Welcome to my life of FUN
Q: Which nutty pop star tapped up the Queen for football tickets, dropped his (baggy) trousers in David Bowie’s driveway and claims a fish finger advert changed his life? A: It must be... Suggs, Suggs, Suggs!
They say seeing Suggs walk into a bar is the first sign of Madness. But the singer arrives alone today, without his mischievous bandmates, striding purposefully into a tavern in London’s Fitzrovia, wearing a thirsty smirk and an elegant cashmere overcoat on this raw winter afternoon.
Suggs is a riveting raconteur. Having secured his first pint of lager shandy, he immediately embarks upon the first of many entertainingly scandalous anecdotes, all delivered in the slightly surreal and rhythmically staccato manner of a Madness song.
‘Buckingham Palace was a funny one,’ he begins, recalling the band’s memorable rooftop rendition of Our House (‘in the middle of one’s street’), having projected an image of a run-down terrace on to the building’s façade, to celebrate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in 2012.
‘I was reprimanded by a princess, which doesn’t happen every day.
‘I’d thrown a plastic glass down on the floor and Beatrice said: “Do not litter my granny’s house.” She picked it up, and quite rightly gave it back to me. In a dressing room you just throw a plastic glass on the floor, but in the grand ballroom at the Palace, you don’t.’
In retrospect, he was lucky that Beatrice didn’t slice him with a ceremonial sword, as was Ed Sheeran’s fate. ‘She might have beheaded me,’ Suggs chuckles. ‘Had us all sent to the Tower.’
Suggs had already risked upsetting Royal protocol when he used an old Tommy Cooper joke on the Queen, asking Her Majesty if she would be attending the FA Cup Final and, if not, could he have her tickets?
‘What are you going to say to the Queen?’ he says now, recalling the episode with his palms upturned. ‘She just said hello, and I just didn’t know what else to say, so I tried the old gag.
‘But she remembered the joke and quick as a flash she said: “That’s Tommy Cooper.” Must be 50-odd years old that one and she could remember it. They say she’s bright, the Queen. She can certainly remember vintage comedy material when she hears it.’
So did Madness, a notoriously light-fingered band, liberate any ‘mementoes’ from their gig at the royal family’s London HQ.
‘Only a couple of toilet rolls,’ Suggs shrugs. ‘Maybe a “please turn off the light” sign.
‘And unlike The Beatles, I didn’t have a joint in there, but I did have a fag. I remember sensing a laser dot on my forehead as I was leaning out the window.
‘Shadowy figures on the roof, having a laugh.’
At 56, Suggs, born Graham McPherson, has weathered well. The youthful features carry a few creases and the waistline is a trifle more generous, but he is ‘match fit’ and in fine humour.
He selects an outdoor table, the better to smoke the first of this lunchtime’s liquorice paper rollups. Several passers-by approach and are greeted as old friends. An elderly gent tells him he loves his new album. ‘I thought that was going to be: “My kids wouldn’t stop playing your bloody awful music,”’ Suggs says, surprised.
The beer and cigarettes accompany tales of an eventful sleepover at David Bowie’s, diffusing Madness’s punch-ups and sharing a death wish with Francis Bacon, and his views on TV talent shows and being a good bad dad.
All this plus heart-rending recollections of tragic songbird Amy Winehouse, his father’s heroin addiction and death, Suggs’s own health concerns and his wife’s battle with breast cancer.
‘Anne survived, she beat it,’ Suggs says proudly of the woman he married aged 21 in 1981, and mother of his two grown-up daughters, Viva, 31, and Scarlett, 34. ‘But it was a horrible ordeal.
‘Funnily enough, when I heard, I was just celebrating a very successful fish finger commercial.
‘I’d got a few quid in the bank and I remember I was sitting there in an extraordinarily expensive restaurant, smoking, and she rang me to say they’d found a lump in her