Suggs on 48 years of Madness: “I hate the rest of them with a lust”
“Hahahaha, I don’t know, I’m always damaging me toe. I don’t know what it is,” Suggs reflected on our brief meeting a couple of months ago backstage in KOKO. After delivering a stellar performance of songs new and old, he sat in the green room, surrounded by champagne and sushi, one shoe off and a throbbing foot. “It’s better now, thank you very much; it was only the little one.”
Two hours before that meeting, the lights went down on the dark theatre in London. Madness took to the stage to play their newest album, Theatre of the Absurd presents C’est La Vie in its entirety. It’s an intimate venue compared to the sold-out arenas and headline festival slots that the band are used to. Still, it provided the perfect setting to celebrate the new record and everything they have accomplished in their 48 years, all a stone’s throw away from where it began: Dublin Castle, Camden.
“It was great. We haven’t made an album for seven years, and we’ve had a lot of ups and downs with the pandemic, like everybody. It’s boring now to go on about it, but we’ve kind of had our own arguments and divisions and the rest of it, but then when we got in the studio, making music, you know, it’s such a great healer,” he said. “Then the idea that we play the whole thing, in its entirety, in a venue that, in fact, where we got our name from, Madness, it come from that, KOKO’s, what was called The Music Machine back in the day, it had a lot of resonance for us.”
He recalls choosing the name, “We were called The North London Invaders. Sort of ’77, ’78, then we found out there was another band called The Invaders. Whatever happened to them, who knows? But they had a record deal, and we didn’t, and they licensed the name. So, we turned up the Music Machine [now KOKO], and Mike, our keyboard player, had taken it upon himself to rename us ‘Morris and The Minors’. There was posters outside, and we was like, ‘Who the fuck are these?’”
He laughs, takes a drag of a cigarette and continues, “I wasn’t mad on being Morris, and the rest weren’t too keen on being the Minors either,” cigarette smoke fills the Zoom screen as the lead singer exhales, “So, we was just thinking, what we gunna call ourselves? We had a setlist of the songs we were doing at the time. It was like ‘One Step Beyond’, dunno, not bad, ‘My Girl’. Nah, that don’t work. Anyway, we were doing a cover of a Prince Buster song, ‘Madness’, and somebody just suggested Madness, and everyone agreed.”
During that period, what Suggs has previously called the “Golden Age of Camden”, the band secured a residency in a pub around the corner, Dublin Castle, by lying about the kind of music they made. Now, still a frequent visitor of the pub, he laughs at how little things have changed despite 50 years passing and the surrounding area being completely different.
“It’s 99.9% the same. I go in, and I say, ‘It’s lovely what you’ve done with the old gaff… fuck all.’ Dreadful mock Tudor Irish boozer. But the story of that place is that’s where we got our first residency in the late ‘70s by pretending we were a country and western band because all the pubs were Irish… I mean, there used to be about 15 pubs in Camden when I was a kid, and most of us have gone, and that’s why The Dublin Castle is sort of this beacon of hope.”
A smile creeps onto his face in between puffs of smoke as he reflects on some of the groups he saw during that period, back when everyone was just making music for the fun of it, and what the future held was distorted by pints of beer and hazy nights. “Snivelling Shits, they were good, don’t know what happened to them. Millwall Chainsaws, they were good n’ all. The Nipple Erectors, that was Shane MacGowan’s first band. I saw them at Dublin Castle.”
He continued, “You’d go out every night, and you’d see a band, and you didn’t know, nobody knew who was gunna make it and who wasn’t, but everyone was at it. There was just music every single night, and it was free; as long as you could afford a pint of beer, you could go out. It was amazing.”
Even though nobody knew who was going to make it and who wasn’t, nobody would have predicted that Madness, a band who at the time was lying about the music they made and couldn’t decide on a name, was going to reach the astronomical levels that they did. That night in KOKO, despite the first half of the gig being new songs and, at the time, unknown, the crowd had a sense of unity in them, a community that is only ever found in a Madness crowd. Conga lines are started on a whim, people dress in Fezs and Safari gear, and a world parallel to our own but slightly out of reach, one of unbridled joy, family and silliness, takes over.
“During the pandemic, my wife said, ‘I think you’ve got performance Tourette’s,’ because I was singing to people at bus stops. Not him again. Old ladies were running away,” he laughs. “I remember the first gig we did when we got back together, and my mate said, ‘It’s unbridled joy,’ and it’s a privilege to be told that, but I felt it. Our crowds feed us in the way that we hopefully feed them with our enthusiasm. Yeah, Madness have always sort of had this feeling for entertainment. For entertaining. It’s an old-fashioned idea; people pay a lot of money to come and see you, and you should reciprocate that. We still really enjoy it, and for me, it gets better.”
When watching them on stage almost 50 years after the band’s original inception, it is clear that the love of performing is still there, as playing the new music, members smile at one another and revel in the applause that new songs receive. “I hate the rest of them with a lust,” Suggs confesses, “It’s like the Hotel California; you can get out any time you like, but you can never leave.”
He said, “We’re just human beings, and we are some sort of dysfunctional family. We’ve been together 40 years, most of us know each other from being at school. But making music, it’s just an extraordinary, incomprehensible thing that happens. Everything comes alight, and everything else goes away. All your individual problems and arguments don’t exist, you know, when you’re on stage or recording. It’s just really magical. I keep saying the word privilege, but it really is, to make music for a living.”
Fans will be able to get more of Madness as the group gears up to release the expanded release of their newest album, which features brand new music and some live recordings. What could be one of the last albums that the band ever put out, Madness looked back at old-school recording techniques to put together the new record and, in doing so, tapped into something special that still lingers five decades on.
“Not for an instant would I suggest that we were anywhere near The Beatles, but we had all seen that documentary about the last album they made… They were getting on, and in the studio, they were in a circle. Normally, in a studio, you’re in a line like you would be on stage, but we kind of replicated that, haha, and wrote ‘Let It Be’. No, we fucking didn’t. But it was just nice to be looking at each other and making music in a room together.”
