1992

CHRIS: The years 1979 to 1986 were Madness – 1992 onwards was a sort of lucky second chance. Which I do appreciate.

MICK GARBUTT (Virgin promoter): Radio 1 wouldn’t playlist it but we got an awful lot of support and squeezed enough individual plays. Good supporters were people like Simon Mayo on the breakfast show. It couldn’t have been anything but goodwill; I can’t imagine anyone who likes British pop music who doesn’t like Madness.

STEVE PRITCHARD (head of catalogue, Virgin): The band didn’t really promote Divine to start with – it was a record company cash-in that they were happy to endorse. Then the reviews came in and they started to feel the warmth; the almost unequivocal worship from the press.

WOODY: We thought the album would do quite well, but didn’t realise it would do what it did.

STEVE PRITCHARD: As a result of the reviews and the first week’s sales, the album started to gain a genuine and organic life of its own. Eventually it became the biggest album of 1992 – we sold nearly 900,000 albums and well over 100,000 copies of the VHS compilation.

WOODY: It went straight in at No1 in England, stayed there for four weeks and then refused to go out of the Top 5 for another four weeks after that.

SUGGS: It surprised me that it did so well. We still owed Virgin a few quid from our glorious period as The Madness, and Divine was only on half royalties because it was TV-advertised, but we still made a couple of quid. Enough to pay off our overdrafts and make a few old men very happy.

MICK GARBUTT: They really thought that nobody loved them, but after It Must Be Love and Divine, they got their confidence back. Talk of a serious reformation really began – and that’s where Madstock came from.

SUGGS: The warmth and feeling generally that we suddenly got from people, being called an icon and a British institution in serious newspapers and all that, was amazing. Unintentionally we’d always given off a lot of warmth and I think we were finally getting it back.

CARL: When Divine went to No1, we thought, ‘What the fuck, let’s give it another go.’ We felt we were better equipped to cope with the pressures – production and finance and the legal side of things were no longer the mysteries that they used to be. To me, it was obvious that now was a good opportunity for us to have another crack…

MIKE: …and it helped that the money was good.

CARL: OK, I’d be a fucking liar if I said money wasn’t an issue, but there’s no way I would have done it if I thought that by reforming we’d be sullying the Madness name.

SUGGS: The other thing is, everyone forgets that you couldn’t get a light for the name Madness for a while. For about eight years you didn’t hear our name mentioned, then suddenly there was this huge demand.

MICK GARBUTT: From the outside, you might have assumed that they all wanted the money. But it didn’t seem that was always the case. Mike had family in Holland and Chris had a young wife and at times he wasn’t sure and would have his moments. But ultimately, the realisation that there was a lot of financial gain helped.

LEE: My house was on the verge of being repossessed and I was about to take out a mortgage on a tent. So for me, on a purely financial basis, it made a lot of sense to get back together.

CHRIS: Me being ever the cynic, I didn’t want to do it at first. I thought people might think we were just doing it for the money.

MIKE: And I certainly didn’t want to play some sad reunion that only ten people came to.

SUGGS: There was a lot of umming and ahhing and some of the band initially didn’t want to do it – I certainly didn’t. I’d put Madness on a shelf somewhere, with the police helmets and the lion’s head, and all the other stuff you’ve got from your previous adventures. But as the momentum built, my opinion started to change. I thought, ‘If the others want to give it a whirl, it would be unfair of me not to go in with them.’

CHRIS: I didn’t really want to do it but eventually, Suggs and Mike talked me round.

SUGGS: I remember Carl in particular was extremely enthusiastic. He was seeing a lot of bands coming to his record company and thinking, ‘Hang on, I know a band that are much better than this lot, and they’re right in front of my nose.’

MICK GARBUTT: I do wonder if any of it would have come together without Carl. He cottoned on early to the legacy of Madness and was constantly trying to promote it. He was passionate to the point of emotional. He seemed to understand the importance of Madness in their time, in pop music, historically what they represented, way more than anyone else. I think Suggs did too, but he wasn’t the one to articulate it.

CARL: Everywhere I went, people would talk to me and they had so much affection for Madness; it was like there was something in the air. I knew we had so much more to offer, but reforming the band would take an incredible amount of enthusiasm and energy, which at the time no one else seemed prepared to do. It took about a year-and-a-half to make it happen, with lots of meetings. It nearly drove me mad in the process, but the thought that Madness still had much to offer spurred me on. Not forgetting, of course, the happiness that performance brought.

BARRY DICKENS (concert promoter): Carl was in the lead role. He was always the one who was out and about. He’s very streetwise and I take my hat off to him; he got them all back together.

CARL: It was like The Blues Brothers – I was on a mission from God to get Madness together again. I met Woody at the Forum and said, ‘Hey, we’re gonna reform the band.’

WOODY: And I said, ‘I’ve been waiting for this day.’ I had literally been waiting for the phone call. And suddenly it came.

SUGGS: I remember I hadn’t seen Carl for about ten years and I was sitting in the launderette watching my socks go round and who should walk by. I said, ‘What you been doing lately?’ And he said, ‘Nothing.’ And off we went from there.

WOODY: Suddenly the rumours were going around that we were getting together in meetings – even though we’d been meeting up regularly anyway – and the phone started ringing, saying, ‘Are you getting back together again?’ ‘No’ ‘Would you like to?’ ‘Well make us an offer.’ So then the offers started coming in and some ridiculous figures started being bandied around. We sort of went, ‘Why not? If people are offering us this kind of silly money we could have a laugh as well.’

SUGGS: We started getting offers from Butlin’s to do a gig supporting Guns ‘N’ Roses.

CARL: We did get offered Butlin’s. It was after Curiosity Killed The Cat had gone down with such a big bang. The money was great but the location was all wrong.

CHRIS: We were also offered Club 18-30…

WOODY: …we should have done the 18-30 gig.

CARL: So it went from Butlin’s to the Dubai Country Club, then the idea of doing one gig became more likely.

WOODY: We did think long and hard about an arena tour but decided it would be nice to do one thing as that’s all we could manage.

SUGGS: We were seven people with seven different ideas. Some of us had no worries and some of us had a lot of worries. And also, in the interim period, people had been doing other things that they wanted to continue with, so it took quite a while just to make it so we could fit everything in around everyone’s lives and families.

CARL: So for over a year, I had been making every effort to coax the band to reform. This had met with some resistance from some members but on St Patrick’s Day at the Irish Club dinner, Vince Power of The Mean Fiddler proposed a deal which I think went a long way to making the reformation happen.

VINCE POWER (promoter): I met Suggs and Carl in the Crown & Goose. I offered them X amount of money and one of them said, ‘You think we can make that much? OK, we’ll go for it’. They ended up making a lot more out of it than that.

CHRIS: At that time, Vince did this big annual concert in Finsbury Park called The Fleadh. And he obviously thought, ‘Hmm, I could tack another concert on the end of that while it’s all set up.’

SUGGS: He said he was going to have all the fences up anyway, so why didn’t we do a day in Finsbury Park?

CARL: We thought, ‘Well that’s good, that’s only ten minutes over the road. We’ll do that.’

CHRIS: So we all got cajoled into doing this ‘one comeback’.

SUGGS: It suited me just fine. I didn’t want to do the tour that some of the others were talking about – I just wanted a one-off ‘Thank You Very Much, Great That You Still Care About Us’ show.

LEE: My bike shop had gone, the bailiffs were at the door, I was flyposting at night and working for environmental health by day. Then Carl called up to ask if I fancied doing a gig at Finsbury Park. I said, ‘What, the Rainbow?’ He said, ‘No, the park.’ I was like, ‘I’ll have to think about it… course I’ll fucking do it.’

WOODY: It was good timing for me too as Voice of the Beehive was waning; we’d hit the peak and were coming down the other side. It just seemed the perfect time to go back to Madness.

BEDDERS: A lot of people had said to us, ‘You didn’t really say goodbye in ’86; there was no real announcement, no farewell gig.’ So we just wanted to put a cap on everything, because we’d never definitively said, ‘This is it. Thanks for everything.’

SUGGS: I was conscious that it hadn’t ended as it should have, and ever since we’d been circling each other like boxers in the ring, somehow waiting for it to click. So after fizzling out, maybe this was our chance to say goodbye properly and make some money. But it was only meant as a one-off – that was definitely the deal.

CARL: In a slightly underhand way, I got the band to reform and play for a TV pilot, which was filmed off Leicester Square and included Dennis Pennis and Norm from Cheers.

CHRIS: Really, we did it as a favour to Carl.

CARL: Once in rehearsal, we loaded the audience and the music did its magic. It was a small step in getting the band to perform again as they enjoyed the performance and got brilliant feedback from friends. We also received £500 each.

WOODY: We did two days’ rehearsals just to make sure we could still play and it felt strange – it didn’t have the magic. But as soon as we stepped out on stage in front of an audience it was like we’d never been away. We did House Of Fun and It Must Be Love and it was brilliant. We also threw in Madness as that was the track we thought we could all remember and it just came back like we’d been playing it all the time. We got such a high, it was almost like, ‘Let’s get back on stage and do even more.’ It was a real buzz; just so fantastic. I remember thinking, ‘I’ve really missed this.’

CHRIS: It was the first time the band had played together in six years but it was really nice. Playing in Madness is like riding a bike; you never forget how to do it.

CARL: I know you’re not supposed to say it, but I didn’t have any doubts. The minute the band got back together in rehearsals, you felt the energy of the original songs and the intent. It was really strong.

MIKE: I really didn’t realise how much I’d missed it until we came back and started doing it again. It gave me a lot of energy and filled me with a lot of inspiration; finally I was back making music again. I felt recharged and almost begging to come back – maybe I should have taken a shorter break.

WOODY: It was just like we’d never ever been away. The magic was there, and we just gelled immediately. There was such a sense of unity. So from agreeing to just do a little one-off show, it suddenly turned into something bigger.

CARL: The beautiful thing was, as soon as we got into rehearsal, the music did it for us. Whatever happens between us, it always brings us together. And I knew from my experience as an A&R man that we would still do a fucking good show.

WOODY: Music was dreadfully dull at that point, and I think people realised what they missed from Madness.

SUGGS: It’s normally recommended that bands that once had any kind of energy or youthful vitality might be better if they didn’t carry on beyond the boundaries of their own physical whatevers. But we were all so young when we started, we weren’t that old when we came back.

CARL: It’s a selfish thing; you do it to entertain yourself. Obviously you entertain people but you have to do it so you’re happy with it and not take the piss. I’d always been deadly serious about Madness.

CHRIS: Suggs wanted to call it ‘Finstock’ which reminded me of fish, so I suggested the name ‘Madstock’.

SUGGS: Although there was some confidence about it, we were talking to the agent and the promoter and they were saying, ‘Maybe you should be thinking of something a bit smaller, lads.’ So clearly they were worried, which suddenly made us worry.

WOODY: We all had our doubts, for sure. I mean, we’d been happy to promote the greatest hits album, because we thought that was going to be it. But this was something else altogether.

BEDDERS: We started thinking, ‘No one’s going to turn up. There might be a few people – a few diehard fans.’

SUGGS: After all, we hadn’t all played together for eight years.

CARL: We were wary. But I just felt there was a lot of feeling there and a demand for what we did. After all, 600,000 people had bought Divine, so in theory some of them should turn up…

SUGGS: …and to our amazement, we sold 70,000 tickets.

CARL: The ticket people told me it was split into three age groups…

SUGGS: …yeah: 30-31, 31-32 and 33-34.

PAUL BREWER (backline tech): I’d been working with Woody in Voice of the Beehive when he asked if I wanted to do the Finsbury gig. Hell yeah! We’d been in Australia with Beehive, and Woody and I literally got off the plane from Oz and went straight to rehearsals – no hotel or home first, just straight in. I only knew Woody at that point, but soon I was right in there as they listened to their records, trying to relearn their parts.

SUGGS (speaking in 1992): My kids weren’t really aware of what we were doing the first time around. So it’s been funny that they’ve seen us on the telly and all that for the first time.

CHRIS: When we re-released the single I had the great idea of re shooting the picture of us, which we did. Except that curmudgeon Mike wouldn’t come from Holland or let the photographer go take his picture (and you thought J-Lo was a diva). So we scoured the archives to find a picture of the great man, which was hard to find. So instead we got a picture from about 1982 or something and used that. Of course, because the rest of us all looked 20 years older on the new cover, someone said to me, ‘Mike still looks great doesn’t he?’ Oh how I laughed.

BEDDERS: To get away from everything around the show, and because we hadn’t played together for years, we went over to Holland to rehearse and play. Because we did that, we missed out on all the build-up to the gig itself, which I think was the best thing to do as we were shielded from all the expectation.

SUGGS: As we rehearsed, we realised we’d never played all our singles at the same gig. Suddenly it made us think, ‘That’s a lot of hits – we must have something going for us.’

WOODY: We said, ‘What shall we put in the set?’ And then we said, ‘Well, let’s have a look at the singles.’ And there were over 20 of them, so that’s a set in itself. And then we started saying, ‘Well we enjoy playing Razorblade Alley, that’s always a corker… Land of Hope & Glory, that’s always a laugh…’

MIKE: In a sense we grew up with our music too, but we hadn’t heard it or played it for some time. So when we came back together, it was like it was brand new and we were hearing it for the first time ourselves.

SUGGS (speaking in 1992): We thought of doing all the hits in chronological order, but of course being such an enormously successful band, we’d have to be onstage for about three days. I’d like us to do some stuff from the early albums – there were a lot of songs that we gave up doing towards the end because we’d had them up to here. We might even do some songs we’ve never done before, covers and things. But we’ll probably wheel out the likes of One Step Beyond for old times’ sake, just to get ’em weeping in the aisles.

BEDDERS: For the warm-up gig, we played this tiny, tiny club – I’ve no idea why it was picked.

MICK GARBUTT: It was a jolly-up, bringing out people from media – we did competitions with Capital Radio and MTV did some filming. It was a hot, sweaty summer’s night. One of those oddities was this neo-Nazi presence there, this hangover from a different generation. Carl said that he peered outside the curtains and thought, ‘Oh my word!’ There was this aggressive male thing that felt intimidating; all this history with Madness which was so contradictory to their left-wing principles, all family men. But ultimately there was no trouble.

LEE: Afterwards, I ended up on a beach with a couple of puffs of skunk in my lungs, on a trampoline, with a lot of kids bouncing higher than me. I thought, ‘Peter Pan’s not having that’ so I got back on, done a midnight bounce stark naked on a starlit night and, coming down, missed the canvas completely and broke me toe on one of the springs. I looked down and the bloody thing was facing me.

LEE: After the gig in Amsterdam I was so high that I bought this stuff to smoke which I put in the breast pocket of my denim jacket. When I arrived in London the next day there was a discrepancy with my passport – I only had two months left on it, and you need six. At Schiphol they wouldn’t have made such a fuss about it, but at Heathrow I immediately got singled out with my sleepy and sweaty mug. I sat there for an hour and they asked me if I had a criminal record. ‘You must be joking,’ I said. Well, they pressed the computer’s Enter button and then this long-list rolled out. The man said, ‘I don’t suppose you’ve brought anything into the country you shouldn’t have?’ I said, ‘No, no, no, I took that before I came in.’ He didn’t find that funny at all, so I was cross-examined, frisked, but hey, I had nothing to hide. So then I got through passport control and jumped into a cab on the way to the sound check. As I leaned forward, I suddenly noticed I still had a couple of jazz Woodbines in my top pocket. How Midnight Express can you get? That’s what they call luck.

PAUL BREWER: We did a short sound check the night before because I think there were time and volume restrictions.

WOODY: I was just so nervous about it. We’d never done anything on that scale before as a headline act.

BEDDERS: I thought, ‘I can’t believe all these people are going to turn up. Why would we appeal?’

SUGGS: There was a lot of nervousness in the band; quite a weight of responsibility. There was this strange atmosphere, full of nervous tension and doubt and all the rest of it. As if all the energy had gone into getting us all back together.

CARL: In the morning, I was walking past a pub off Tottenham Court Road and I could hear the whole pub singing along to It Must Be Love. I walked on, with a rather lovely warm glow in my heart.

STEVE FINAN (Madness manager): Someone had followed Vince’s accountant and robbed her of the bank draft. Let’s say the advance was maybe £600,000 – a lot of money. Vince was like, ‘I haven’t got any money to pay you but it’ll give it you on Monday.’ It was my worst fear come true. I knew that if the band realised there was no money, they wouldn’t go on. This is midday on Saturday. I said to Vince, ‘If I don’t have £300,000, I know they won’t perform.’ So we start to get together every single penny we can get our hands on. Vince is going to his venues, getting money from the bars, from everywhere. Bit by bit, it was coming in. I then go to the pub, The Crown & Goose, where the band are filming. As I walk in, the first question is, ‘Have we got the money?’ I’ve got a camera in my face and I’m like, ‘Yes!’ We hadn’t got any of the money at that point, but if I’d have said ‘No’, that would have been it. They’re all high-fiving, great, wicked. Now I’m in psycho mode. No matter what, I’m going to make sure this happens. So someone went to Heathrow to get the maximum off his credit card, and Barry Dickins and me are in this little cabin with all this money and a counting machine. Vince said, ‘Can you sign off for the money?’ I said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding, there’s no way I am walking out of here with three hundred grand in a bin liner. You’re out of your mind. Phone a Securicor van!’ The next thing, over the radio, the Securicor van’s burst a tyre over the other side of Finsbury Park. So, six bouncers, me, Vince and Barry walk across Finsbury Park. All the crowd are there. We get to the Securicor van, the guy lifts the hatch up, I throw the money in, kiss everybody, sign the bit of paper, then off we go; now we’re going to do the gig!

WOODY: How did we feel? Absolutely petrified. We knew we had sold a lot of tickets, but we still had no idea how it would go.

CARL: We were all sitting around before the gig and a few of our lot still weren’t sure about it. It was all a bit much for them. They all kept asking each other, ‘Are you into it?’ It became our gig catchphrase.

CARL: We’d organised a backstage area for the disabled and a crèche for our kids. Once we got to Finsbury Park, my six-year-old son Casper asked his mum, ‘Have all these people really come to see Dad’s band?’

BEDDERS: Rehearsing in Holland had kept us out of the buzz of the whole thing, so it was doubly more emotional when we actually got to Finsbury Park.

PAUL BREWER: I was basically setting up all the stage gear on the day; a whirlwind of a job which I don’t really recall. I do remember Woody introducing me to John Lydon, who really didn’t give a fuck.

TIM DORNEY (guitarist, Flowered Up): Madstock was amazing and I got to meet one of my heroes in Ian Dury. Unfortunately, it also marked a real step up in the decline of our singer, Liam Maher, who had confidence issues caused by his drug use and was doing more and more to try and get over them – a vicious circle really. At Finsbury Park, he locked himself in a toilet and refused to come out. We eventually coaxed him out and went on 45 minutes late. It was all a bit embarrassing really.

SUGGS: We’d paid Morrissey £60,000 to play two nights. It was a bit of a coup getting him, as he doesn’t usually do those sort of things. I liked him at the time because he was very amusing company. He’d do things like invite you round and then open the door and he’d have sunglasses on and waving a stick pretending to be blind. You never knew what was coming next.

BEDDERS: At the time, there were lots of connections with Madness; he was big mates with Suggs and Carl, who used to hang out with him, plus I’d played on Kill Uncle, which Clive Langer produced. And I think he was a Madness fan too and was living in Camden at the time, so I think we just asked and he said yes. But we didn’t really realise what we were going to get. He was being peak Morrissey at that point, antagonising the audience.

SUGGS: Unfortunately, there were all these sort of fat, ex-Madness fans, maybe a little bit less savoury than you’d particularly want. And Morrissey comes onstage waving a fucking Union Jack, and behind him were photos of skinheads on a big screen. Who could have written that? What was it saying? That Madness were racist? At that time in England it was just a very provocative thing to do. I mean, what was he even doing with a Union Jack and a skinhead backdrop at a Madness concert? I don’t deny him the right to use whatever symbols he wants as an artist, but as a friend I was disappointed that he knew how inflammatory that would be to a Madness audience. For us, all that symbolism represents a really bad time in our career, and part of the reason for us packing it all in.

SIMON GODDARD (author): As Morrissey’s set progressed, they began throwing coins and beer at irregular intervals. Upset by this, he made the impromptu decision to cut his set-list, leading his band off stage after nine songs.

TIM DORNEY (guitar, Flowered Up): I remember seeing all the pound coins getting lobbed at him – serves him right for using skinhead and NF imagery to a bunch of essentially ageing skinheads.

BEDDERS: I saw the last bit of his set and the whole thing was totally antagonistic between him and the audience.

SUGGS: I felt really disappointed for him, the audience and us. I think it would have been brilliant if they’d given him more of a chance and if he’d given it a bit more. I was on stage when he left and it didn’t look like a particularly bad scene to me. Then again, we’ve had Echo & The Bunnymen supporting us in front of 3,000 Sieg Heil-ing loonies throwing bottles and chairs.

CARL: I was quite surprised by the reaction he got. He’s a friend of ours and I thought he was good for the bill but he chose to present himself a certain way and he has to live with that.

SUGGS: Morrissey knew he was walking a line that was really contentious, but one that he could justify. It was almost like, ‘What’s going on is in your head. I’m just waving the flag of my country’. I don’t know if he thought it through or not but it just felt a little bit odd. Not that having short hair and a Union Jack necessarily makes you a racist – nor should it. As Billy Bragg said, they shouldn’t be able to appropriate those things. But it seemed very incongruous for him to be doing it and that sent a bit of a shiver. And then of course he got all the bloody headlines and we didn’t. I thought the most disgusting thing he did was when he said it was a National Front skinhead who threw something at him, because I didn’t see any fascism in the crowd at all.

SIMON GODDARD: It’s a common mistake to believe Morrissey was bottled off stage as a direct consequence of parading the national flag around. Neither the flag, nor his backdrop, nor even his set-list including The National Front Disco, had anything to do with their hostile reaction.

CLIVE LANGER: The main problem was there weren’t that many Morrissey fans there. Looking back, I’d say that out of 30,000 Madness fans who were there, 29,000 of them were soft skinheads with their girlfriends and it was the other 1,000 hard skins who decided to let him have it. They just didn’t want him.

MORRISSEY: I know there were a lot of people there from the National Front, but I don’t think they were particularly interested in me. And even though there were reports of me being booed and pelted off-stage – which of course never happened at all – I don’t believe it was the National Front who did that. I think it was a small selection of rather dull North Londoners.

LEE: As much as he is a respected and highly rated lyricist with good musicians, Morrissey should not have been supporting us at Madstock. We have a certain type of audience and I wished we’d catered to them instead.

CARL: I like Morrissey and I respect him as an artist. But Morrissey doesn’t work well when he’s not playing to his own crowd. He’s used to the adulation, but not working for it.

SUGGS: I led the band out onstage and we were all really nervous; I felt like the captain of a football team coming out for the cup final.

BEDDERS: In the dressing room beforehand we’d said, ‘What shall we do when we come on?’ So I suggested, ‘Well let’s do nothing.’

CARL: I said, ‘Let’s just stand there giving it the big ’un.’ So that’s what we did – stood there rock still. Just went bosh and everyone went, ‘Rahhhhhhh!’

BEDDERS: Standing in that line at the front just seemed to ramp up the crowd for some reason.

SUGGS: It went off like a packet of crackers; very emotional. Seeing that reception transcended any idea of novelty value we thought people had of us.

PAUL BREWER: A noise rose from the crowd the likes of which I’ve never heard before or since; it was a tsunami of nuttiness.

WOODY: It was such a powerful electric moment. I can still feel it now, more than 20 years later.

CARL: We didn’t move for two minutes. It was fearsome man, it was brilliant. We just stood there and it got louder and louder. A lot of friends cried.

STEVE FINAN: It was unbelievable – people just screamed forever.

PAUL BREWER: I remember watching them standing there and thinking, ‘What can they be feeling?’ I think it lasted 13 minutes, but I could be wrong. It was certainly longer than on the subsequent DVD.

BEDDERS: There were a few lumps in the throat and a bit of, ‘It’s okay, I’ve just got something in my eye, I’m not crying.’

WOODY: The warmth and enthusiasm was so overwhelming, I was in absolute floods.

LEE: It was real goosepimples and hair-on-the-back-of your neck stuff. In fact I’m getting goosepimples now just thinking about it.

SUGGS: I didn’t know what it was going to be like until we were actually out there. I did think, ‘Are we going to be able to jump up and down and go mad and be as stupid as we were?’ And needless to say, like ducks to water…

PAUL BREWER: Woody came back to the drums and said something like, ‘Well that was a good start.’ He then checked to see if his two cans of Coke were there – they were – and BANG! Off they went.

WOODY: We went into One Step Beyond and it was like, ‘BLOODY HELL!’

CARL: Suddenly there were 36,000 fans jumping up and down. Flats reverberated, a sofa went across the room, windows cracked…

CLIVE LANGER: I couldn’t believe what I was seeing; people from front to back moving up and down as one. I’d never seen anything like it.

MIKE: It was just massive, over the whole hill. Everybody was dancing, right to the very back.

WOODY: I’ve never seen a gig like it before or since – the entire crowd was rippling like a massive wave.

CARL: There were people dancing everywhere, including about 50 on top of the beer tent and a couple on top of an ice-cream van.

CHRIS: Just the vastness of it was incredible; I couldn’t believe that all these people had come to see us.

SUGGS: It was fucking mental – everyone was going completely fucking barmy.

BEDDERS: I just remember, the first few numbers we set off and we were playing and we were in the groove and it was going well. Then I looked round to Chris and he wasn’t moving – I think he was just overwhelmed by everything. But as we went on, we got into it a bit more and we relaxed a bit more. You have to control your nervous energy when you go out to play a gig like that. There’s a difference between nervous and being over excited, so you really have to try and centre and control yourself.

LEE: It’s got to be my favourite Madness moment; it’s certainly the most emotional. All my relatives and friends were there – just everyone all in one big playground. I was in tears from the reaction and recognition.

BEDDERS: It was amazing – a really emotional night.

WOODY: To me, the audience said it all. It was, ‘Fuck the whole of the industry, this is the most important thing!’ We were all completely in tune with that audience.

CARL: One of the really staggering things about it was that everyone sang along with every song, all the way through from start to finish. There was just this swell, this build, this crescendo of affection.

SUGGS: Suddenly you realised that each one of those songs had an impact on somebody’s life, for all different reasons, as all great pop music does – your first kiss, first dance, first punch-up. It was extraordinary; we hadn’t expected it at all.

MIKE: I realised that the fans had had their whole lives punctuated by our music and all those years were being compressed into one afternoon. It was quite amazing, the history was tangible; all those things people had gone through when they were growing up, suddenly, it was all there and a whole period of history suddenly came alive again through our songs. Everybody was like, ‘I remember when I was this old, and I was doing this…’ and all the happy memories that people had suddenly came back in one big explosion. It was a great celebration; a recognition. The atmosphere was pure joy – I just remember everyone grinning. Even the big ugly skinheads had smiles on their faces.

CARL: I know it sounds corny, but there was a rare strength among the crowd and a euphoria that you seldom see.

SUGGS: With everything you do, there’s a certain amount of, ‘Is this the right thing? Should I really be doing this?’ And all I know is that we went out on stage and it was so fabulously fabulous that I actually felt more involved than I’d ever been in the old days. I was suddenly aware of all the thoughts I’d been repressing – that we were good and we had meant something. As soon as the first strains of One Step Beyond started, I thought, ‘It doesn’t get any more complicated than this; it’s just jumping up and down in time to pop music, and that isn’t a bad way to earn a living.’

SUGGS: It couldn’t have gone any better. It was a revelation – how much we’d achieved. My kids were 10 and nine and had never seen the band before. All our families were there – it was a very proud moment.

BEDDERS: It was a homecoming, a farewell and a rebirth, all at the same time. There wasn’t a dry eye on stage.

CARL: Backstage, there were lots of friends and family crying.

MIKE: My brother Ben is a serious jazz musician and had never really been that bothered about Madness. But even he was overcome with emotion. He came up to me afterwards with tears in his eyes and said, ‘I never knew what you did was so good.’

BEDDERS: For the first time, we did actually feel quite a lot of recognition.

WOODY: It was just a great show; very exciting – my most memorable gig ever, definitely. There was a lot of love in that field – I still get emotional about it now.

CARL: It was one of the best days of my life and reminded me that after you’ve been in Madness, doing anything else is drab. It was also a moment of immense personal satisfaction. Trying to reform Madness wasn’t easy as there were some doubters in the band, but the reaction of the crowd was a vindication that we still carried a great energy and still had something magical to offer.

SUGGS: It was probably one of the best concerts I ever remember doing with Madness. Getting up on stage and playing One Step Beyond for the first time in years was a revelation. Up until then I was sick of hearing it because it’s so simple. But then to be reminded that that’s why you’re in a band in the first place, because it’s simple and it is just jumping around a lot of the time in front of people playing music. You can be sophisticated and clever as you like underneath that, but at the same time, it doesn’t matter if you’re not really. It brought it all back. And it really reminded me what a joy it had been, making music. And I’ve had that joy ever since.

CARL: I will never forget sitting in my car on my own afterwards, backstage by the back fence, watching everyone leaving. I saw dads carrying young children, families having mass sing-alongs of It Must Be Love… just lots of happiness everywhere. There was a really special, joyous connection going on. It looked like something really nice had just happened.

SUGGS: I remember leaving the venue and seeing people literally emotionally and physically exhausted, lying on the pavement outside. It was a truly monumental moment.

BEDDERS: I actually walked home to calm down a bit. It was quite a good way to let the adrenaline wash away.

SUGGS: It was the first time we’d opened a gig with One Step Beyond, and it’s a fairly up-tempo song, so there were about 35,000 medium to large middle aged men all jumping up and down at the same time…

CHRIS: …and as can happen when you have 35,000 fans hitting the ground in unison, the people in the local flats could feel the vibrations.

SUGGS: A woman living opposite Finsbury Park rang police to say her picture was moving along the wall.

CHRIS: Somebody must have rung up the authorities and asked if there’d been an earthquake and, when they looked into it, they decided there had been.

SUGGS: The seismologists reckon there’s an underground lake under Finsbury Park and as people were jumping up and down, it started rocking and created the quake. Possibly the greatest achievement of my life – creating an earthquake. Something to tell your grandchildren, isn’t it?

ALICE WALKER (seismologist): On the 8th of August 1992, the police phoned the British Geological Survey, and they said that people had been phoning in saying that there had been an earthquake in London. They had described some effects like heavy lorries passing outside. People were frightened. Tower blocks were being evacuated because people thought the tower block was going to fall down. It was an intensity of about five. When I told the police that I thought the cause of the disturbance was a Madness concert at Finsbury Park, they didn’t believe me at first. I got a phone call the next night from the police who said exactly the same felt-effects had occurred – and so they did believe me after all. So my reputation as a seismologist still remains intact.

DR CHRIS BROWITT (seismologist): Tremors were recorded on both nights, but were 20 minutes earlier on the Sunday night, when the concert started 20 minutes earlier. It must have been one particular number that got everybody going in harmony and was able to generate this particular energy wave, and that number was One Step Beyond. This particular song fits the energy pattern. The entire effect was at just the right frequency to shake a nine-storey building.

WOODY: It’s the same reason why armies break step over a bridge, because if you all jump up and down together you cause a wave effect through the earth, and that’s exactly what 35,000 people did at Finsbury.

CLIVE LANGER: Morrissey had originally only been advertised for the Sunday, but he agreed to do both dates. The irony was that refusing to do the second night was stupid of him because his fans turned up and he would have had a great time.

BEDDERS: We were just disappointed he didn’t come back on the second day. Personally, I think he should have just come and played again and rode his way through it a little bit.

CHRIS: By coincidence, The Selecter were playing at the George Robey pub, just down the road from Finsbury Park, and Prince Buster, who had been a great inspiration to us, was playing with them. So on the Sunday, we bunged him a few quid and he came and did Madness with us, which was brilliant. Of course, our version was different from his, so we had to re-arrange it so he could do it the way he was used to.

SUGGS: I was told, ‘There’s a funny little guy with a beard outside. He reckons he’s Prince Buster.’ Our manager let him in and came back and said, ‘This is ridiculous. It is Prince Buster, but he wants £2,500 to come on stage and sing Madness with you.’ So I said, ‘Fuck it, give him the money. Didn’t we make enough out of him over the years?’ Of course once he came on stage we couldn’t get him off.

BEDDERS: After the gig he ended up having a very long conversation with my mum backstage for about half an hour. Later on she said, ‘Who was that bloke I was talking to?’ I was like, ‘Mum! That was Prince Buster!’

MIKE: It was totally pivotal for the band. Critics had never taken Madness very seriously, but after Madstock they started saying we were great British pop, up there with The Kinks. All of a sudden they were writing in the newspapers, ‘Classic English pop’ and ‘The classic English band’ and ‘One of the best British bands’ and all stuff like this, which is of course wonderful; it’s what we’d always wanted. It made such a difference.

SUGGS: The joy did seem to resurface for all of us I think.

WOODY: Suddenly we could appreciate what we had – it’s true that you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.

BEDDERS: We finally realised how much we were loved, in a funny sort of way.

WOODY: We came back to great acclaim, with an album that knocked Simply Red off the top. I was chuffed to bits. Absolutely delighted in fact, because we deserved it. We were the biggest selling singles band of the 80s, we spent more weeks on the chart than any other band and yet we’re still treated as a joke. No awards. Nothing. That gig was like a big ‘fuck you’ to the music industry and I’m incredibly proud of it.

SUGGS: It was very emotional. Especially when that sack of cash arrived at the end. You should have seen the tears in my accountant’s eyes.

LEE:  The main thing was, by doing Madstock, I got a cheque for thirty grand for two days’ work, including the rights to the live album and merchandise etc. The mortgage people were suddenly happy again and I managed to keep the bailiffs away, which was handy. It sure beat living in a tent.

BEDDERS: It was such an emotional weekend. I think a lot of people were watching and waiting to see how it went. I mean, if it had been a complete disaster it would’ve killed us stone dead. It was actually amazing to come back to that much love and respect.

WOODY: I think we’d encapsulated the fun times in people’s lives, and we’d been away long enough for people to forget how good the songs were. It was very emotional and it showed how much people had missed us.

SUGGS: It was really ironic that suddenly people from The Independent were really into it, because it was safe to be behind something that had been and gone and proved its worth. Whereas at the time it was a thin old wicket, you know: ‘Madness are a bit thick and they do come out with some bollocks sometimes so I don’t know if I can throw my weight behind them.’ Intellectually, we’d been looked down on for ages, which really pissed me off.

CHRIS: The next thing after the ‘farewell comeback’ was that the band announced a UK tour at Christmas, which I didn’t want to do. My dad had once said to me that one day I wouldn’t control it and it would control me, so I knew if it happened it would never end there and I feared us becoming like Gary Glitter. Now, Gary’s fine and all, and I loved his shows, but I didn’t want to keep doing that sort of nostalgic thing as artistically, it’s not very invigorating. The rest of the band said, ‘OK – we’ll just say you broke your arm.’ Because of course the show had to go on and they had to announce the tour. So of course I did the gigs and enjoyed it and then off we jolly well went – we did Madstock…we did the Christmas tour…and we’ve been going ever since.

WOODY: The thing was, it was really enjoyable and we realised we’d come back together and enjoyed each other’s company and musically it was fantastic. We realised there were people out there who really enjoyed our music and had had a long enough break to appreciate us. There had been a starvation of good fun music in the late 80s and people started to take themselves far too seriously. Things had got a bit dull and there was a drought of people who just wanted to have a good time and play good fun music, which was our speciality.

SUGGS: In some ways, splitting up was a good thing because I was plunged back into the real world, whatever that was. Having a few years out of the pop business is good for anybody. It gave us all a reality check, so when we came back to the band we all appreciated it a lot more than we had before.

CARL: I’m just glad I pushed for the reunion because the band was so dear to my heart. I’m glad to have taken that step and hopefully the others are too… though probably nobody would admit it publicly.

CARL: Andy MacDonald offered me 10 per cent of Go! Discs Publishing as a sweetener to get me to stay as an employee with the label, saying I could continue with Madness and remain as an A&R man. My heart was with Madness though and I felt that I could bring my record company experience to the band. I also felt it was somehow dishonourable to pop off and play Wembley Arena and at the same time represent those acts’ careers. How could I honestly concentrate on their interests? I thoroughly enjoyed my time there and I learnt much, which helped both me personally and the band. All artistes who engage in the company side of the business seem to do well and I knew I was turning my back on a career. My first love, though, was Madness.

WOODY (speaking in 1992): I’m always surprised that people are always complimentary, that they always have something good to say about Madness. Even now, five or six years after we split up, people are always telling us what they remember. I suppose it might have been that endearing element, but that was because it was quite genuine.

CARL (speaking in 1992): The reason we are what we are is we are seven little loners who got together, formed a little gang and had this group conscious, interest and sound. So when you get back together you click. We don’t have to hear the joke from Chris any more, he just tells us the punchline cos we’ve heard it 50,000 times.

SUGGS: Unfortunately, the video itself was really badly filmed – it looks like it was made in someone’s front room instead of in the open air in front of thousands of people. There’s a close-up of a guitar when someone’s playing the piano, and a close-up of the back of someone’s head when someone else is fucking flying over the other side of the stage. If someone had tried to make it as boring as they could, they’ve succeeded.

STEVE FINAN: We were all sat around the table and had the BBC on speakerphone. They were saying, ‘Give us a good reason why we should put you on Top Of The Pops again.’ We’re all trying – what if we did this or that? And they’re literally going, ‘No, no, no.’ Then Carl says, ‘I know, we’ll fly to Moscow and play live from Red Square. No one’s ever done that before.’ And it was off the top of his head! Of course, Top Of The Pops were like, booked in, done. Organising that was just weird because they could only have one outside broadcast satellite in the whole of Russia. But again, Carl knew where the guy was. He’s quite incredible.

CHRIS: I thought it would never happen and tried to suggest a link from Blackpool or something that would have been quite funny as everyone else’s links were always from Miami or LA etc, but blow me down the next thing I know I’m on a flight to Russia. I’d just got married and of course wanted to bring the wife, but the tour manager and Carl tried to persuade me not to. God knows why, as it’s very cold in Russia at night. Anyhow, they should have concentrated on getting Bedders and Lee to come as neither of them did having not attended the ‘brainstorming’ session in question at the Marriot Hotel Swiss Cottage. So they could say they hadn’t actually agreed to it.

JILL FURMANOVSKY (photographer): Five of Madness – Lee missed the plane, Bedders had exams at college – and a small film crew went to Russia. I was invited along to shoot for You magazine. We met at a colossal building known as the Hotel Russia, which took up an entire block and slept 6,000.

SUGGS: The hotel was so big, I got completely lost in the corridors. I was trying the key in all these doors and didn’t know if someone was going to burst out and kill me.

JILL FURMANOVSKY (photographer): Suggs joined us for a midnight feast of ‘little snacky things’ brought from home, washed down with vodka. We spent most of the night behaving like school kids. At one point, Suggs and Carl removed the double-glazing with a screwdriver to let in fresh air.

SUGGS: It was really funny – it was almost as if we had never been away. It was just like it used to be – one of the band had ordered a load of dresses, someone else had ordered a load of Egyptian stuff; there were 20 different costumes. Mike was going to go on as Shirley Bassey but he decided that was too much.

STEVE FINAN: For the actual broadcast, I had to be the bass player. I was dressed up with a hat and gloves. It was freezing. When the camera came to me, I turned away.