 |
 Return to Homepage |
Type some text in the box below and let us find it for you ...
Madness Central Video Player
Official MadSpace: Latest Blogs
The below is a live RSS blog feed from the Official Madness profile on Myspace.To view any of the three latest blogs simply click on its title ...
Madness Central on The WebIn addition to this site we also have profiles on the below social networking sites.
Click on the required icon and feel free to send us a message and/or friend request.
Contact Madness Central ManagementAny queries, comments or suggestions relating to this site are always welcome and can be sent to the Madness Central management team using the form below.
Privacy Policy: Any data submitted via the above form will only be used for the purpose stated herein. In no situation will the senders name and/or email address be sold or distributed to third parties.
Navigation QuickLinks
| News Blog Interviews Lyrics Interactive Discography |
Downloads In Print Tour Madness Images MC Forum |
Return to HomepageReturn to Top of Page
On a Monday morning so dark from thundery rainclouds it seems as though the sky has fallen in, Graham ‘Suggs’ McPherson, shoe-less and wearing only a black t-shirt and faded jeans, sits on a canary yellow patterned armchair in the chaotic living-room of the modest Camden mews cottage in which he lives with the singer Bette Bright – or Anne, as he knows his wife.
Colourfully he sketches in the Madness background, a scenario of which this dryly ironic singing straightman has the keenest comprehension, essentially because he has not spent all his life in London. As much as The Kinks or The Small Faces provided wry three-minute chronicles of life in the British capital in the mid-1960s, Madness are an archetypal London group of the late 1970s and early 1980s, working within a framework akin to a Stanley Kubrick-directed Lieber and Stoller musical performed by a cast of fifth and sixth formers from a London comprehensive.
A polling of opinion amongst the seven Madness members would name The Beatles as the one outfit considered the most vital British rock combo ever. Hardly surprising; Madness rose from being 2-Tone outsiders to become the UK’s most consistent purveyors of astutely intelligent pop because of the group’s six songwriters’ clean perception of, and talented adeptness with, the magic of melody – the one single ingredient crucial to great songwriting.
Suggsy himself, who found his nickname in his early teens by sticking a pin in an encyclopaedia of jazz musicians and co-opting the name of a flautist, was born in Hastings in January, 1961. When he was three his father left his son and his jazz-singer mother, which was the last time Suggs ever saw him. In fact, his father, a music-crazy photographer, was a junkie: “He spent a lot of time in hospital: the last thing I heard about him was that he was in a hospital in Birmingham. I’ve been meaning to try and find him, but … I can’t really remember all that much about my early childhood – there was never a time when I can remember my dad being around … I don’t remember any bad times … I had a lot of ‘uncles’ through the years,” he chuckles, with just a suggestion of pathos.
After his father left them, Suggs and his mother moved to London for the first time. When he was eight they moved for a time to Liverpool, where his mother sang at The Blue Angel, a club then run by The Beatles’ first manager Alan Williams. Then followed moves first to Manchester and later Wales, where Suggs passed his eleven-plus and started at the local grammar school. Midway through his first year, however, they returned to London, where Suggs moved to an all-male comprehensive of 3,000 pupils at Swiss Cottage. He continued with a far less formal education than at the more traditional grammar school where, he says, he had been doing very well.
“When I came back to London my downward progression at school was very obvious,” he admits. “I started off quite well in the first year, but then I began hanging around with the wrong people, and soon I wasn’t going to school at all – I stopped showing any interest. But that was largely because I knew that the teachers themselves hadn’t got any interest in whether I had any interest … After Wales, it was like a holiday coming to school in London.”
Some of Suggsy’s London schooldays are detailed in the song that concludes the “7” album, “Summer in London”, the dark edge that often lurks in the customary wit of his vocal delivery surfacing in the song’s – and the LP’s – final, prescient line, Riots in London. “Summer in London” deals with that particular phenomenon of big city schooldays, “bunking off”.
“I tried to make the vocals sound really twee,” Suggs remembers, “but with very depressing undertones. It started off as just a song about myself – memories of what I used to do. Then it progressed on when I realised how many other people must do the same thing.
“We used to bunk off school, and go down Oxford Street where we’d spend all day wandering around doing fuck-all. Obviously that’s the kind of despondency that leads to people running around smashing things up.
“I never used to really nick much – other people in the group were better at it. I was never very good at nicking – I was a bit of a coward.
“In fact, that’s why I eventually got involved in the group: because I had arrived in London a bit late, I wasn’t really involved in any particular area or culture. I didn’t have any roots, and I was ready to find something I was interested in.”
Take It Or Leave It, the Madness biopic ably directed by Stiff boss David Robinson, is a factually accurate account of the group’s early years – though some members would have liked it to have been both surreal and to have delved deeper for its information content.
“I think it is maybe a bit short on entertainment,” remarks keyboardsman Mike Barson. “But I liked it, though I was in it. It was promoted the wrong way, so it didn’t do very well: at the moment it seems we just made it for our personal video machines.”
At one point in the film mention is made of concerned visits made on Suggs by social workers: the near-delinquent Madness singer was a source of worry to his local social services department while at school. He was living by this time on the edge of the City tenement flat with his mother, who had become dispirited with her singing career and had abandoned it, earning money instead by working in West End pubs.
In his mid-teens Suggs found himself becoming friends with one Chalkie, the son of a man his mother was going out with. Chalkie subsequently became a Madness roadie: going to school in Hampstead, he introduced Suggs to his friends and to a weekend social scene based around local pubs and gatecrashing parties in the area.
Amongst this crew was Mike Barson and Lee Thompson, later to become the Madness sax-player. Inspired by Sunday colour supplement articles on New York subway graffiti writers, Barso and Kix headed a similar team of outlaw artists, ripping off cans of spray paint and making strenuous efforts to raise the London graffiti output above its unimaginative norm of initial and name writing. Some of their work remains to this day: on the side of a pub at the junction of Holloway Road and Liverpool Road there’s still a large spray-painted birthday card, an early effort by Mike Barson at publicly expressing his artistic identity. Some of Suggs’ work, meanwhile, adorns the arches of the Westway.
But it was Barso and Lee, Suggs insists, then using their graffiti signatures of “Mr B” and “Kix” who were the real forces: he remembers when the pair crept at night along the railway lines to adorn Highbury and Islington tube station with their street art. Around the Lido swimming-pool off Hampstead Heath their initials and the remnants of some of this spray-paint artwork still can be seen, he claims. In a book on London graffiti written by George Melly, there is a photograph of one of Barso’s finest aerosol wall paintings, a car crash scene with a centrepiece of a blood-drenched lifeless hand emerging from a car window.
“Graffiti has never really died down in London,” reckons Suggs, “but people just don’t use it properly. In fact, when the ‘7’ album was about to come out we thought of going down the sidings at Golders Green station one night and painting all the tube trains there like they do in New York.
“But,” he adds, an introverted reflection momentarily passing across his face, “you suddenly realise that there are some things you’re never going to do anymore.”
Just as he led these North London graffiti artists, keyboardsman Mike Barson is also the leader of the Madness gang. It was he who formed the group, making the various permutations rehearse for a year and a half before their first stagework. He has always been the backbone of the group’s songwriting: on their third LP, “7”, he co-wrote nine of the songs. In the studio, says Carl “Chas Smash” Smith, “you’ve got to stop Barso going over the top – he’s got so many tunes and melodies running through his head and he tries to get them all in.”
A major controlling factor over this Barson quest for the ultimate overdub is group producer Clive Langer. “I often underestimate what Clive does,” admits the keyboardsman, revealing the editor-like function Langer fulfils, “He often forces me to alter and improve things I haven’t got round to sorting out on my own.”
Like a less eccentric version of The Specials’ Jerry Dammers, Barso is the Madness member who fulfils the group’s art school intake quotient – Suggs also wanted to go to art school but paid the consequences of consistently bunking off school by passing only a minimal number of ‘O’ levels.
In a rehearsal studio on the Holloway Road, the distant Barso is completely in his element, pursing and pinching and chewing on his mouth like a schoolchild deep in concentration on a difficult exam essay question as he leans over his keyboards, working out the parts on a new number.
He is far less comfortable the next evening when he’s interviewed by me at the BBC’s White City television studios following a Madness recording of their “Cardiac Arrest” single for The Kenny Everett Television Show. Whether consciously chosen or not, the location he suggests for this encounter – a plastic table next to some vending machines in a corridor alcove – is one in which he remains safe from revealing himself in any great intimacy. As we talk he nervously squints and squeezes his eye lids together, continually drumming his fingers on the table-top.
Barson went to Hornsey Art School in 1975 because he wanted to become a commercial artist. “I used to like advertisements and things like that,” he explains. “I never particularly liked any great works of art, I preferred commercial art and cartoons.
“In fact,” he adds, explaining one very obvious visual dimension of Madness and reminding me that Suggsy pressed on me a copy of the 2000 AD comic, declaring it to be the cult reading matter of the Eighties, “quite a few people in the group really like cartoons, and can get into the good aspects of them.”
At Hornsey, however, Mike Barson only completed his first year foundation course. “I didn’t get in for the next part, I fucked it up a bit. I didn’t really like it there – they were all sort of ponces,” he fires up.
“Art schools don’t really seem to be into art: they’re more into talking about it. It shouldn’t be to do with how many ‘A’ levels you can get, because they don’t have all that much to do with intelligence at all – they just reflect your abilities to learn things. But that’s all they seem to want, so they do a lot of talking at them,” he says, the words suddenly pouring out of him in a torrent.
“A lot of those people,” he continues, “are really useless at drawing or painting. They just have a lot of waffle. Being able to talk about what you’re doing has a lot to do with how impressed people are about it. If you talk really confidently about what you’re doing, people think that maybe it is good – people tend to agree with what they’re told.
“So anyway,” he concludes, calming down, “I didn’t really like it, and I didn’t go in very frequently. I applied for another three-year course at the London School of Printing, but I turned up two hours late for the interview and they never let me in.
“But I wasn’t really that bothered.”
Raised in Kentish Town, Barson, who resembles a young, less dissolute Oliver Reed, was a frequent visitor to the nearby Rock On vintage record store by Camden Town tube station. But he simply dismisses his love of Fifties and Sixties music: “It was the old cliché of my elder brother having the records and me listening to them.” He adds that this elder brother, Benny Barson, has been recently given a record deal with A & M: “Bit of a good record, it’ll be. He’s a brilliant musician. He plays all the instruments himself: a bit of a wizard. There’s no rivalry between us – he’s always been better than me.”
Barson is similarly self-deprecating when he provides a deflating explanation of Madness’s fondness for early r ‘n’ b, soul and rock ‘n’ roll: “It’s easy music to start with when you’re beginning a band. Most groups begin with ‘Johnny B Goode’ but most of them don’t work those songs out right: you’ve got to get the rhythm correct to do them properly.
“But anyway, the music that was about when we started was pretty shitty. Nobody in the group liked punk much, except for Bedders, our bassist – he was a big Clash fan. I agreed with the things the Pistols were saying – I just didn’t think their music was very good.
“But the 2-Tone attitude was similar to punk; it was good not to see any hidden mystique in music or to believe you have to be really good to play it. I hate the attitude that there’s something special about music or musicians. I think anyone should be able to have a go at it. At the time when the punk thing came along, you’d think you had to be playing for five years before you could make a record.
“I used to think that we sounded alright live, but it didn’t seem to connect that therefore we could make records – there seemed to be some magical difference. But there’s nothing particularly special about making records. If you’ve got a good idea at home then it can be a good idea on record.”
Suggsy and Carl were both cropping their head in skinhead style long before the late Seventies skinhead revival, they maintain, “We were into old American clothes, and both Fifties and Sixties records at the same time, and we were into looking like skins,” says Carl. “But we didn’t like it when the skins came out again, because it made us look bad. No-one had a crop in ’75 or ’76 but then all the NF and BM stuff happened, and that’s how we got roped in on that.”
Probably because he remembers the unfortunate, damaging early article in which it was alleged Madness were themselves neo-fascists, Barso refuses to admit to having ever allied himself with any faction. “I was just a young chap.”
He is, however, more prepared to commit himself when describing the effect of Madness’s music. “It’s a positive force, being good to all the land,” he chuckles pleasantly.
As a fan-heater blows hotly in our faces on a chilly lunchtime, Suggsy, Carl and I sit amidst the cluttered debris of the tall half-renovated terrace house off Holloway Road which the generous-natured Carl has recently acquired.
As Chas Smash, Carl has a role akin to that of a visual Greek chorus, underlining and italicizing through his dancing and character acting the storylines that are an integral part of most Madness songs. The last member to join the group, his role is the most redundant and indulgent, which paradoxically means it is also the most vital: for as every fan, the onstage Chas Smash is the personification of all the Madness elements fused into one.
Both onstage and off he and Suggs are a strong team. They are both Capricorns with birthdays one day apart in the middle of January. Carl, however, is two years older than Suggs: only Bedders is younger than the 21 year old singer. Considering Madness is now nearing the end of its third year of success, Suggs is exceptionally young, which makes it even more remarkable that he should appear as unscathed and self-possessed as he does – he expresses his gratitude for this to his now pregnant wife Anne, who inevitably passed on to him the benefit of her group experience with Deaf School.
“But Pete Townshend,” he points out, “was eighteen when he started The Who, and Dylan Thomas wrote all his best poetry in his early teens – Aubrey Beardsley was really young, too ...”
On the quiet, Suggs is very tough and resilient, as is Carl.
Both are well-known in the guise of their hedonistic alter-ego of The Coco Twins, a clubbing and pubbing double act. Recently, however, The Coco Twins have scaled down their activities in much the same way as has the entire Madness operation: at the end of last year, the group split from its manager in order to care for its own affairs more directly; there will be no more lengthy Madness tours, though short series of dates will continue to be played. Keeping an eye, perhaps, on immortality, Suggs remarks how pointless it is to waste a group’s most creative period on touring when instead it could be writing and recording.
“We’ve been boozing and clubbing for three years solid – now we’ve all stopped. We thought we were pretty close as a band, but we discovered we weren’t really,” explains Carl, adding that rather than staying up all night he now prefers to have a good night’s sleep and get up early.
Carl disappears into the kitchen with his young brother Dermot to make another of the endless pots of tea on which he now seems to subsist as an alcohol substitute.
As befits a vocal front-man who habitually wears on both his face and in his voice a permanent air of faint bemusement, Suggs is a modest fellow. He seizes the moment to consider with customary lack of ego the appeal of Madness has for many of its fans: “The group’s playing often is really out of time, and there are loads of notes missed. Also, in my singing I never get a smooth tone. All that’s probably part of our popularity: if everything was really slick, it would be a lot less easy to identify with. When things are a bit dodgy-sounding you can imagine people recording and writing them.”
Certainly Suggsy and Carl are the media face of Madness. However, as Suggs points out, “all the people in the group are completely different. Me and Carl tend to be together a lot, our guitarist Chrissy Boy and Lee, Bedders and our drummer Woody – Mike is a bit of a loner, but he’s really friendly and easy to get on with. But there are changing factions all the time. Yet there definitely is something that gells between everyone. Suddenly everyone comes together and it really becomes … The Madness.”
It was Chrissy Boy who first suggested the group then known as Morris and The Minors (nee The North London Invaders) should choose for a name the title of one of the songs they played. “And we thought, ‘Madness – brilliant!’, except,” Suggs grins, “Chris was the only one who didn’t like it … But I think it’s a brilliant name, because you can be mad in a million ways: Madness can be quite sane, or completely over-the-top, or it can be just funny, or really serious.”
All of Madness now own houses: the group money has been regularly and democratically divided up, thereby preventing any Specials-like friction. The group do not suffer from that peculiar, unhealthy British disease of being guilty about improving their lot. As Carl says, indicating with a wave of his arms the patchy plasterwork on the walls of his new home, “I’d be a bit upset if I didn’t manage to come out of this with something – certainly my parents would.”
Of all the groups with whom Stiff boss Dave Robinson has ever dealt, he is most impressed with the attitude of Madness: “I wish I could bottle it – I’d give it to a few of my other bands. Most bands when they’ve had a few hit records assume that their IQ also has improved. This is not so. Madness have never been guilty of such thinking.
“That’s because they’re completely professional. They take it all very seriously, but equally they have a tremendous sense of humour about everything. They’re very bright boys, and they’re also very streetwise. Once they trust you, they’ll allow you to just do your job and get on with it. But they know everything that’s going on about their affairs – they’ve made it their job to find out.”
More than most groups Madness have remained true to their backgrounds: they haven’t moved away from their home neighbourhoods; they can still be seen travelling on public transport in the area; until he cut down on drinking Carl had a nightly residence propping up the bar of The Hope and Anchor.
Indeed, Carl tries to remain in touch with many of the group’s original fans. “In the beginning it was a lot of the kids from the Kings Cross squats who used to come to our gigs – they were all on Tuinols and other downers – real no hopers. Tuinol’s a very depressing drug. I can’t see the buzz of collapsing.
“But all the same I used to have a lot of friends down there. At three in the morning you’d see loads of kids out on the street out of their heads. Most of the people we knew there were skins: they used to get busted all the time. A mate of ours from there worked with us a bit, but then he got into smack … That whole scene is real depravity.
“But,” Carl worries, “nowadays we don’t always see what we used to see. I don’t always have time to mix around that anymore. You get separated. Your circumstances become different and you’re not aware of their problems.
“In fact, you can even find yourself becoming a bit intolerant of those problems.”
Equally, however, Madness are aware enough to understand the inevitable, unfortunate necessity of isolating themselves from the few in order to communicate more effectively with the many. Disappearing on overseas tours for long periods of time has only improved their understanding of Britain.
As Suggs mentions, “When you travel all over the world you see everyone’s scapegoats, whether it’s the Mexicans in Los Angeles or the Aborigines in Australia. Travelling does make you more enlightened. In fact, often people are just narrow-minded simply because they’ve no experience of anywhere else.”
“Mind you,” adds Carl, “everywhere in the world you go, people say, ‘Your country is pretty fucked up, isn’t it?’ And when you go on tour here like we did towards the end of last year, you see that the country really is in a bad way. It’s hard to remain in good spirits when you see how many kids haven’t got anything to look forward to at all. It’s getting bad in London now, but I remember last time we were in Edinburgh it was pissing down with rain and there were all these kids coming backstage who didn’t even have a coat or anything.
“You know,” he continues, “I like a bit of socialism, and I like the idea of unions, but I don’t think they’re working. I like the idea of communism where everyone shares, and I like the idea of capitalism if it means you’re spending your money well and helping people.
“But I don’t like any single one of them entirely on its own. I think your views change every day. They should.
“I think all you can do is simplify things, then it becomes easier: if you say that honesty really is the best policy, and that you shouldn’t wrong people and you should try and help people, then that makes everything easier, doesn’t it?
“If you have the attitude that you won’t fuck anyone over, then you can’t do any wrong, no matter what politics you follow.”
Madness In Print Return
Return to Homepage | Return to Top of Page