(#265: 22 May 1982,
2 weeks; 12 June 1982, 1 week)
Track listing:
Embarrassment/Shut Up/My Girl/Baggy Trousers/It Must Be Love/The Prince/Bed And
Breakfast Man/Night Boat To Cairo/House Of Fun/One Step Beyond/Cardiac
Arrest/Grey Day/Take It Or Leave It/In The City/Madness/The Return Of The Los
Palmas 7
Madness, madness, they call it madness, the kind that
gets you lying prostate on a park bench, trying to sleep in the rain, or
dropping dead of a heart attack on a crowded bus; the kind that makes you
scream “SHUT UP!” at the world. The kind that keeps you in waking nightmares
when you’re trying to sleep, having spent the day trying to be as jolly and
extroverted as possible.
The wackiness of this madness is but a breath away from the
sort of madness which gets you carted away in a van (“There are degrees of
madness,” Ian S Munro has his doomed visionary painter Donald – doomed such
that he can only function as a patient in a mental hospital in Lenzie – to the
protagonist of his radio monologue The
Artist In Search Of A City. “Mine’s maybe not the worst – it only harms
myself”).
“IF YOU’D’VE BEEN WHERE I’D’VE BEEN, YOU’D’VE SEEN THE
FAIRY QUEEN!” is the childhood Glasgow mantra Donald goes on to recollect – the
missed and forever lost chance to find one’s Holy Grail. But then you might see
the Holy Grail as the turning of life itself, even seen from the shadows of
gloomy tower blocks in Camden.
Although the sixteen songs on this collection – twelve hits,
two album tracks and two B-sides – were recorded over a period of some
two-and-a-half years, there is a strong case for arguing that the stories they
tell could have taken place within only four or five blocks – in Camden – and
that they are not only interrelated but may also tell the story from the
perspective of Suggs’ protagonist being the same character. The school-leaver
of “Baggy Trousers” who hasn’t quite grasped what his schooling was for may be
the bewildered would-be boyfriend of “My Girl” who may be the only person who
doesn’t see where he’s going wrong, may descend into being the hopeless petty
criminal of “Shut Up” (where it’s still everyone else’s fault but his) or even
the semi-derelict, borderline psychopath of “Grey Day.” Even if he manages to
get everything else in life, there remains a fundamental self-hatred which will
do for him on the bus to work (were office commuters still wearing bowler hats
in 1981?).
Crucial to the linear development outlined in these songs
is Suggs’ own deadpan delivery. Like the younger Roger Daltrey, Suggs doesn’t really
try to “sing” these songs as such, but mouths them, slightly despondently but
with a necessary overlay of unquenchable cheer. His two overall messages are “Why
me?” and “Why not?” And this is important to the music’s success, since it’s
fair to say that Madness songs never really go
anywhere, but rather circle on themselves until the singer is trapped in a
loop. “My Girl” describes what’s wrong – from one flawed perspective – but there
is no ending, happy or otherwise; the song simply ends, unresolved. In both the
single and video versions of “Cardiac Arrest,” a happy ending of sorts is
salvaged – in the video, Chas Smash literally springs back into life just as he
is about to be buried – but on the original album mix, we simply hear piano and
drum heartbeats, gradually slowing down and then stopping, with no way back.
Perhaps it is simply a reflection of the way Camden
sometimes seems to turn in upon itself; beyond the High Street, Lock and Market,
and before it turns into Hampstead, it is a deprived and grim-looking part of
town, though, importantly, not bereft of life. The world which these songs
describe is not, by and large, a materially wealthy one and quite often is a
brutal and unforgiving one. Hence, if Madness wish to come across as zany and
wacky, it is essential to remember that their good humour is built on a
foundation of profound pain. Comedy can be as much of a mask as it can be a
guide.
If we take the story chronologically, it all seemed so
simple at the beginning – or did it? Given that two of the three earliest songs
here are Prince Buster covers, and the third a Prince Buster tribute, Madness’
development does, shamefully, remind us how minimal a role ska and reggae have
played in this tale thus far – a part wholly out of proportion to the
importance of these musics and their centrality to the mindset, wellbeing and
coherence of post-war Britain. And yet, like former 2-Tone labelmates The
Specials, Madness used ska only as a skeleton, a framework for wherever they
felt like going next; by the time they reach “House Of Fun,” they are
straddling the thin stylistic line between English music hall and polka.
To those of us just a few years too young to get the full
impact of the Pistols, however, 2-Tone was
our “punk,” and when Madness appeared on TOTP
with their first two singles, it was yet again time to open the window and let
in the metaphorical sun. Over in the States, Lennon heard their extraordinary
recasting of “One Step Beyond” – Chas Smash’s intro mostly derived from Buster’s
“The Scorcher” via “Double Barrel” (the group were the epitome of the 1969-71 skinhead
generation’s younger brothers coming to adulthood) – if not their even more
remarkable, break-down-every-wall performance of the song on TV, and knew that
something new and refreshing was happening (even though he chose to misremember
the intro as saying: “Don’t do that…do THIS!” But hasn’t that always been the
point of pop music, as protection against ossification? The song is taken with
great, gruelling aggression which still carries within itself the aura of
triumph. Likewise, “Madness,” the song, is taken with an irreverence which ventures to the border of
surreality (saxophonist Lee “Kix” Thompson’s stubborn refusal to modulate keys during
his solo) as if to say: well, we are reinventing this music.
But “My Girl,” which appeared as a single, at the
beginning of 1980, was the first palpable evidence that the group were stretching
beyond any “ska” boundaries; the song’s rhythms are subtly derived from ska,
but the song’s melodic and rhythmic impetus have much more in common with Ray
Davies, a bus ride away in Muswell Hill, and its demons are audibly troubled;
keyboardist Mike Barson has said that the song was initially inspired by
Costello’s “Watching The Detectives,” and there is always the same, if more faintly
expressed, terror that things might turn violently sour; the reality behind
some people’s notions of “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers.”
The predominantly instrumental “Night Boat To Cairo” is
also rather unsettling, with its over-eager accelerandi and rallentandi, its violent
hammering of familiar Eastern musical tropes, as if wanting to blow the Nile up
once the last boat, with its grinning, toothless oarsman, has run its course.
An improbable, courtly string section – the Empire running through Shostakovich’s
lines one more speedy time before being detonated? – which appears near the song’s
end amplifies the disquiet.
“Baggy Trousers” was an especially big hit, and
deservedly so, since its end-of-term knees-up air disguises a deeply ambivalent
meditation on schooldays – the singer didn’t really enjoy school or its
associated japes, appears to have learned nothing from it (whereas in reality
Suggs had once been a grammar school boy) – with some of the most sophisticated
chord changes to be found outside jazz.
“Embarrassment,” which sees the group trying, of all
things, sixties Motown , is the sad yet inevitable consequence of these japes
and their wider relation to society, yet its placing as the opening track on Complete Madness is, I believe,
significant – its story of society closing its doors in the face of a girl who
has become pregnant by a black man, coming less than a year after what were
essentially race riots in Britain, is a slap in the country’s face in itself.
One can look at recent events in Madness’ former back yard and wonder whether
the British have progressed an inch over the last three decades.
Two of their four 1981 singles offered as dark a vision –
perhaps darker by virtue of being inconclusive – as late Specials-period Jerry
Dammers. “Grey Day,” with its synthesised wind noises, purposely over-harsh
trumpet and baritone sax figures and tolling bells, could have emerged from a
cauldron adjacent to New Order’s “In A Lonely Place” and depicts a life without
purpose or relief. Whereas “Shut Up” remains one of New Pop’s most disturbing
singles – New Pop? Barson said “Grey Day” originally owed something to Roxy’s “The
Bogus Man,” and underlines my suspicion that beneath this nutty skanking band
are an art-rock group earnestly trying to get out – since its climactic
paraphrasing of Weller’s “Start!” is aimed at the listener with a distinctly
accusatory air, in the manner of: “you LET me happen.” It was once a ten-minute
epic, with song title included in the chorus, but conveys so much more in its
abbreviated final form; on the 7
album (not an uplifting listen), Barson’s piano and the Carla Bley chord
changes just carry on, bumptious and disregarding.
Such darkness illuminates why their cover of “It Must Be
Love” came as such a relief. Or did it? The video to the single, which appeared
at the end of November 1981, that month of “in memoria,” begins with the group
standing around a graveside, filmed from the perspective of the deceased. And
although it is perhaps the only song on this record to concern itself with
love, its arrangement is too jarring and discursive for easy comfort – dub
cut-out tactics leading to David Bedford’s fulsome, formal string section, a
three-note rockabilly guitar solo from Chris Foreman, Thompson’s sax suggesting
– as elsewhere – a buried need to go all Davey Payne or George Khan and just
BURST free of its surrounding picture. All as part of an interpretation of a
song first recorded a decade previously by its author, Labi Siffre (who happily
took a cameo role in the video), Britain’s first prominent black gay
singer/songwriter.
“Cardiac Arrest” was sneaked out as a kind of
audience-testing single in early 1982 but nobody was fooled by the superimposed
happy ending and it became their first single since “The Prince” to miss the
top ten; it may in retrospect have been wiser for the group to flip the single
and promote the B-side “In The City,” written and performed for a Japanese car
commercial, although that performance is boisterous to the point of worry. But
their next single, “House Of Fun,” premiered here, gave them their first, and
by common consent a most welcome and long-overdue, number one; here the Suggs
of “Baggy Trousers” – or maybe we should call his character the Worried Man of
Camden – is just out of school, grown up and eager to learn the lessons of
life; but he’s at the chemist’s and can’t quite summon up the nerve to ask for
a packet of condoms, stammering out incomprehensible codewords and stymied by
the repeated appearances of the old lady next door in the shop, against whom
Suggs has no option but to keep his countenance. Unlike the album version,
which simply fades out on the chorus, the 45 abruptly crashes into a fairground
calliope which loops to fade; is maturity going to be as disappointing as
childhood was? Nonetheless, the single deservedly sat on top of the greatest UK
singles chart there has ever been or is ever likely to be (you doubt my word?
Read it for yourselves).
Which leaves the two stray album tracks; “Bed And
Breakfast Man” from 1979’s One Step
Beyond… and “Take It Or Leave It,” from 1980’s Absolutely and also the title song from the band’s autobiographical
1981 movie. Both show startling sophistication for a band so seemingly wet
behind their ears (although, as the North London Invaders, they had been going
in various forms since 1976; Chas Smash, far from being a random stage dancer,
had once been the Invaders’ bassist); the carousing, tonality-challenging organ
runs of the former and the jagged 14/8 structure of the latter, both coupled
with Suggs’ studiously disinterested vocals, suggest clear ancestors of Blur
(it is unthinkable that the teenage Albarn and Coxon, growing up in distant
Colchester, wouldn’t have spun Complete
Madness over and over; it is, amongst its many merits, one of the great party
albums to get to number one, provided that you don’t listen to the words too
closely). And we know that, in a largely baffled and uncomprehending USA, the
fourteen-year-old Gwen Stefani, among a few others, was taking careful notes.
The sense that all this celebration is only the prelude to apocalypse.
I have left the album’s last track until last; “The
Return Of The Los Palmas 7” was the first of their quartet of 1981 singles, and
is mostly instrumental (the one-word lyric I will leave you to discover, if you
don’t already know it), but is one of this record’s most important songs in
that its cautious optimism finally places Madness on the side of life. In the
accompanying video we see the group tucking into their full English breakfasts
in a greasy spoon caff called Venus – haven’t I seen that street before
somewhere? – or dressed up proto-Brideshead
style in tails and bowties, in a posh mansion, or indeed as cowboy gunmen,
rolling back down Primrose Hill into town.
But cut into these sequences are not-quite-random
montages of moments – Harold Wilson, Morecambe and Wise, Bobby Moore, Margaret
Thatcher, failed car stunt vaults, Ashes triumphs, Apollo orbits; the list goes
on and on – which seem to suggest, well, here’s Britain, and here’s the world,
and we all know that people are the same wherever you go and that, well, there’s
good and bad in everything.
As the song ends, the musicians come out of the café and
walk back out into the street. Where are
they? But then the camera pulls back and we see that they are but specks in the
gigantic yet reassuring shadow of the Trellick Tower, for a generation the
comforting signifier of coming back into London, and for personal reasons I
find this rather moving, as well as a pointer to “For Tomorrow” and,
eventually, “Under The Westway.” That is their Madness – and study that cover
photograph carefully; are they really happy or truly mad? – in that you can
throw whatever you like at them, and however far down they sink they will
never, ever, be out. At least, not
for now. Or perhaps take the view that, as in Lear, it's the figure of the Fool which tells the most truth.
But next we meet again with a man keen to make himself sink
without a trace, and a stylish trace at that.
