Buster Bloodvessel reflects on five decades of madness in Bad Manners
Everyone loves Bad Manners. From skinheads to Princess Diana, the universal appeal of their high-energy blend of two-tone and R&B means they’ve remained one of Britain’s most beloved ska bands some 45 years after their inception. But perhaps nobody loves the band as much as their madcap frontman Buster Bloodvessel, who is currently suffering through a cripplingly bad back while on their Christmas tour. His chief concern, however, is that it’s no good for dancing.
But he soldiers on through renditions of ‘Lip Up Fatty’ and ‘Special Brew’ anyway, not wanting to let the side down. “Everybody’s enjoying themselves,” he assures me. “But I’m suffering on stage quite a lot. I’m doing six to eight painkillers a night, and it’s not even touching the sides. The pain is just horrific”.
When I put it to him that around this time last year, it was reported that he feared he wouldn’t live to see the next tour, he shrugs it off. He’s not bothered by the idea that he was close to death, calling it an “overcautious” verdict – but he remembers going into hospital and missing one night of the tour and seems more frustrated he let fans down than anything.
Getting in touch with doctors has proved pointless, and when he finally gets an appointment, he barrels in with a laundry list of ailments. “I’d say, ‘I’ve got this, this, this and this wrong with me. Can you solve any of these problems in five minutes?” he laughs. It’s an obvious “no”. And if they did the other obvious thing and told him to stop performing? “I wouldn’t listen to them if they did,” he says. “That’s for certain”. Jumping around on stage, bad back or not, is second nature at this point.
Buster has spent 48 years performing, during which time he’s garnered shock and admiration in equal turn. He once painted his bald head red without telling anyone on Top of the Pops and was subsequently banned from the show, then he mooned the Pope and was subsequently banned from Italian TV entirely. But his high-octane energy, which was often burned up by wagging his huge tongue around, was infectious. Bad Manners have had one of the most enviable chart runs going, having spent 111 weeks in the UK Singles Chart between 1980 and 1983, and a lot of that is owed to Buster’s onstage antics.
“I always was like that, you know,” he says. “My mother used to say, ‘You need to take five minutes to calm down’. And I never used to. So I suppose that’s where it all starts, when you’re a young lad and full of enthusiasm, and you want to go out and prove it to the world”. He utilised that bombastic energy in school when he formed Stoop Solo And The Sheet Starchers, soon finding that promoters loved the antics that drove his mother up the wall. The band was renamed Bad Manners, and, borrowing his name from a character in the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour, Douglas Trendle christened himself Buster Bloodvessel.
“I never saw it as being as successful as it’s been,” he reflects. “Our aim was to start playing music for us to have fun and to never change that attitude. And so we’ve tried to stick with that attitude, although not always has that happened, but majority of the time, it does. We’re still having fun. That’s the most important thing”. That said, when talk of the new album crops up, the enthusiasm withers quite comically.
“We’ve got an album coming out next year; that’s what we’re working on right at this moment,” he says, so as a matter of fact, it’s funny. “Nothing’s positive about that, but we’ll be positive next year. It’s so early stages you can’t really make a tune out of it really”. Buster laughs about it in big guffaws that ring out over the tinny phone line. Sensing how unusual it is not to flog an upcoming album, he adds, “When we do have something worth promoting, then I’ll promote it.”
He gives it a go anyway, warning: “It’s not very interesting, but if you want to hear it!” At this stage, all he can say is that the band have surpassed the “boom, boom, bang, bang, do it like this” stage and is now starting to get into arguments. “Sort of stuff you don’t really want to hear about, I’m sure,” he advises. Robbed of the implausible image of someone telling Buster Bloodvessel what to do, we move on to why Bad Manners want to get back in the studio.
It’s been over a decade since Stupidity, and they’ve been toying with the idea of doing a Christmas single for a few years. “We’ve got lots of silly little ideas in mind,” he says, “And we’re doing very well in many other countries at the moment, so it makes sense to actually record another album”. Ska does seem to be having a revival at the minute, and bizarrely, it’s only as of this year that Madness have secured their first number-one studio album with Theatre Of The Absurd Presents C’est La Vie.
“Madness have just had a number one?” he tells me, the low crackle of his voice raising an octave in genuine surprise. “Really? I don’t even know the record you’re talking about”. His sole focus seems to be capitalising on newfound popularity overseas, and he’s so tunnel-visioned about it that he’s blithely unaware of the recent strides of fellow ska peers.
“Mexico is quite incredibly mad for us at the moment,” he explains. “I don’t know why, but the whole of Mexico seems to be on our side. We go there, the government look after us.” They were set to play a gig there about four years ago that coincided with an earthquake, and the band saw the devastation first-hand. “We saw everyone being rescued,” he says. “It took to their hearts to the fact that we was there and we had a show coming up.”
The next summer, they went back to play, making good on the cancelled gig – and 15,000 people were there. “We was quite impressed,” says Buster, acknowledging how strange it is that one of the most uniquely British musical exports is such a hit there, and it’s much the same story in the Phillippines and Indonesia. They had just wrapped up their Greatest Hits Tour across Australia and New Zealand, where Buster was surprised to find they ate more pies than anybody else in the world. “More pies than us, and they’re all fit and healthy-looking,” he says. “And their pies are really nice – I mean, really nice.”
Buster’s enthusiastic embrace of food (he famously once ate 29 Big Macs in a row) and the subsequent talk of his weight (fans at shows often chant: “You fat bastard” at him) doesn’t bother him in the slightest. “I don’t care at all,” he says. “I’m huge, always have been. I got stick all the time and still do. I mean, it’s one of those things: when you’re a big boy, you’re a big boy. People like to pick on ya.” Once weighing in at 34 stone, he turned his size into strength and briefly owned a hotel designed exclusively for rotund folks, delicately named Fatty Towers. “You’ve got to take your disadvantages and make them your advantage, always,” he advises.
With that ethos in mind, he’s doing his best to get on with the Christmas tour in spite of his back. “The band are playing brilliantly, really putting themselves into the soul of the music – everyone’s performing out of their skin,” he says. “I’m sort of boggling along, just being me.” He’s started to notice the crowd are getting younger as the years go by, which is a pleasant surprise he’s still figuring out.
“There’s been a lot of losses in ska, of people who have died recently,” he muses. “I’m not sure if that would be encouraging people to come back into the ska world – but it is quite healthy at the moment, that’s for certain. I mean, the run of gigs that we’ve got just shows you that there’s got to be a lot of fans out there. And the majority of the gigs are selling out, so it’s really good.”
Their next aim is to celebrate the 50th anniversary of their Christmas tour, and with a new album in the works – complete with a Christmas single – it seems like Bad Manners aren’t going anywhere. But Buster is a realist and knows he can’t keep gigging forever. “I don’t know if I’ll be privileged enough to live that long,” he says. “But I’ll certainly give it a go.” As for right now, he’s content wheeling out the hits in front of audiences across the world, so long as they’ll have him. “I’m like a pig in muck at the moment,” he laughs.
“I’m wallowing in it – it’s lovely,” the tongue-wagging frontman concludes with one last cackle.
