notting Hill Gate's Acklam Hall, where they were bottom of the bill beneath the reggae Tribesmen and the punk-esque Valves, had to be recreated at short notice at the Keskidee Community Centre, after the Acklam had, somewhat ironically, been laid waste by football hooligans.
According to Suggs, the film was a "natural step to take ... as our early years were so dependent on our visual stuff, which is almost as important as the music. We've made two albums of music, so we thought it would be a good idea to do a visual thing."
Each member of Madness chipped in a cool £20,000 to finance the project, with Stiff bringing the balance up to an estimated £400,000, but hefty though that figure sounds, it's still small beer by feature film standards. To cut corners, Take It Or Leave It was shot on 16mm film and blown up to 35mm by a Swedish laboratory, the Scandinavian reputation for efficiency taking a bath when the company involved wrongly processed a whole roll of valuable celluloid, forcing director Dave Robinson to re-shoot.
Madness was partly motivated into making Take It by the failure of Dance Craze a film produced by Chrysalis Records, to accurately show the spirit of cultural depth of the 2-Tone era. Dance Craze which was released early in 1981, turned out to be little more than a performance film, showing the various ska and predominantly 2-Tone bands through their paces. Thus compared, Take It is certainly different, veering almost too far in the direction of cinema vérité. Barson comes across as something of an ogre - which is hardly how he is nowadays, and you're left in little doubt why Lee and Suggsy periodically left the band after face-outs with the keyboard maestro. There's enough nuttiness to give the impression that Madness was always a sort of jolly labour of love for the Camden lads, but perhaps not enough for their young fans, hooked on a diet of impeccably loony Top Of The Pops Madness videos, and maybe not enough of the music that their newer fans could identify.
"We just wanted to make a rock and roll film like it had never been done before," said Woody, after it was completed, " ... to show the reality, that it's not all wonderful ... it could have been made more commercial. I think the concept worked fine for us. I just don't know if it was the best idea."
Despite the enthusiasm of all concerned, the time factor was also against them. Stiff had produced two films before but they were of Stiff tours; here ex-photographer Robinson was working with a script, drawn from interviews conducted with each member of the band. ("I think he gave up on our acting abilities quite early on," said Barso, half-jokingly.)
The other thing that conspired against the overall success of the film was its poor distribution. The company responsible for getting it to cinemas obviously failed to realise its potential amongst the young teenage fans who were buying Madness records in their hundreds of thousands.
And if Take It Or Leave It eventually turned out to be a bit of a damp squib at the box office, the boys, as always, had an ace or two up their sleeves. Grey Day was released on April 17th, a re-working of an old Invaders song, which apparently owed its inspiration to their early enthusiasm for Roxy Music. It quickly became a silver record, reaching number four in the charts a month later.
Having completed their filming commitments and despatched another hit single, Madness immediately set off on a touring blitz of New Zealand, Australia and Japan - the latter country having already been well-primed for the boys' visit by a television commercial the boys did for Honda cars! Apparently this is a bona fide method of attaining instant fame (or derision, if the young Japs don't like the advert.) And in Madness' case, also shifted a lot of cars! As if mob hysteria in Tokyo wasn't enough, Lee was nearly drowned by a freak wave on Bondi Beach in Australia, but happily was saved by a brace of strapping strine lifeguards who promptly asked him for his autograph!
No sooner was the tour over, than the group was packed off to the famous Compass Point Studios in Nassau, to record their third album, 7. The LP was released a fortnight prior to the premier of the film, and to maximise the promotional putsch, the group begin a thirty-six gig British tour at the same time. The tour and the album release are preceded, as per usual, by a single release from the latter, in this case it's called Shut Up. As with much of 7 it's a capsule morality play about a guy who tries to lie his way out of being arrested, when, of course, he's guilty as sin. The melody is chunky, irresistible as ever, with a honky-tonk piano neatly punctuating the lyric. The video shot to promote Shut Up perfectly illustrated the vaguely bizarre but always engaging character of almost everything Madness do. Suggs is dressed as an exaggerated villain - all stripey matelot shirt and black gloves, whilst the rest of the group in police uniform chase him around. This sort of thing, or Lee Thompson, honking his sax suspended from a crane jib for Baggy Trousers is what was missing from Take It Or Leave It, the sort of cartoon capers that made them an almost regular feature on Tiswas and the toast of thousands of school playgrounds.
7 however, marked a musical advance for Madness, displaying new subtleties and a stronger melodic feel than much of their earlier work. By now they'd outlived the inevitably limited appeal of "hard core" ska bands like the Specials and Selecter, both of whom had all but disintegrated and 7 was seen by many reviewers as a symbol of Madness' maturity, and also a clear sign that the band intended to stay around for a while. Suddenly it was fashionable for the heavy-weight rock writers to admit to liking Madness.
"I think the reviewers went right over the top," said Lee at that time.
"I reckon that it goes up and down," argued Mike, somewhat philosophically. "People think that everyone else will hate it, so they go the other way. The best thing would be if they'd never heard of the band and just liked the record."
"We didn't make a conscious effort to be more serious," said Suggs, "7 is very natural, but I'm glad it was less nutty and more serious."
With a single already high in the chart, a tour underway and additional attention focussed on the band via the Take It film, 7 had no trouble going straight into the charts and very appropriately peaked at number seven on October 20th. But maybe Suggs had hit on something when he said 7 was "less nutty" than their previous efforts. Several cynical journalists have suggested that Madness' endless flow of clownish antics and off-the-cuff Cockney humour was nothing more than a facade or that even if the band's spirits were abnormally high, a few years in the business would knock it out of them. More likely is the inevitable growing up of a bunch of good-natured, don't-give-a-damn street kids - which would've happened with or without the pressures of the rock 'n' roll biz. Or as Lee puts it: "What happens is that you go places and people expect certain things from you, and some of the group act nutty - it's just what they want. There's seven of us so there's always a chance that one of us will be a bit mad that day. We never put on an act for people though."
And yet the relentlessly wacky image of the band obviously did hide their development as musicians. "When we described our music as 'The Nutty Sound'," admitted Woody, "we were just putting our own label on the sound. But I think it screwed us up in the long run, locked us into our own little jail."
However, if 7 was a watershed in the band's musical history, it was another composer who provided their most unashamedly pop-oriented single to date. Ten years after it was first released, Labi Siffre's rather coy love song, It Must Be Love returned to the charts with the benefit of a Madness update. This was a departure from Stiff's 'milk the album' principle with Langer and Winstanley recording the song for single release "on odd days off" according to Chrissy Boy. The video promoting It Must Be Love was no less crazed than previous efforts, despite the slightly sugary nature of the material, and featured a guest appearance from Labi Siffre himself plus a hilarious lesson on "How To Play Instruments Underwater". Taking them into the New Year with a number four slot on January 5th, 1982, the single's success must have been a nice wedding present for Suggsy, on December 22nd he'd married singer Bette Bright, coincidentally an ex-colleague of Langer's in Deaf School.
In many respects their next single, Cardiac Arrest reverted to the carnival music bounce of Madness' earlier hits, and it was also Carl's first credit as a composer (with Chrissy Boy) on a singles label. Another good video, this time telling the story of Chas Smash's harried commuter fairly literally, complete with London bus and Lee as an off-the-wall conductor. But the record failed to make the impact of previous 45s, possibly because BBC Radio One went cold on airplay following the untimely bereavements in two of their dee-jay's families. Cardiac Arrest made number fourteen for two weeks in March '82.
Two months prior to the release of Cardiac Arrest, Carl's name was in the news for a rather different reason. His brother, Brendan, one of the original Camden nutty boys, had joined the French Foreign Legion the previous summer, after running out of money in Spain. Five months later he decided he'd had enough of the Legion's idea of the hard life and sent a distress call back to London. Carl and the boy's parents arranged for Brendan to escape from the Avignon training camp, and got him safely back to London via an Italian rendezvous.
That same month, Stiff announced that they were mounting their biggest ever campaign and spending £300,000 to promote a 16-track compilation of Madness hits - all eleven of them - plus assorted B-sides. Titled Complete Madness, the album would be released on April 23rd and as a natural tie-in, Stiff was going to launch a video cassette featuring all of Madness' highly-acclaimed promotional clips - with specially filmed links between each one.
Although industry observers expressed doubts that Madness' young fans would be able to afford even the comparatively low price of £19.50 for the video tape, always assuming their parents could afford the hardware to play it on, plus the cost of an album of hit singles many of them would already have, they were soon confounded. The album went straight into the charts at number two, achieving gold status in the process, and became the band's first number one LP on May 18th. It was still in the top ten when it went platinum in July, and the video package has also stayed in pretty much the same region of video sales charts ever since its release.
Although spring 1982 saw the boys taking a bit of a well-earned breather, they were still writing material, recording and making television appearances. Whilst the 'greatest hits' album was holding sway in the upper regions of the charts, the band had two more hit singles for good measure! House Of Fun, somewhat in the cheery-yet-sentimental mould of Baggy Trousers shot to number one on May 25th, the same week Complete Madness was at the same slot in the LP charts! Two months later they released Driving In My Car in both 7 and 12 inch versions, the latter having the bonus of a third track, Riding On My Bike; art was now imitating life, for most of the band were by now keen cyclists. Indeed, as we go to press with this book, Clive Langer and various members of the band can be seen pedalling their way through the West End to finish their next LP at London's Air studios.
Although 1982 hasn't been Madness' most arduous year as far as gigging is concerned, it surely boasts the most prestigious performance of their career. On Wednesday July 21st the band appeared at a gala charity concert in front of HRH Prince Charles and as benefits such an occasion, they opened their set with a stunning arrangement of the National Anthem ... played on kazoos! What only a select group of lucky fans knew was that the band had played a secret gig the previous evening at the Bull and Gate pub in Kentish Town. Those in the know were lucky enough to see them play a catalogue of their best-known material, plus their bizarre version of the National Anthem, as a warm-up for the Royal show.
This unassuming commitment to fun in the face of conformity is clearly what keeps Madness going, both as a group of likely lads and a high grossing pop act ... not withstanding any reservations they might have about being nutty all of the time, for all of the people.
"They're great, great fun, very, very talented and they haven't changed from the guys who played at my wedding," opines Stiff's Dave Robinson.
That certainly seems to be true, for although in the space of three short years, Madness have gone from amateur party band to a successful business consortium that can finance films and buy property for its members, they haven't been overwhelmed by either the speed or scope of their rise to fame. "Somebody wrote that we were working class boys guilty of losing our roots," shrugged Barso. "That's a load of crap. We aren't guilty about anything. I haven't lost any roots to be guilty about."
Back to Dave Robinson: "They are one of the few young bands that hasn't fallen into the trap of thinking that their IQ has automatically been raised by selling records. Groups, live such an unusual life, touring and recording, that it's pretty hard to find people that keep their cool."
"I think we just entertain," says Suggsy, "That's our philosophy, but we entertain properly, not in a schmucky way. That's our place in the workings of the world. I'm convinced that's what we're destined to be. But what we do has nothing to do with people like the Nolans or any of that bollocks.
" ... the real thrill of all this is being so popular when we're just a bunch of absolute knobs!"
"I wouldn't deny our sort of humour, but what I'm saying is hopefully people don't think that's all there is to Madness. I hope they realise that a certain amount of thought is given to it. There is a problem in that if you tell people you're nutty, they think that's all there is to it, and the same goes if you say you're serious. Anyone can go and look silly, but it's very hard to be original and incorporate other things too.
"We're a unit of people with a lot of different opinions," he said later, roundly condemning those who see him, or Barso, or any one person as the leader of the band. "We look at ourselves, and we sometimes have shitty ideas, but it's refreshing and stimulating. It's always fresh because we can always do what we want and we can always do it with Madness ..... We don't do things to pander to anyone, and we aren't in it for the money. We do it because we enjoy it."
And so do we, lads.
- Contributed by Lee 'Loobyloo' Buckley
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