‘I told our label I didn’t want any more money’
In a London pub, Madness frontman Suggs talks to Will Hodgkinson about the band’s first No 1 album, mega fame in the Eighties – and the threat of Armageddon.
AN upstairs room at the Blue Posts pub in Soho with old-fashioned wooden chairs and a swirling red carpet, on a rainy Monday morning, feels like the ideal place to interview Graham “Suggs” McPherson.
Madness were a band born out of Camden Town pubs and their singer, still looking like a brush-haired miscreant at 62, grew up with his jazz singer mother Edith Gower in, among many other places, a council flat above a carpet shop on nearby Tottenham Court Rd. You wonder what he learnt from his bohemian upbringing.
“I learnt how to get pissed and slag people off,” Suggs says, lighting up a cigarette, seemingly oblivious to the smoking ban that has been in place since 2007. “Having a musician mother was just an embarrassment. It was, ‘F___, Mum’s going to start singing in the pub again’.”
In his school years Suggs would trawl through pubs and clubs to find his mother, who’d be working, drinking or doing both at the same time. A favoured hangout was the Colony Rooms, a tiny daytime drinking club on Dean St that was, depending on your viewpoint, a haven of artistic wit or a viper’s nest of bitchy alcoholism.
“There would be Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, George Melly ... I learnt very early on the power of vernacular, of being quick in the way you talk and think. At the time I thought it was all very sophisticated, but I took my daughters there years later and they went, ‘Dad, this is a shithole, full of pissheads’. That’s when the scales fell from my eyes.”
There is plenty of vernacular in Theatre of the Absurd Presents C’est La Vie, which in November became Madness’s first UK No 1 album. Roughly shaped as a three-act play, it combines a Samuel Beckett-style sense of absurdity with a tragicomic music hall mood and lyrics about the collapse of society. It sounds like heavy stuff. Being Madness, it comes wrapped in the kind of boozy, jokey, English sentiment matched only by the Kinks.
“We’re all doomed!” Suggs says with a hearty, phlegmatic chuckle when I ask what the album is about. “It came out of lockdown, which was a depressing and isolating period. The band fell out over the options the politicians at the time were offering us, probably because we were communicating over email ... Certain band members think we’re on the edge of Armageddon, which is in the lyrics of C’est La Vie [by the keyboardist Mike Barson]. I like to be more optimistic. Still, we’re in difficult times, aren’t we?”
During lockdown, Madness staged a concert in front of nobody at the London Palladium. That was the kernel for Theatre of the Absurd. “It was so dispiriting. I’m looking at an empty auditorium, my knees went because my whole life has been played out in front of an audience, and it didn’t help my mental state at all. We were stuck in Whitstable for much of the pandemic and my wife said I ended up with performer’s Tourette’s: I was singing to people at bus stops. I knew everyone in Tesco’s, every old woman in the street ... It got to the point where people were running away from me, going, ‘That bloke from Madness has lost his marbles’.”
Suggs contributed the title track, a portrait of a theatre where nobody knows the lines, nobody knows the point of anything, nobody can escape.
“That’s how the whole period felt like: stuck in a world where nobody could communicate at all. Once we were back together, back to rolling around on the floor and pulling each other’s hair out in true Madness tradition, we made an album that is all about pathos, which is a word that Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys taught me the meaning of: happy and sad at the same time.”
Even in their seemingly happiest songs,
Madness have always had a touch of the melancholic. On the new album, their 13th, a song called In My Street finds Suggs describing a neighbourhood of
Turkish drug dealers and uncollected bin bags that you cannot escape from until Judgment Day. It sounds like the world-weary descendant of the Madness classic Our House, which, though on first listen seems like an innocent celebration of family, has an undercurrent of gloom to it as well.
“I wrote In My Street because I was preparing to move out of our house after 40 years, which was round the back of Holloway prison,” Suggs says. “I thought it had a touch of Dead End Street by the Kinks, but you’re right because there is a line in Our House which most people miss: ‘Something tells you that you’ve got to get away’. The Kinks were a huge influence on us, and they had the same quality: nostalgia, a longing for things that are gone, while wanting to escape your surroundings at the same time.”
In the early Eighties, Madness were everywhere: breaking through with the bouncy ska tune The Prince in 1979 and becoming massive with One Step Beyond the same year. With Baggy Trousers, a reflection on being naughty at school, and House of Fun, a tale of going into the chemist’s to buy a condom for the first time, they inspired an entire generation to do funny walks around the playground. Success came not long after Suggs joined in 1977, getting the job when the band members heard him singing old rock’n’roll tunes as he came out of the cinema after a screening of American Graffiti.
“We had a residency in the Dublin Castle in Camden Town and it went from 10 people to 30, to 40, to a queue round the block,” Suggs remembers of that time. “We were in the Hope and Anchor one night when the Specials were playing. They were from Coventry and in those days the best chance of finding a place to stay was by pulling a bird, but with Jerry Dammers’ [lack of] teeth, he ended up kipping on my mum’s sofa. That’s when he said, ‘I’m starting a record label and it’s going to be the English Motown.’ I thought it sounded a bit optimistic, given they had just played to 35 people in a pub basement, but six months later he had 2-Tone, he put out The Prince and it got to No 16 in the charts. We were barely able to play our instruments.”
The whole 2-Tone movement went off, as Suggs remembers, “like a cracker”, with Madness, the Specials and the Selecter sharing a tour that saw concerts ending in pandemonium night after night. Everyone had a deep love of Jamaican music, the Specials and the Selecter had black and white members,
and the whole thing came out of Dammers being inspired by the late Seventies Rock Against Racism movement. Yet the concerts became a magnet for the far-right.
“There were gigs where half the audience were sieg-heiling,” Suggs remembers. “We got it worse, although the Specials were getting it too and half of them were black. It came out of football hooliganism: there was a crackdown on it in the early Eighties, so gigs became a place where the skinheads could still have a punch-up. Thankfully they moved on to [the short-lived punk movement] oi! and left us alone.”
In their glory years a new Madness single became a major event, to the extent that nobody knew where they would go next: the bleakness of Embarrassment, the sweet romance of Labi Siffre’s It Must Be Love. It actually got too much for Suggs, who went to the band’s new label Stiff Records and asked if they could make it stop.
“There were people camped around my house and it was surreal. We made videos that everybody talked about in school the following day, like Lee [Thompson, saxophone] flying in the air in Baggy Trousers. A few months previously I was earning £11 a week in a butcher’s and now I had £30,000. I actually told the label I didn’t want any more money.”
Barson, Madness’s principal songwriter, left in 1984 after 15 top-10 hits, tired of the pressure. It led to the end of the band’s imperial phase and, in 1986, a split amid a general conviction that they had run their course. The offer of a massive reunion concert in Finsbury Park in 1992 got Madness back together. But feeling the cruise ships edging into view as they settled into being a successful Eighties nostalgia band, in 2009 they made The Liberty of Norton Folgate, a concept album about a corner of east London that until 1900 was independent from the crown. It also marked Madness as a serious band.
All of these years later, Suggs’s life doesn’t appear to be hugely different to how it was when he was rooting around the pubs and clubs of Soho, trying to find his mum. By the time our interview finishes, it is midday, which means he can legitimately order a Guinness from the bar. Before we say goodbye, I ask what has kept Madness going.
“I suppose it is a simple thing: a love of music. I go back to when we grew up ... some were going to work as builders and taxi drivers, and a small pocket of us thought music might be the answer. Lee Thompson did some time at Her Majesty’s pleasure, I did a few nights in police cells, but music ... we start playing and everything seems to make sense.”
Perhaps thinking of the world evoked by Theatre of the Absurd Presents C’est La Vie, he concludes: “It is the only thing that does.”