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No one can doubt that Madness are one of the most successful British bands around and a lot of that success must go down to their outstanding videos. They've all been seen on TV quite a lot but as singles slip from the charts the videos disappear too. However, the Madness videos are too good to be left to gather dust so the band has released a special video to go with their latest album .......
There are 13 tracks on the video, called, as if you hadn't guessed, Complete Madness, including House of Fun, It Must Be Love and many more of their greatest hits. There are some surprises too. Remember the last time we featured Madness, Lee told us you wouldn't be able to see their Japanese car advertisements here? There was so much interest in the ads that the nutty seven decided to include the two commercials they'd made on the Complete Madness video. And as an added bonus the video even starts off with a Japanese record advertisement of theirs!
All the other great Madness scenes recorded over the years are there on the film. You can see Suggs pretending to be Superman, Woody dressed up as Buzby, Chrissy swimming underwater, Mark eating red carnations and pick up a few piano tips from Mike Barson.
The boys have been talking about their film work and so too has Dave Robinson, the boss of Stiff Records who is responsible for making the videos.
The importance of video
They all understand how important video is to them. Says Chas: "Now I'm trying to write more with video in mind. It can sharpen your focus, make things easier to describe and actually write what you're trying to say. We want to get into video a lot more. Now you've got video juke boxes: at the moment there's only about 20 in this country but soon there's going to be about 20,000.
It's going to open up a whole new market. Over the next 18 months it's going to become a completely new thing. Obviously it's a big plus, another dimension for us."
Lee's early morning ideas
It's Lee who has a lot of the ideas for the videos. "I lose sleep over it," he said. "If I'm awake in bed for more than an hour and have an idea I have to jump out because I know I'm not going to get to sleep unless I write that idea down. So I get up at three or four in the morning to write it down and hopefully it'll get used."
"There doesn't have to be any reason for anything. It just has to look really good. Like on Baggy Trousers I was on wires and we thought it was going to show, but it didn't. People thought it was some sort of expensive special effect but it wasn't, it was just a crane!"
Lee went on: "I enjoy making videos more than making TV shows. There's not so much hanging about." He does enjoy some TV shows, though: "When we filmed the Kenny Everett Show we set out to prove him wrong - he said people aren't very visual!"
Suggs recalls Lee's own version of being 'visual' for the Kenny Everett TV appearance. "He dressed up as Gary Glitter for the song. He wore a chest wig, a proper glitter suit, and platform boots. He was really pleased with himself because Gary is his idol!"
Alarming stunts
The man who has the final say is Stiff Records boss Dave Robinson. He supervises all the filming and stunts, including the group going round the alarming loop ride at Great Yarmouth for the House of Fun video and the equally alarming scene when a grand piano crashed down in front of Mike Barson in Shut Up.
Dave felt the crane driver might not drop the piano in just the right place so he had several people standing close at hand to pull him away quickly if things looked like going wrong. "In the event the scene went without a hitch, but Mike was sweating quite heavily!"
He enjoys working with Madness. "They are natural performers and there are plenty of laughs to be had. But you have to catch them quick because after the tenth time through a scene they've lost interest!"
Advertising Madness
As we said earlier there has been a lot of interest in the Madness commercials for the Japanese car firm.
Chas filled in some of the background: "They presented us with this really awful song to sing. We wanted to do the advert but we didn't want to do the song. So we said we'd write our own. It was frantic because we had to knock something out in ten minutes. But Barso got us round the piano and we did it. It wasn't bad as it turned out. We wanted to be popular in Japan and that was a way of doing it. It opened up doors for us."
What about a TV show?
It all goes to prove that Madness mix well with TV. And with all their nutty antics you'd expect them to make their own TV show. "The idea of doing our own TV series does come up from time to time," said Suggs. "When it does, we reel off about 15 ideas for sketches which promptly get forgotten. Haircut One Hundred have got a pilot of a TV series and maybe we'll do a pilot ourselves but it takes a lot of money to do."
In the meantime we'll just have to enjoy their hit Driving In My Car. There's no getting away from cars with Madness. If you've wondered why the publicity pictures show them in a Morris Minor instead of an honourable Honda, it's all because the lads were once known as Morris And The Minors. Wonder what the Japanese car people think about that?
Contributed by Mike Johnson
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