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Institutional by Marie Ryan
Marie Ryan muses on the established nature of MADNESS. CHRISSIE BOY and BEDDERS cop it sweet...
Mark "Bedders" Bedford, bass player with goodtime pop band, Madness, leafs lazily through the copy of RAM that the London-based hackette has brought along to the interview.
"'Ere, look at this," he says to Chrissie Boy, "'Ere's a thing on Dave Robinson." He reads out the quote which begins the story - 'What would you prefer to have, 10% of something or 12"% of nothing?', and they both break up giggling.
"The head of your record company: sound like a pragmatist," I offer.
"Yeah?" says Bedders, all wide-eyed innocence. "I always thought he was a Catholic."
Welcome to the Madness interview.
Maybe the world needs a little Madness, but lately I've been feeling a little equivocal about the Fun Boy Seven. The early Madness singles and albums were full of optimism and danceability, perky pop scenarios that celebrated the vigour and fun of youth. Three or four years on and the formula is sounding tired. The only reaction the last two singles have provoked in this writer is indifference. Sure, I appreciate the irony of House Of Fun, and Driving In My Car is a jaunty enough little pop tune, but both of them are so firmly in the mould that Madness have carefully shaped for themselves, they're do damned predictable, that they fail to be anything more than another indistinguishable ingredient in life's background noise.
But, you retaliate, Madness are FUN, and isn't Having A Good Time justification enough? Perhaps. I'll have to think further on that one. In the meantime, Madness singles continue to zoom up the charts so I'll accept I'm in the minority.
While the singles might lack that crucial attention-demanding ingredient, the associated videos are quite a different matter. The crazed lunacy that comes naturally to all seven members of the band is allowed free rein here, and the result is a giddy collision of silliness, cleverness and wit. These seven wags prance around with such ludicrous abandon and obvious enjoyment that the music becomes totally secondary - an incidental backdrop against which their pranks are performed.
Watching Lee soar through the air clutching crazily at his sax and looking more like a circus clown than a member of a pop group, your critical faculties take a flying leap out of the nearest window. Madness give permission for the child in you to take over for a while. The Baggy Trouser video won an award for the band and it's not hard to see why. So whose idea was it to have Lee fly (suspended from an unseen crane)?
"Lee's, he wanted to fly," recalls Chris. "Actually, it was rather, er ... Sick. He wanted to have six dummies which were supposed to be us, and he was supposed to fly and kick all our heads off. We though that was a bit much you know, so we didn't let him."
"His newest one," continues Bedders, "is he wants to jump out of a plane with a parachute and his sax and the cameraman has got to jump out with him and film him as he's going down. He's going to go into training for it."
Stiff Records' boss Dave Robinson takes more than a fatherly interest in Madness. As the label's main cash crop, ensuring the band's continued chart supremacy is of some importance. Nevertheless, I suspect that Robinson's close involvement on the video side is motivated more by a desire to join in the fun than a need to ensure that things are done the right way. It was Robbo, in fact, who filmed the roller coaster ride in House Of Fun. Well, sort of ... CHRIS: "He didn't really have to film with that one because we used a camera they used to use in the war. They used to put it on the front of planes, right, and it's got a cartridge of film which lasts four minutes and it's fixed focus, you see, rather wide-angle. You switch this little button and point it and it films.
"It's funny though, 'cos he was filming us and we were going on this thing that goes right around, you know, did you see it? And as he got to the top he was really cackling away - and all the money fell out of his pockets!"
This vision of Dave Robinson upside down on a fairground ride with his hard-earned moolah cascading to the ground sends Chrissie Boy and Bedders collapsing into heaps of laughter. The exploits of old Robbo seem to provoke more than their fair share of chuckles from the lads; but don't assume that the Stiff Supremo's status is merely that of a figure of fun. Whatever Madness really think of Dave Robinson, it's tinged with a heavy dollop of respect. Not respect for the man's business suss and judgment. Madness' singles are nearly always chosen by Robinson.
Chris gives me the history: "When we used to pick singles, he'd pick something else and we'd say 'No, No'. For some reason we'd all disagree with him, but he'd always get out the one that he wanted. Now if he says he wants something to be the single, we just agree." "Yeah, well he knows more about the commerciality of things than we do," says Bedders, taking up the thread. "He knows all about units and whatever, good times to put singles out and stuff. That's what his job is, I suppose. But nothing would ever go out that we hated." Even so, not all Dave's decisions are welcomed with open arms by the boys. When I compliment them on the B-side to Driving In My Car, a dub-shaped ditty called Animal Farm, both Bedders and Chris express enthusiasm for doing a dub album of their old songs. CHRIS: "But Dave Robinson didn't like the idea. This was about a year ago when I suggested it to him, but he said it wouldn't be commercially viable. I was more worried about the artistic value, which is a bit idealistic, I suppose."
But Madness may be able to circumvent the problem by recording it themselves in the studio they plan to build in their new office. Their new office? Yep, that's right. Not content with buying themselves a house each, the nutty ones are now buying an office for the band. In the past, Madness have been so busy that they've been forced to leave such matters as album cover designs in the hands of Stiff. But now, their decision to dispense with lengthy tours means that the chaps can now involve themselves more fully with all aspects of the Madness operation, and having their own office fits neatly into this concept of greater involvement.
Given that they'd announced that they would undertake 'no more lengthy tour' I express surprise at their upcoming tour of Australia. "This is not lengthy - lengthy in time," explains the bass player. "I mean we toured America for five weeks on one occasion and we were doing tours going round Europe for a month. That's actually one thing that's changed in our lifestyles. We won't go out on the road for long tours because of people being married and stuff - especially when you can go on television and get to millions of people. It's like doing ten or fifteen gigs.
"But we really enjoyed ourselves in Australia last time, and we thought it would be nice to go back and play live again especially as the record's now going into the charts there."
The twosome then proceed to regale me with stories that sound as if a good time was the one thing they didn't have. "We didn't see much of the place because of the plane strike," begins Bedders. "The first gig was in Perth and we had to run off the stage at the end and race to the airport to get on the plane, which was the last plane before the strike."
"And it was going past where we wanted to go as well," adds Chris. "So then when we got off the plane we had to drive back 400 miles." "So we had to bus from gig to gig - we were doing like ten-hour journeys on the bus!" Bedders sound incredulous.
"It was lovely," intone Chris morbidly. "It was a bit of an old banger, this coach. It had all these beer cans rattling around in it, and bottles and people...
"One of the blokes who worked for us (called Chalkie) fell asleep with his head in a certain position, and when he woke up he couldn't move his head and he had to see a physiotherapist. He'd pressed a nerve or something."
Mmmmm, sounds like you had an absolutely wonderful time, chaps. Undeterred, and definitely undaunted, they claim to have only one regret about their previous Australian tour - they were unable to buy any hats with corks on!
"We all wanted one of those hats," laments Bedders. "We couldn't find any, though. We thought Woolworths would sell 'em!"
Madness are now part of the pop furniture, a respected institution after a mere four years. If evidence of this was needed, it came a couple of months back when they were invited to play at the Prince of Wales Charity Trust bash in front of The Man himself. In true Madness fashion - that is, sending up the event in the nicest way possible - they began their set with a version of God Save The Queen played on kazoos. But, according to Bedders, there was a certain numbness to the occasion which he blamed on the hordes of record company people who populated the front rows. Record biz people are not particularly known for their love of rock'n'roll (it's more the lifestyle they espouse), and it seems their bums remained firmly wedded to their seats.
But what about the Prince? Did he enjoy it? What did he say to them?
Bedders puts on his snobbiest upper class accent: "Terribly, terribly decent of you all to play." And then in a voice so patronising we all dissolved in hoots of laughter: "Camden Town seems to be an extremely culturally rich area, I must say." Madness remain singularly unimpressed by this bestowal of approval from the establishment.
At this very moment, Madness are hard at work on their new album, the name of which they decline to tell me because 'it steals the thunder'. But they do let on that it differs from its predecessors. For a start, some of the songs are longer - up to four minutes. (In Madness terms, that's a long song.) And humour plays a lesser role.
"I haven't written any of the lyrics," Chris explains, "but they all seem a bit down to earth."
Bedders gives an example: "There's one called The Rise And Fall, and it's about a person going back to his old town - this is second-hand because I didn't write it - but it's about a man going back to where he used to live and finding it all knocked down, everything's been cleared.
"Chris wrote the first verse and Suggs the rest. The last bit's about Liverpool, and how like in the riots up there, they demolished a whole block."
In the past, Madness have always avoided taking any obvious political stance, and Chris and Mark seem in no hurry to assume the role of commentators on The Hard Times We Live In. But neither are they unaware or uninfluenced by the events of 1982.
"To be honest, I didn't think I'd see soldiers fighting in my lifetime," announces Bedders with uncharacteristic seriousness. "I didn't honestly believe we would send an army somewhere and start killing people. Things like that only happen once in your life. I'm sure you're bound to start commenting about it. Need I say more?"
Madness embody the innocence and naivete that most pop bands start off with, but quickly lose. That they've been able to retain it goes a long way towards explaining their continuing popularity. But at the same time, it gives them a curious asexual quality; Madness have avoided growing up, they're locked into a sort of pre-teen timelessness where good, clean pop fun is all. The rest of us inexorably pass through this stage on our way to becoming mature, sexual beings, (though it must be said that not all of us make it all the way).
But being grown-up can be tiring, and who could criticise someone for wanting to abandon life's burdens for a night and hop back into that fun-filled, problem-free world that Madness represent? That's why you see people spanning the ten to thirty age group at Madness gigs. As I go ready to leave Stiff's brand spanking new offices, now located in the Nutty Boys' stomping ground of Camden Town, Bedders came up to me.
"Make sure you tell everyone how much we're looking forward to going back to Australia," he said, the silly grin on his face failing to hide the fact that he really meant it.
Don't say you haven't been told...
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