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When The Going Gets Whacky, The Whacky Get Homesick - by James Truman
Seaside postcards, happy snaps, sublime surburban sketches, the music of Madness is a fond caricature of British life. In America, where everything is writ large, what price such small delights? JAMES TRUMAN ponders the fate of Madness and Englishmen out in the California sun. Photographs by Kate Simon.
At the corner of Santa Monica and La Brea, in the fading glare of a grapefruit coloured sun, a mangy looking street punk digs in his heels and swivels round. A thousand cars glide noiselessly by. With one swift move I'm cornered, backed up against a wall. The punk fingers me with a long stare, of the ugly and silent variety. He needs a shave; he will always need a shave. He pushes his face up close to mine, so close you can count the blackheads on his nose.
"Nina Hagen," he barks, louder than necessary.
I'm already up to 25, and still on his left nostril.
"Nina Hagen!" He shouts it this time.
"So?"
"What do you think of Nina Hagen?"
It was opinion the punk wanted, and he wanted it fast. I'd got an art-mugger on my hands. It was a familiar situation. There are ways around it. You hand over your ideas, avoid getting sidetracked on philosophical discourse, and nobody misses supper.
"Cyndi Lauper with rabies," I volunteer.
"Nina Hagen is up there," he counters, pointing up to where a jet plane is tracing Olympian circles in the sky. This wasn't going to be easy: the punk fancied himself as a conceptualist too.
I look him in the eye. "Nina Hagen is the connective bridge between culture and consciousness ..."
"Shut up," he mentions. You could tell he wanted more.
" ... While Madness are the undertow of a receding tide bent on sacrificing the precise geographical properties of an individuated pop culture to the false consciousness of a homogenous internationalism."
The punk takes a step backwards. "I'll tell you what Madness is, buddy," he leers. "Madness is ... freedom."
Madness is freedom. Oh dear. The kid was an amateur, probably spent his whole life stealing fifth-rate concepts from deadbeat Romantic poets. In the criminal hierarchy he was no more than a glorified hub-cap thief.
I pushed him roughly aside. He needed to understand that he was dealing with a professional here. And he was. A professional on assignment. Never mind that the professional didn't know the first thing about Madness and, because the record company had been too cheap to express-mail any press cuttings, still didn't. A friend had given me the angle before I left New York. Madness, she told me, had recently shrunk in size. That made it easy: find out about the change in size, collect some local colour, and then hit the beach for four days, there to get a sun tan and catch up with Fast Ollie, my old friend.
A couple of hours later the group materialises in the dressing room of a university campus sports hall. The thing you immediately notice is that one of them - he called himself Carl - has a big red scab beneath his lower lip. A herpes sore! The story is looking up already. I ask Carl, whom other people seem to call Chas, what happened.
"The little guy stubbed a cigarette out on my chin," he says.
"What little guy?"
"Him over in the corner." He waves his hand in the direction of the corner, where the guy is playing with a bazooka gun. He is indeed little. Bearing in mind that Madness have shrunk in size, it figures that he has to be the leader. Okay, The Face Interview.
You've been doing this for a long time now. What keeps you going?
I'm getting a camera for my birthday.
That's nice. Do you believe in religious ecstasy?
You what?
What did you have for breakfast last Tuesday?
Can't remember.
Tell me about your musical influences.
I don't know.
People say you play the piano and do all the arrangements.
No I don't.
Listen, everyone says Mike Barson is the brains behind the group.
My name's Matthew.
Sorry. Which one's Mike Barson then?
He's gone away.
Where'd he go?
Not sure. Daddy knows.
Daddy. Who the hell's daddy?
Chris. He plays the guitar.
My mistake. What do you think of Los Angeles, anyway?
I think it's good.
"You know, I really hate this place," says Suggs one afternoon, in a car cruising one of LA's endless freeways. Outside there's the miraculous California sunset, which for one hour each day turns the city into something soft and dreamy. The group has been here five days - for TV shows, concerts, the usual - has another five to go, and Suggs is counting. Madness don't like LA. Mostly, they don't like LA because it isn't home. Also because it's LA, which means they share an opinion with most of Europe and all of New York.
Vast and formless, Los Angeles seems to take the American life-style to the furthest extreme of self-parody: it admits nothing that isn't immediately, selfishly desirable, and the things which are desirable declare a system of values that could never survive elsewhere. The surfers, muscle builders - all the California body-fascists - fret endlessly about the weather, their suntans, the air quality not so much because they're the most visible attractions of LA life. The things that aren't visible - culture, for example - don't appear to be there at all. That's because they're closeted away, probably in Beverly Hills or Bel Air. One knows, instinctively, journalistically, that at least a fraction of the world's greatest artists are out there; somewhere, Michael Jackson is doing whatever it is he does with his pet llama. But they're unseen. In LA you don't see the people whose names make you think of LA. If they go out, it's not in public. They don't need the attractions of LA because, in one sense, they've become the attractions of LA. Which is not so different from surfers flooding the beach. It's the same insular existence.
All in all, it's not so surprising that every other person in Los Angeles seems to be English. With the mother country on a grim slide, here's the antidote: a life uncontaminated by politics, culture, anxiety, the work ethic, memory of any kind.
After one of Madness's shows, Steve Jones pops backstage. He's got a band in LA. Someone comes up and asks him if he was once in the Sex Pistols. He goes blank for a second. Was he? Was Fast Ollie the greatest bongo player of all time? Probably, but he came to Los Angeles to put himself in mothballs. Rumour had it that he was now working as a short-order cook in some fast food joint. There must be half a million fast-food joints here. I'd never find him; he'd never find himself, but what the hell. He was submerged in the California life. As we approach the hotel a sports car zooms past. Inside is Iron Maiden's tour manager. The California life! He has it all: the drop-head Mercedes, mirror shades, hair trailing in the wind.
"What a prick," says Suggs with admiration.
Suggs and his group don't exactly travel well. In fact they don't travel at all. Somehow they manage to spend five days playing baseball, touring Disneyland, doing concerts, travelling the freeways and make it all seem like a weekend in Regent's Park. They remain wilfully out-of-synch with everything going on around them - like proper Californians, only in reverse. Theirs is a curious kind of bunker mentality. Twenty-four-hour jokers, they appear to support all the stale old myths of buddy-buddy rock-and-roll camaraderie, only their camaraderie is based on the fact that they do - actually, genuinely - despise everything it suggests. Which leaves a number of unfilled gaps.
Their privately serious side is an embarrassment to them; their professionally whacky side bores them to death. The space between is a long, resounding silence. In other words, you'd have a more rewarding time trying to interview a cement mixer. Cement mixers, for starters, don't close ranks. On my last evening, when I'd finally got Suggs to talk a little more openly about some of the above, he suddenly pauses in mid-sentence, notices the rest of the group are listening in, and clams up for good. Hanging his head and shuffling his feet, he begins to look like a schoolboy who's just been caught wetting himself in class. It's an obviously hopeless task. What he needs is a damn good art-mugging.
In structure, theme and substance, the art-mugging isn't altogether dissimilar from the live radio phone-in show. After a little goading, Suggs and Mark Bedford, the bass player with the balletic eyebrows, agree to go on the air at K-ROQ, a local station, to answer listeners' love problems. Now this is more like it. Having bribed a friend to call in with a list of filthy questions, I shoot off with them. By the time we get there, the lines are buzzing. Someone out there really does believe Madness have something to say to them.
And their problems are profound. The first caller, a girl, can't have a relationship because she's too much in love with Boy George. The second, who sounds suspiciously like the first, is too much in love with Mark Bedford. Mark's escort, who's passed out on the studio floor, swallows a look of pure venom while Mark stammers his way to an answer. The next, a youth called Peter, want to know how to pick up a girl in his Abnormal Psychology class.
"Try hanging some dollar bills out of your back pocket," suggests Suggs.
The girl, it turns out, isn't short of cash.
"Then wear a car on your head."
"What?"
"OK. You buy yourself a pack of cigarettes, you stick one in your left ear, and you light it slowly and casually. Then you stroll up to her, you puff the smoke in her face, and you say: 'How about you and me getting it together babes'. That always works."
In a flash I understand why Suggs wouldn't tell me how many groupies he'd been to bed with. They're all suing him for bad presentation.
The final caller on Love Line has a familiar problem. She's got an English boyfriend who can't express his emotions. She wants to know if all Englishmen are so pathetic. Suggs begins to explain a heartfelt theory of British reserve when the boyfriend himself comes on the line.
"Why are you hiding your emotions?" someone asks.
"Well ..." he deliberates. "I dunno really."
Ah! The authentic voice of Shakespeare's country! Everything is suddenly made clear: Englishmen are indeed pathetic idiots. Small wonder they all move to America, where no one notices, because everyone exists beyond embarrassment. The people at K-ROQ are so far beyond embarrassment they'll soon have come full circle; presently they're circling around abject humility. They're such a serious nightmare I begin to wonder if we're not related.
It should be explained here that K-ROQ is a minor phenomenon of the American music business. A couple of years ago they launched themselves with a format in direct opposition to blanket Top 40 and Disco radio. They played arty stuff and especially English stuff, and they started getting sensational ratings. As such, they're a perfect example of how marginal ideas can be absorbed into the amorphous glob of American mass culture without the status quo being changed. K-ROQ's presentation is as insincerely Californian, as gung-ho groupie, as any other major station. Instead of baseball, beer and party they're baseball, beer and new music. Same difference, as it turns out.
To be truly marginal in Los Angeles, it strikes you, is to submerge oneself in a sub-culture so freakish that no one would ever want to absorb it. A prime example is the growing LA mod scene, a really peculiar mutant offspring of Sixties London. On the beat for several years now, it has its own O.N. Klub (recently closed, though) and its own magazine, Twist, which is full of terrific soul-searching pieces on What It Means To Be A Mod (consensus answer: search me) and Who Are Mod's Spiritual Parents (choices: Mary Quant, Diana Rigg, James Bond, Cathy McGowan and Steve Marriot). For a week, it also has its favourite group in town.
"Same audience as usual," Chris cheerfully announces after a concert. They expect to soon know them all by name. It's not something they particularly want but, as the last survivors of 2-Tone, they've learnt to put up with it. But it might be more than just 2-Tone. It seems somehow appropriate that Madness's American audience should be Sixties throwbacks, because it hasn't been since the Sixties that Americans have shown an overwhelming interest in a pop music based upon the everyday of British working class life.
Madness are not, in fact, particularly popular in America. Their one hit, "Our House", was, they all suspect, nothing more than an exercise in record company hype and muscle. Their ordinariness tends to work against them here. The new American market wants something glossier, glitzier, more exotic.
To throw the problem into painful relief, Madness arrive in LA during the run-up to the Grammy Awards, the American industry's reward for excellence (read: greatest contribution to the budget sheet). The situation in their hotel is ridiculous: you go up in the lift with Annie Lennox, come down with Alice Cooper, sunbathe by the pool with Cindi Lauper and hide in the bushes to avoid Richard Butler. And that's just a summary.
While others are being swanned around in limousines, Madness are usually holed up in one darkened suite, announcing their disgust with the filthy black slime of the record business while caught in the double-bind of needing it. And, maybe, needing America. A string of British hit singles has made them popular but, they insist, far from rich. Mike Barson's departure was but the first sign of the group's mortality. They know it can't go on forever, and they're not excited by the idea of gardening again for Camden Council.
Barson's leaving (Paul Carrack is the temporary replacement) was, Chris says, no great surprise. It did, Suggs says, put him in mind of packing it in himself. You sense that there's as much envy as regret when it comes to Barson. You also sense that because the group didn't think much about what they were doing in the first place, when they rode in on a shared wave of communal activity, they have a problem deciding what to do next, now they're on their own.
One of the results is the melancholy which "Keep Moving", the new album, expresses rather beautifully. But, as Chris glumly points out, every Madness album has sold less than the one before it. What people want is hit singles and the nutty stuff. For their three LA concerts they serve it up on demand, but the fun is put inside inverted commas. It makes for a strange spectacle: a familiar first-rush naivety buoyed up by a gritted-teeth cynicism.
"You can't help but get cynical about it all," says Suggs one afternoon. "After a while you don't believe anything anyone tells you. I just don't want to hear anyone else tell me the records are good, or the show was great. You spend most of the time thinking how bloody ordinary you are, and then everyone wants to feed you this myth."
The opposite to the myth is the bread-and-butter. Or, when the going gets tough, the cynics get married. Lee Thompson is the last but one to tie the knot. On another perfect day, February 29 - he doesn't like wedding anniversaries - in the Los Angeles Hardrock Cafe, amidst the trappings of the style known as California hideous, he does the correct thing by Deb, his girlfriend of eight years. The service is over so fast you'd be excused for thinking the chaplain was taking a lunch order.
Afterwards they make a quick exit into the waiting Bentley (1952) that will take them to a Las Vegas honeymoon. The chauffeur is Ramon Sheen, son of Martin. By this point, we really didn't need any more celebrities. Or pop stars.
To make everything even more ridiculous, the apeman in front of me at the airport check-in counter looks a deadringer for the lead singer of Kiss.
"Gene?"
"Huh?"
"Gene Simmons?"
"Right. How are you doing?"
"Great. You seen Fast Ollie, man?"
But the Great Man just turns away, his eyes fixed on the steady, unblinking horizon, where life is easy and pop stars live, work and survive long enough to become absurd caricatures of themselves. Madness, I say, are good people.
- Contributed by Steve Bringe
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