2005

BEDDERS (speaking in 2005): The new album is still cooking; we have it on 220 degrees and it’s rising nicely. It’s being mixed by Dubs and Segs, who’ve worked with the Chemical Brothers – an interesting combination! It’ll come out sometime later this year.

CHRIS (speaking in 2005): I’ve played with Lee, which is fun but just because I left Madness doesn’t mean I’ll rush back to being in a band again. I enjoy playing music and would like to do another album with Lee.

CHRIS (speaking in 2005): I won’t be appearing at anything else to do with Madness or The Dangermen. The band have known this for some time and it’s actually been a long while since I bailed out. As for the reason, I was just sick of the petty, time-consuming bollocks that goes on, which is about as diplomatic as I can get. I’ve played on most of the Dangermen sessions which I understand is turning out really good (despite me leaving) and is due out on V2, who are right good geezers and I should apologise to them as well. Just remember, the band has survived the departure of Mike and done a Christmas tour and a Madstock without Bedders and is still going strong.

MIKE (speaking in 2005): It’s his decision – he just said, ‘Get somebody else in to play the guitar’. We’ll carry on, and if he wants to come back then fine. He’s one of my oldest mates so obviously he’s always welcome.

SUGGS (speaking in 2005): Chris had difficulties with some of the people in the band and other things that surround being in a band.

WOODY (speaking in 2005): Certain members of the band were getting on his nerves. We’re an honest bunch, and we’ve always felt that if members are unhappy or disillusioned, the best thing is for them to go and have a break.

CHRIS (speaking in 2005): I asked them not to put, ‘Going for a sabbatical’ in the press release, but of course they did.

WOODY (speaking in 2005): Chris will always be the guitarist of Madness. When he’s ready to return, the door will be open wide.

CHRIS (speaking in 2005): Leaving the band has made me think about my life. It’s been 13 years the second time around and only one Wonderful album to show for it. Playing Baggy Trousers, One Step Beyond etc for the rest of my life isn’t too appealing. I’m in the privileged position to be able to choose who I work with and I always seem to have just enough money in the bank to not worry too much. Plus it’s not all about money anyway.

SUGGS (speaking in 2005): The Dangermen are our alter-ego – they kind of exist in a parallel universe out there somewhere.

SUGGS (speaking in 2005): It’s been a great experience. I love a certain kind of British film; they’re an important part of British culture, they bring humour and genuine drama. I like things that are realistic, slightly quirky, surreal and dark. That’s what we brought to the band.

SIMON FRANKS (Audio Bullys): We were asked who we’d most like to work with and we said Suggs. He’s a hero; someone I’ve respected since I was young, so it was a dream come true.

TOM DINSDALE (Audio Bullys): I knew some Madness stuff from when I was young when they were on the radio. I bought Divine Madness when I was 11 or 12 and loved every track on it.

SUGGS (speaking in 2005): Although they’re young, they’re continuing the long tradition of songwriting based around London’s street life. In some way, there was a flow from what Madness were doing. We had a certain affinity for things that go on in and around London and ended up writing around five songs in four hours.

SUGGS (speaking 2005): London is still my main inspiration for songwriting and much of the music I’m involved in. I’m endlessly fascinated by its people and the streets they live in. Most of my songs are written about people, so my favourite past-time is sitting on a pavement anywhere watching the world go by. Maybe a face or a snatch of overheard conversation will spark something in my imagination. For example, I overheard an old chap walking by and he said, ‘We are living like kings! These days will last forever!’ And I just thought, ‘That’s a fantastic thing.’

SUGGS (speaking in 2005): We don’t mind playing small and sweaty environments, but the thought of playing a beautiful forest isn’t a completely horrible thought either.

MIKE (speaking in 2005): We’re very much looking forward to playing in lovely surroundings. Y’know – all picnic baskets and champagne. One of the reasons we wanted to do it was because a forest tour sounds unusual and different.

SUGGS (speaking in 2005): I went to see Jools Holland play a forest last year, and it was lovely. I didn’t realise you could actually do a tour of them. So we’re rather pleased. But it makes no difference to me where we play, as long as it’s great pop music. I can see us playing on the street corner and I can see us playing in stadiums.

LEE (speaking in 2005): It’s necessary to differentiate Madness and The Dangermen. With The Dangermen, we want to find the feelings that we had at the time of our beginnings in the small clubs. Madness is another thing. So the sets aren’t the same.

SUGGS (speaking in 2005): It’s part-laziness that we can get away with doing five or six concerts in England and make a reasonable living, and that’s what we’ve been doing for ten-odd years.

SUGGS (speaking in 2005): Mentally, we’re all still 18, and physically we’re sort of hanging on in there.

MIKE (speaking in 2005): We’re like a good wine – we’ve matured and just get better and better.

CHRIS (speaking in June 2005): I still speak to Bedders a lot, Lee a bit, Suggs rarely, Mike not lately and Woody not for a few weeks. And Carl not for months. Which is nice.

JOHN ‘SEGS’ JENNINGS (producer): It was a bit of a party. It was all about the vibe, what you’re going to wear, how you’re going to have a party. They were small gigs for them – the Scala was packed. Everybody was up for just doing songs they loved. Just the ska stuff. I was the new boy which was quite good for them as (a) they had a bit of sport, and (b) they had somebody new, a bit of new energy. It was good fun.

WOODY (speaking in 2005): It’s nice to play a new album without the expectation of, ‘Do Baggy Trousers.’ ‘No. We don’t have to. We’re being The Dangermen this week, so tough.’

SUGGS (speaking in 2005): Playing small places has been a bit more rejuvenating as well. Playing bigger venues ultimately has an effect on what you play and how you perform. Small venues are amazingly freeing – you can just do what you like really.

WOODY (speaking in 2005): It’s been very enjoyable being a live band again. Twenty five years ago we were a band who practised songs and went and played them live. And it’s taken us 25 or 26 years to realise that it was quite a good formula. We’re better musicians now; more in control, more relaxed.

SUGGS (speaking in 2005): When we played these old songs in the Dublin Castle last year, we were going back to playing songs that people could dance to. We haven’t made a record for a long time, so we wanted to make something that would be fun.

MIKE KEARSEY (trombonist): Steve had previously worked as Lee’s sax tech and played some shows already, and Terry Edwards had introduced me to the band through his All Stars Extravaganza project at the Dublin Castle, which featured Lee, Chris and Bedders. Through working as a freelance player in London, I’d also met Joe on various gigs and recording sessions, so when the band were looking for a trumpet player for The Dangermen Sessions in 2004 I recommended him. Joe initially turned it down as his beloved Millwall were playing in their first FA Cup final. Madness had always been one of his favourite bands, and I remember him calling me back, slightly panicked, ‘It was a Madness tribute you were asking about, wasn’t it?’ Then when the 2005 shows came up, Terry was busy so I again put Joe up for the gig. When I first began working with the band, it felt almost like stepping into someone’s marriage because they have such strongly established inter-relationships. The guys are still so passionate about what they do, still have such a blast onstage and they are all very supportive and go out of their way to make additional musicians feel comfortable and part of the team. Working with other bands, there tends to be significant individuals who make the calls but Madness works as a collective more than any other band I’ve experienced. I guess that with seven strong and creative personalities, it’s the only way to survive.

MIKE KEARSEY: The name had come up the year before during rehearsals for The Dangermen material at John Henry’s rehearsal studios in North London. It was towards the end of a long day and drinks had been taken. We were The Brass Monkeys for about half an hour before Woody came up with the ‘violin’ moniker.

SUGGS (speaking in 2005): The Live 8 people were in touch with our people I think, but we couldn’t do it as we were doing a corporate gig that night. We said, ‘We’d love to do it, but unfortunately we’ve got a gig booked which we can’t cancel.’ In the end, Bill Gates went to Live8 and left us to it – he didn’t even show up. He left us playing to 4,000 Microsoft androids, all shaking their head in time to the rocking beat. But he gives about five billion quid a year to charities, and by keeping his staff happy we’re making him more money so he can give more money to charity, so that’s our excuse for doing it.

SUGGS (speaking in 2005): It was written in the 1940s and is a traditional calypso song from Trinidad about extramarital affairs.

WOODY (speaking in 2005): If you’re hearing the song for the first time you have to listen quite closely to the lyrics.

SUGGS (speaking in 2005): Like a lot of Madness songs, it’s funny but it’s dark at the same time.

BEDDERS (speaking in 2005): The deal with V2 has worked really well because it’s not easy to work with us. We do want to make things, but at our schedule, so we’re only a band when we want to be. Because we’re not together 24 hours a day, and we have our family life apart from Madness, it isn’t easy for a record company to plan things with us. Luckily, V2 understood that when we signed the contract. They knew we didn’t want to sign for four or five albums – we made sure we had our private and family life.

WOODY (speaking in 2005): We’re free to do what we want, and then after a few months someone calls and says, ‘Let’s make an album or play a few gigs.’ But that’s good for everyone. Because we’re not always in the spotlight, people are glad to see us again after a while. We go, we come back – we’re an elastic band.

DENNIS BOVELL: I was MC which was quite fun, bringing them onstage. I tried to do my James Brown MC impression.

SUGGS (speaking in 2005): We’ve added One Step Beyond and Night Boat to Cairo, but it’s The Dangermen playing Madness songs, that’s the difference. Doing the album and going back to all the early ska stuff influenced how we now treat Madness songs, so we’ve changed the arrangements and made them more like Dangermen songs.

SUGGS: Obviously we weren’t just influenced by ska music, so that’s why we had The Supremes and The Kinks on there too. Unfortunately, Bittersweet by The Undertones got sacrificed at the very end, which was terrible because I love the song, even though it’s not one of their best-known ones.

SUSAYE GREENE (The Supremes): Madness’s approach to You Keep Me Hanging On was divine; no sacred reverence and thank goodness for that. They came, saw and conquered the song in their inimitable way, making it become fresh all over again and proving that a great pop melody and lyrics translate into whatever a creative modern mind wants it to be. To me, that’s what making music is all about.

WOODY: We wanted to work differently, especially on the level of the sound. We wanted the songs to sound ‘old school’ but with some modern sounds as well. We wanted a big sound – Madness always have a big sound, but wanted something even bigger. It was interesting to work with Steve and Segs, who have a ‘new school’ sound, and Dennis who is very connected with ‘old school’. We recorded the album ‘old school’ and they mixed it ‘new school.’

LEE: It’s my wife’s favourite Madness album – she’s always asking when we’re going to do another one. Personally, I always like to try and write original stuff.

CHRIS: Some of it is OK. Some is not. It doesn’t really inspire me at all.

WOODY: We wanted the CD sleeve to make you think of a gang…

LEE: …so we took a picture from an old Fats Domino album, then scanned it and reproduced it, because we wanted to do a vintage cover.

DAVID STEELE (V2): The shows were great, there was a good vibe and the record did all right but we never had that one killer song for the radio. The problem was, we had difficulty in just getting exactly what The Dangermen were. We were a little unsure about this concept. We thought it would be quite cool as an alter ego, almost like they were a band in the late Seventies. But that was hard to get across because everyone thought, ‘Oh, that’s Madness with a different name.’ We had to sell it, so in the end it was ‘Madness Presents The Dangermen’.

PETER RUDGE (manager): It was a half-cocked idea that had merit but we were unable to execute it effectively.

CARL (speaking in 2005): After 28 years of being with one person, having three great kids, and then it suddenly goes, I soon realised I could not recreate the family home. Once it has gone, it has gone. Then you realise you are to have lunch with your kids like some retired uncle. That hurt a lot. After the split, which I didn’t want to do, I went into rehab for depression to get my head together. I was so unhappy; I was 16 stone and just thought, ‘If I hang around here I’ll just start doing drugs and drink.’ At the time the choice seemed to either go billy-o or go for a walk in the desert and find myself. It cost a fortune but it was the best thing I ever did. Changed my life; got focused.

LEE (speaking in 2005): We’re more popular in the USA now than ever before.

SUGGS (speaking in 2005): No Doubt came and followed us around on tour. Not Gwen Stefani though – she was off promoting her line of underwear.

SUGGS (speaking in 2005): Someone on this tour recently told me, ‘We thought you guys were dead.’ It’s because we’ve been parochial in the last decade or so. Touring the world sort of fizzled for us after 1986. But we can make enough money just playing in England — we can make more staying there than we can touring.

CARL (speaking in 2005): I enjoy writing more than I enjoy recording, and I enjoy performing more than I enjoy recording. I come from long line of dancers, so performing is my genes. What I really like is what happens between the audience and Madness. The effect the music has on them, and their reaction, that’s what I feel it is all about.

SUGGS (speaking in 2005): You do get better at it; more relaxed. It’s still a simple voice but you are always thinking how you can make it better every time you perform.

LEE (speaking in 2005): I’ve had a charmed life; I was in the last great boy band. I’m so fortunate not only to have been in that sort of band, but to be in it with this combination of fellas.

SUGGS (speaking in 2005): Madness is a very strange organism, which moves very slowly. There are seven us all going round in circles and different directions. When we’re working and playing music together it just clicks like it always did. It’s when we’re not playing music that we start squabbling.

CARL (speaking in 2005): What partly keeps us together is a shared conscious of what we like, things like Tommy Cooper, the classic comedies and stuff like that. Comedy is a good medicine for hardship. I absolutely love Laurel and Hardy, Chaplin, Keaton, Bertold Brecht. All of that stuff, I don’t know how it filters into the band, but it does somehow.

LEE: Much to my disappointment, V2 HQ decided not to make a promotional video as our previous effort for Shame & Scandal almost cost the marketing man his job. Instead, they said the budget could be spent in other areas of promotion. It was put us to perform on Strictly Come Dancing instead, as it would be seen by more viewers than the odd Dangermen/Madness fan, which of course made sense in a business kind of way. In a blind rage, we cobbled together an idea and the last of our royalties/advance and threatened to make the video ourselves, but exhausted by all the goings on at that point stopped, looked at each other and thought, ‘Ah, who gives a fuck?’

PETER RUDGE: Everything was a soap opera. They weren’t functioning effectively, even on the level they used to before. It was like pulling teeth and it wasn’t pleasant. For V2, it was a nightmare. They couldn’t give them what they’d been used to at Virgin, who’d spent a lot of money on Wonderful. The writing was on the wall, you could see it. The only terms of revenue you make with a band like Madness is live touring and they only toured once maybe every two years for ten days. I remember having this chat with Carl and he was saying, ‘You’re spending too much time with Il Divo.’ ‘Well, Carl, I have to pay the rent. OK, let’s move on.’ It was so complex.

SUGGS (speaking in 2005): We’ve got loads of songs stockpiled. But no one has yet said, ‘Let’s put them on the table and see what we’ve got. And then see how many more new ones we have to write or whatever.’ But from remembering snatches of songs that people have played over the last ten or so years, there are probably a lot of potential tracks that we’ve just forgotten about.

MIKE (speaking in 2005): We’re thinking about doing something next year. But there are seven people and they all go in different directions and at different tempos. So it’s sometimes quite a task bringing everyone to heel.

SUGGS (speaking in 2005): It’s not lack of enthusiasm for doing stuff in the band; it’s the balance of keeping your life outside the band alive. It requires a lot of effort to make a record and make a good record. So some people in the band have an issue with how much time they can dedicate to new projects.

CARL (speaking in 2005): Writing these days is like a different set of little cogs. I give some music to Suggs, Lee will bring some lyrics to Mike, Chris will bring some music to me, Lee, Mike or Suggs, and Woody just sends out demos of music. I tend to either give bits of music or write with Suggs, or these days I just like to write on my own.

SUGGS (speaking in 2005): Arlington House has loomed large over our career. As kids we used to walk past everyday, and see the guys on the streets, sitting at the end of the road.

PETER RUDGE: I was kind of relieved when we went our separate ways, even though I found them enjoyable, amusing and quite rewarding. They’re a fantastic live band who’ve created a niche in the business for themselves. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a global footprint. But they’ve leveraged a point when they had 20 big singles in a short period of time into quite a career and become an endearing part of British culture. I’m full of admiration for what they’ve done. They’re not to be underestimated when they focus on something.

SUGGS (speaking in 2005): One idea is that we now make a record that’s more like the British pop that we’re famous for. Some of us have been having the idea of writing an album about London as a concept; to write in a slightly bigger way about the city as an organism, its fabulous ever-changing nature and our experiences there. When I told Chris he said, ‘What the fuck do you think all our songs have been about?’ As though London was somehow a brand-new idea. He’s right – and we all hope he’ll be back to work on it with us.