1999

SUGGS: It was getting a bit ridiculous. It was obvious we were going to keep doing this thing, whether it was every couple of years or every year.

LEE: We’d done the Christmas tours and all the old stuff, and I felt it was time to push the boat out a bit.

WOODY: We just needed something fresh and new that would inspire us and make us excited. People had come forward with songs before, but it had never seemed like the right time to record any of them. But now it seemed perfect, ‘cos it was our 20th anniversary.

SUGGS: We just felt we had the most material and the right feeling.

LEE: Everyone put pen to paper and started writing. I said, ‘Mike, put the tulips down, I’m coming over.’ Then I packed my pen and ink and went across to Amsterdam. We got to work straight away and came up with several songs.

CHRIS: Personally, I didn’t think it would come to anything. I already had a lot of songs I’d written with Lee that would have been good for Madness to record but I felt a great loyalty to Crunch! so I didn’t want to give them up.

SUGGS: The band had gone off and done some demos together without me and Mark, which really started the ball rolling.

CHRIS: It was suggested that we use our old Liquidator studio in Caledonian Road to demo some new songs. It ended up costing us a lot of money for some tracks that didn’t have Suggs singing on or Mark playing bass on. And the songs aren’t Madness without Suggs – it’d be like Oasis without Liam – so he came back and we redid them.

WOODY: It still took a long time to make sure that everyone was committed. It was coming together but there was one fundamental rule that we were constantly going back to: You need all seven members of the band, otherwise it won’t work. There were limbs missing.

SUGGS: One would get on, one would get off, one would say, ‘Yeah I’m really keen’ in the pub that night, then the next morning, ‘Oh bollocks, I don’t wanna do that.’ We’ve always had a certain kind of perversity. For every person in the band who desperately wanted to be successful there was someone who was dragging his feet in the canal and facing the other direction. We’d always worked on the premise that we all had to be enjoying it to be able to do it. And by that stage. we all felt like that.

WOODY: We’d done very well just getting together a couple of times a year; greatest hits, an easy life. But we needed that sense of paddling in the deep end so we came back to writing new songs. Saying that, we didn’t want to go back to that cycle of the music industry straight away, so we were a bit cautious.

CHRIS: I was very wary and negative, but I put everything into other people’s songs. That’s why it took some time to really start writing stuff.

SUGGS: We’ve all had our periods in the wilderness and mine came around this time, but then I got back right into it. My thoughts were, ‘We’ll do this album, reconnect with each other and then really get our act together with the next one.’

CARL: We knew that people were quite happy for us to play a few big shows of greatest hits every couple of years, but a full album of new material was a different story entirely.

MIKE: We waited 14 years to make it as we wanted to make it a really good one.

CARL: If we’d rushed into recording a bunch of new songs when we first got back together we’d probably have been slaughtered, and more than likely deserved it. I think we were right to hold off making the record until the time was right. There was no panic or pressure and we felt completely confident with the quality of the songs.

SUGGS: There’s a certain point where everyone’s slagging it off and there’s a lot of pressure from people who say you shouldn’t disturb the memory. Then after a while you ask, ‘Who owns this concept?’ It’s like a box somewhere on a dusty shelf somewhere, only to be looked at by the privileged and righteous. Well, it’s our box, to get down whenever we like and to do with whatever we want.

WOODY: We approached the first rehearsals very cautiously. We didn’t want to have a miserable time, we wanted to have a good time and we were very open to the fact that if it wasn’t going to work, then we hadn’t lost anything by attempting it. But it went surprisingly well and the songs really began to mould themselves into Madness songs. It was enjoyable and I personally got a buzz out of it.

SUGGS: The atmosphere was clear, there was no confusion and it was pretty straightforward. In those years off, I think we’d all grown up a bit. We all had to get together on an equal footing as grown-ups and not teenagers, which is what we’d been when we started.

TERRY EDWARDS (musician): Having played and recorded with Bedders, Chris and Lee, and socialised with most of the band, I’d become a reasonably natural choice to help out. By that point, I’d got a track record as an arranger, too, so it helped that I could get a horn section together and be the conduit between band, producers and other musicians. It was exciting to be working on some new Madness stuff.

BOZ BOORER (musician): I worked quite hard with Carl and Lee on the early demos. Carl asked me to give him a hand with some brass parts so I did a week with them, which was a lot of fun and I was made to feel welcome – it was like a little family and I was invited in.

TERRY EDWARDS: It was a positive experience all round; so many of the band write songs that they must have been gagging to get something out after such a long time.

CARL: I’d been concentrating on the album for so long – it was something I really thought about and really wanted to do.

BOZ BOORER: We’d been there for a couple of days without Mike but when he eventually turned up the sound really came together; it just emanated from his keyboard.

STEVE PRITCHARD (EMI-Virgin): Mike coming back from Holland really was the turning point. With him joining in, the gang was complete. It really was like the return of the magnificent seven, like a Western.

MIKE: During those first rehearsals we played our new songs to each other – songs that are occasionally brilliant – and Clive Langer made us realise that they could stand up to our best efforts from the past.

WOODY: We still worked together in exactly the same way. So there was no new weird and wonderful way of recording the album. We still went into the studio with Clive, presented our songs to him, then went through the elimination process.

WOODY: We didn’t have a perceived idea of what sound we wanted. People wrote songs and we played them – it was that simple. We are who we are: we are Madness and you can’t take Madness out of us.

SUGGS: Someone was in the studio when we started recording. And they were sitting there when Mike started playing, then Chris, then me, then Carl finishing it off and he said, ‘Oh fuck me – it sounds like Madness’. Because it is all the components; all the parts coming together.

BEDDERS: It’s a slippery thing to say, but who else could it be? When you get the seven of us playing together that’s what it sounds like and time didn’t seem to have changed that too much. It’s strange, because it’s not as if we didn’t listen to contemporary music – we all did and we all had very diverse tastes.

WOODY: The thing was, we weren’t fighting it any more. In the latter part of our career we were fighting against ourselves because we were fed up with being us. We were trying to expand our horizons and we didn’t want to be Madness particularly – we wanted to be better. This time round we just went in and we were who we were. There was no need to be any different because we suddenly realised that people over the years had bought our records. We thought, ‘They like us for who we are, so why change it?’

BEDDERS: I think that’s natural. When you make albums then obviously each one has to be different so you feel in a sense it’s progression. This time we felt like we’d just go back in there and play the songs, which is what we did when did the Madstocks. We were very relaxed about it.

SUGGS: Between us, we had a whole bunch of new stuff, so it was just a matter of getting Clive Langer to throw out the rubbish and pick tracks that everybody could play live and believe in. And that’s just what happened.

LEE: I didn’t particularly want to use Clive and Alan because I know how busy Clive is and how much he charges. I was thinking of Linton Kwesi Johnson and Devis Bovell, or maybe even Ian Dury. I thought that would have been a great combination but of course it didn’t happen. However, in the end Clive did a brilliant job – he pulled out all the stops.

SUGGS: Each of us imagines it coming out slightly different than it eventually does, but Clive and Alan are the only people who can manage seven separate concepts, with all of us playing a different song at the same time.

WOODY: They also know what we’re capable of, and the extent of our ability as musicians. They know there’s no point asking Chris to do a heavy metal guitar solo. Instead, they know how to get the best out of each of us.

SUGGS: Plus it helps that Clive has a vision and does great arrangements.

WOODY: There was a danger of trying to go down the modern line and bring in a load of dance beats and stuff, but Clive rejected all of that and wanted Madness to sound like Madness…

LEE: …he said he wanted that rawness of One Step Beyond. He wanted it to sound basic.

WOODY: Mostly, it was enjoyable. We just went in and bashed it out very, very quickly. I did all my tracks in a week – it was like back to the old days again. The thing was that we just wanted to go in there and put everything down as live as possible as quickly as possible. We just wanted to go in there and get a kind-of live feel. It would have sounded quite odd to hear a drum machine in these songs. It was more enjoyable, for me because it was less anal – it was just go in, put the kit up, put the mike on it and do it. It sounded like a Madness album.

BEDDERS: It starts with Woody and me – we’re really the two people who play together because you put the bass and drums down together, hopefully, and get a good take of the two and obviously patch bits and pieces up. It really is more like a live performance.

CARL: We’ll also have a guide vocal to help us.

WOODY: We’ll add the keyboards in, bit of guitar, bit of sax, whoever’s around at the time, because you need that to give it a bit of flavour.

BEDDERS: We’ve never really written the songs in the studio. We’ve always been quite disciplined and always had the songs more or less ready, and rehearsed them exactly how we were going to record them.

SUGGS: It’s like an East German football team the way we rehearse and record.

CARL: We like to go into rehearsal and get Clive in, who’s reputedly the eighth member of the band, and go round the songs, rearrange them, if he thinks something lacks something then we go off and rewrite, so it’s all prepared, we know what we’re doing, so that we can enjoy it really.

WOODY: And then Clive changes his mind.

CARL: Whoever writes the song, writes the song: verse, verse, chorus, middle-eight. And then Clive comes and goes, ‘No no we’ll have that there and da da da’. And that’s generally his role. He’s a musician as well as being a producer, which is helpful.

WOODY: We did it in a way that was just like how we recorded in 1986. So we didn’t move on – we were still stuck in the old way of recording where you go to a studio, you grind away, do loads of overdubs, and people go in separately so it’s not very collective as a band. So actually it was somewhat of a struggle by the end.

SUGGS (speaking in 1999): The success is being in the studio and writing great songs, and the success is me being here right now, and the success is whatever is on that day. Whatever it is on the following day is irrelevant, because it hasn’t happened. Tomorrow is a mystery, yesterday was history, but today is a gift and that’s way we call it… the present!

BEDDERS (speaking in 1999): We all feel better and that’s why it’s better. And that’s where it stems from.

WOODY (speaking in 1999): It’s a lot more relaxed.

BEDDERS (speaking in 1999): We’re relishing it a lot more and we want to keep it going.

SUGGS (speaking in 1999): I was really pleased when we came back that we were taken so seriously. I remember a period when it was considered immature to like Madness. But we were seven individuals who somehow managed to produce this one thing. And you do all this work, pile it on and on, and a few years later people can see that, though it was understated it was something. All these big explosions of pomp were going on around you while you’re in the trenches. And when the dust settles, you find out you’ve won.

LEE (speaking in 1999): Really, we’re honest, wholesome, good-for-nothing chancers.

SUGGS (speaking in 1999): Madness have always been about accentuating the positive. It’s no accident our songs are still enjoyed 30 years down the line. They’re upbeat, timeless – a clear-eyed celebration of life.

CARL (speaking in 1999): We appreciate that the record company is behind us. They’re happy we’ve done a great album and we’re happy we’ve done a great album.

SUGGS (speaking in 1999): We’re just a diamond waiting to be buffed… a rough diamond.

STEVE PRITCHARD: They were back to being a band then, with lots of opinions and directions. We really wanted it to work.

SUGGS: We were lucky because there was a new freedom to do what you liked, when you liked. In our earlier incarnation, it was all about single-single-single-album-tour every single year. But things had changed by the time we reformed properly – suddenly the pressure was off and we could do what we wanted to do, at our own pace.

CHRIS: I could never stand the original naff pork pie hat drawing but I understand why so many people love it and have tattoos etc. But we had to get shot of it and move on. I know everyone loves it but there you go. That’s showbusiness.

CARL (speaking in 1999): We never had any real plans to write together again, but the reaction to the live shows here and in America was so good it seemed daft for us to just do all the old favourites. We’ve been lucky in that the group has never quite disappeared from the public eye. Every now and again there’s been a concert, a compilation album, or new groups giving us a plug! But there’s nothing to beat being back in business for real.

SUGGS (speaking in 1999): We’ve been talking about doing new material since ‘94. The reason is
that we didn’t want to fudge it. It had to be proper Madness. What turned it round was touring the States last year on the back of the ska revival. We’d never toured the US. We played to crowds who didn’t know us. When they lapped it up, we realised we had something
new to offer.

CARL (speaking in 1999): Since we’ve been playing together again, we’ve written a few new songs, but not that many, to put in the set because it was beginning to get a bit tiresome just playing our old material. There seemed to be a bit a flurry of writing last year and everybody felt confident that what had been written was strong enough to stand up to what we’d done in the past really, so that sort of pushed us into making an album.

SUGGS (speaking in 1999): We waited for quite a long time for all this to come together. I mean some if us have been pushing for it more than others, but all in all, I think in the back of all our minds, we’d do it again and now was exactly the right time. We never kind of split up officially, we just kind of fizzled out, and if it hadn’t been for the fact that it was 14 years, then we could say it was just a pause. But you know, we don’t. I mean, we’ve been offered things like ’80s revival tours, but we’re not really interested in reviving the ’80s, you know we’re interested in making a great new album, which is what we have done.

MICK GARBUTT (Virgin radio plugger): We all insisted on Lovestruck as the first single – it was an obvious hit.

LEE: It was one of the first pieces of new material we started writing and one of the songs Mike and I wrote together in Amsterdam. From the opening piano notes ‘tum-ti-tum-ti-tum-ti’ etc, I knew it was going to be an enjoyable session. Its working title was Falling For A Lamp-Post, a song of love lost through the bottle and your only friend is a lamp-post and the best hangover cure is another.

SUGGS: It’s about being so drunk one falls in love with a lamp-post. I’ve certainly done
 that and I’m sure most people will identify with the lyrics.

BEDDERS: Lyrically, it’s fantastic, and conjures up some wonderful imagery – that confusion of being drunk and staggering around, with a bit of hopelessness and bravado thrown in. I can just imagine Lee in that situation; being really drunk and trying to get home, bouncing from lamp-post to lamp-post. It’s also got one of the best openings to any Madness song.

LEE: As well the lamp-post stuff, it was also about stepping back and looking at what I’d been doing after the band split and how close I came to losing my house, my family and everything else because of my drinking. It made me realise that it really had been touch and go.

SUGGS: It’s certainly one of my favourite songs. It’s been compared with The Sun And The Rain, which is fair. It’s the same speed with the same air of melancholy.

CARL: It was the first video we’d made in absolutely years, so it was nice to come back together again. It was shot in King’s Cross and I actually took my corset off for it; I didn’t mind showing off my fat tummy.

CHRIS: Everyone had loads of ideas for it. Because it was about drinking, Woody and Mike were meant to represent good and evil.

WOODY: Normally I hate doing videos because there’s so much hanging around, but I laughed all day doing that one.

LEE: That’s cos you were pissed out of your head!

MIKE: It’s a good video but I didn’t like all the bits in the park.

CARL: Oh I dunno, I liked dressing up as hippies – the only thing was, no one was handing out any spliff.

MIKE: Also, they didn’t want us to have any alcohol on set and yet the song was all about the bloody stuff!

SUGGS (speaking in 1999): People are always asking, ‘Are you doing it for the money or for artistic reasons?’ or whatever, and that’s exactly why you’re doing it, both those reasons, you’re getting some artistic expression and at the same time you’re getting some money. It’s like Van Morrison, a very artistic and creative guy. He says he looks at it like it’s someone painting a house, if he writes a song. I think there’s an element of that in the band, we’re not too pretentious about it all.

CHRIS (speaking in 1999): One of the reasons that we have reformed is because we all get on OK. There are a few little tear-ups now and then but that is understandable at our age. A lot of other bands split up because they detested each other and still do.

WOODY (speaking in 1999): I think we’re a lot more relaxed as musicians, we know our instruments better, Suggs knows his vocal chords better. I think we’ve just grown up. Hopefully we haven’t become boring old farts.

LEE (speaking in 1999): For better or for worse, we’re not as naïve as we were back then. And I think that is for better and for worse. When we started, I don’t think we knew what we were after. We just went into a room and bashed and banged and blew things and just had a marvellous time.

SUGGS (speaking in 1999): It doesn’t enter into my frame of reference, all that stuff about blemishing and thinking of being in boxes and bubbles. I just think I’ve grown up so much, that it’s just, ‘I’m alive’, you know what I mean? And there was that Dennis Potter thing wasn’t there: I can’t tell you how great this cigarette is to smoke and how blossomy the tree is, all the blossom, that’s how I feel. Everything is what it should be and could be and I’m not interested in comparing it to the past and to the future or whatever.”

MIKE (speaking in 1999): We have tried it at various times before, but it just hasn’t happened.  People have gone through various things, and when we get together, the work that we create is good.

WOODY (speaking in 1999): It’s a long time and we’ve been doing the same stuff and new material is the only way forward. We’re gonna do videos and we’re gonna do gigs but we’re gonna be more selective. We’ve got lives.

BEDDERS (speaking in 1999): I’m kind of confident in, I think in what I’m doing in the rest of my life, so I think it’s quite easy to go and actually now do this and play some music and enjoy it and relish it a bit.

CARL (speaking in 1999): It’s brilliant to be back together again.  Madness work against the sort of grain. It may not look like that, but we do. If it works for us on an honest level then we do it.
 

SUGGS (speaking in 1999): The best thing about being in Madness is that you just sort of hide, be irresponsible, in a world that is so overwhelmed by people being responsible.  Sometimes it is better to jump out of a car at the wrong time and runaway and go and sit in a pub on a sunny afternoon than it is to go and do what you’re supposed to be doing and that’s a great luxury of being in a band.

CARL: I put all my singles in storage and had a management company for a while, so I put them as my address. I paid a year, and then I paid a half year, and thought, ‘They’ll get back to me when they want paying.’ Next thing, my agent rang and said someone was auctioning a load of stuff. They’d approached my old office and I hadn’t left a forwarding address, so everything I’d ever collected, all my original singles, had gone, along with loads of family pictures and gold discs. I was annoyed as I didn’t want to go around buying what’s mine, but I also felt quite stoic about it. I thought, ‘What’s important? The band are working again, it’s great, we’re making a great album, I’ve got the wife and kids, my memory is in my head, so to let go, it’s quite good in a way.’ It’s a real shame, but what can you do? Sometimes I think I must have done something wrong for it to have happened, but I just didn’t give the right address. But the thing is, if you spend your life saying, ‘What does it matter if your ship goes down with all your goods, and you are alive on the shore?’ You say things like that then have you have to live by it.

SUGGS (speaking in 1999): In any group of people, everyone’s got their idiosyncrasies. It can be difficult to spend this much time together, and obviously, we all have our ups and downs, but on the whole…

CARL (speaking in 1999): … yeah, it’s pretty nice being in Madness. A lot of people are pretty gobsmacked that we’re still together and still get on pretty well.

MICK GARBUTT: Lee and Carl had a fractious relationship that ended up with them having a fight. I think there was some underlying feeling that Carl, who was now ‘Mr Record Company’, was taking over. He was the prime mover and really wanted some professionalism.

LEE: There’s a sort of grey area, no one knows what actually happened because there was alcohol involved but it got a bit physical, yeah. Me and him in the toilet.

CHRIS: Thommo came off worst, but you would with Carl.

LEE: Things were never the same afterwards.

PETER RUDGE (Madness manager): All of them tolerated Carl, but for me, he was a nightmare. I found my relationship with him to be the most unpleasant I’ve had with any artist I’ve managed. In a way, he was harmless but he could be physically intimidating.

LOUIS VAUSE (Crunch! keyboardist): I remember being in the studio once, talking about Lee, and suddenly Carl’s face went very cold. He looked at me and it was frightening. I had to say, ‘Carl, this is Louis here!’ He just replied, ‘Lee’s been winding me up for 20 years.’

MICK GARBUTT: I’m wondering if the resentment between Lee and Carl came from the early days because Carl wasn’t originally a full-time member.

SUGGS: We got pissed off with each other all the time and the odd blow was thrown, but not many, considering. Although I do remember Chris and Lee nearly killing each other once.

CHRIS: We were in France and there had been a lot of excessive drinking before we went on, so I was in a bit of a narky mood. Lee just started totally mucking around, banging the microphone on the floor. The sound guy came out and tried to swap out, so Lee pretended to hit him, and I just went for him. I thought, ‘I’m gonna kill him.’ We both exited stage right, had a big row and then back on and did the gig.

LEE: Chris attacked me with two bottles. If it had been Jack Daniels, I wouldn’t have minded, but he’s come at me with two Perrier bottles. I thought: ‘Chris, what you going to do with those?’ Then we ended up hugging a couple of hours later. As you do.

SUGGS: Me and Mike also had a fight after a gig in Manchester because he turned the van over. I mean, what sort of idiot does that?

WOODY: Madness is like an extended family, so we do love each other, but we also get on each other’s nerves. It’s not like you don’t love each other – you just need a break sometimes.

SUGGS: We hit each other on the nose in the wee small hours occasionally, and there’s late-night mad things that go on – standing outside a hotel after we’ve done a gig in Belgium or somewhere. That’s how we get our therapy – going absolutely barmy at each other, with each other, for each other and against other people. It’s when you’re really pissed that you get down to saying, ‘What REALLY annoyed me…’ It’s like any problem, isn’t it? When it comes out in the open it’s daylight.

JOHN WYNNE (Madness sound engineer): I remember once there was a row and Carl said something to Woody and Bedders about, ‘Oh, you’re just a pair of middle-class grammar school boys’, having a poke at that, in the belief that they were all street-cred working class.

SUGGS: Mike slapped me round the face with a rubber chicken once too. I did the whole gig apoplectic with rage with the shame of these red welts across my face. Chris jumped on his back and we nearly had him, but he’s a very big man, Mike. He was throwing us off like flies.

LEE: The thing is, we used to have this roadie who did the pyrotechnics and he’d mark the stage with gaffer tape where the keyboards would be. Somehow there was a mix-up and they were right on top of the pyrotechnics. One… Step… Beyond… boom! Mike came into the dressing room, ‘You f*ckers, you’re trying to kill me!’ and, yeah, a rubber chicken was thrown across the stage.

SUGGS: Bedders also hit me in the eye with his bass once – I’ve still got the scar. He said it wasn’t on purpose but you never know. The only saving grace was that it was the thin end.

CHRIS: We all argue and bitch with each other, some more than others. The main sort of bitching people are me and Carl, me and Barso or Barso and Carl – any kind of combinations of us three. Woody’s kind of really sensible, he’s become the elder statesman of the band in some ways, he’s really funny. Bedders just stays out of it, Suggs stays out of it, and then Lee does these weird little e-mails that no one understands.

SUGGS: The main factor is, we’ve been friends, some of us, since we were 12, so there’s a great communication between us all. That doesn’t mean we don’t fight horribly – because we do. But there’s a lot of flexibility, allowing people to be what they want to be, and do what they want.

PETER RUDGE: The infighting was quite dramatic but in the end they always circled the wagons and moved on as seven. It was almost tribal in the way that they dealt with life. I’d never seen that kind thing before.

CARL: All the dark stuff is never seen. It’s alluded to, but it’s never spoken of.

STEVE PRITCHARD: The band were all genuine people and were always nice to work with. But the main problem was there were seven strong characters with strong opinions about everything. They were all so individual and had all got their own world views which rarely fell in the same place at the same time. So there were big arguments.

JOHN WYNNE: If they hadn’t been in Madness, there’s a good chance that a few of them would have been on Her Majesty’s pleasure. Lee would have definitely been there. Suggs and Carl too, maybe. The others were more sensible.

CARL: It’s a true story – sort of – about the generic term for down-and-outs with nicknames. The idea for it came from an incident I had with two old guys who used to hang around near where I lived when the band were starting off. One was an Irish ex-boxer called Dempsey who was a gentle giant and a little punch drunk; the other was Scottish and very quiet. They’d become a fixture for years, sitting on a park wall outside the old fire station drinking their bottles of VP Ruby Red. They were very pleasant and I’d stop and chat with them and they’d offer me the drink, which I’d turn down. One day when I passed, I saw Dempsey on his own in a state of distress; he was crying his eyes out, full of grief. He told me his Scottish friend had slept in a derelict house and had been kicked to death by a gang of lads for a laugh. I remembered the story and was later moved to write about how there are so many who disappear onto the streets, forgotten or ignored. I also expanded it a bit to take in how we all have the potential to be great, but life can take you down weird roads. It’s where the line, ‘Johnny The Horse was kicked to death / He died for entertainment’ came from. I’d also read another about this guy who was taken into casualty by a policewoman and checked himself out and died on a bench. So it was that sort of thing, about the sort of people who aren’t really missed by society, like down-and-outs who’ve had a life but you never know exactly what it is.

MIKE: The video was cooking at the beginning, but they ran out of time and money by the end of it.

CARL: Yeah, I wasn’t sure about this one too.

CHRIS: We turned up at about 8am but they didn’t film us until 6pm because the director did commercials, so they had very high standards of lighting and so on. Everything took hours.

CARL: And again, in the pub scenes, they didn’t want us to have any actual alcohol in the glasses, which was a bit naff.

MICK GARBUTT: It was B-listed for radio play but it just wasn’t going to happen. There was no doubt it was a fantastic track, though. It was Carl’s pride and joy.

BEDDERS: We had a lot of trouble getting our new records played on the radio. I think the radio station people found it hard to fit us into their neat little playlists and Johnny the Horse suffered badly from this. Was it in the style of an old Madness song? Was it a new direction? That was the dilemma.

CARL: I don’t know why it wasn’t a big hit but quite frankly it doesn’t concern me. The moment has passed

CARL: Clive felt it was too similar in tempo to The Wizard and Johnny The Horse to go on the album. When I found out, I offered to take off two of my other tracks just to have it included, but no one in the band supported me. I thought it was worthy of inclusion but there you go; Madness is a democracy to a large extent and you either have to live with that or go on holiday.

CHRIS: It’s a long story. For some reason it became a choice between You’re Wonderful and another good song, Round and Round. I liked them both and said both should be on the album, giving us 13 tracks. There was then some sort of kerfuffle and neither of them made it – it was a decision made by the band, record company and producer. I thought if the quality was there we should let it shine out, but my feeble voice got rather lost in all the testosterone. As usual, it was all a bit wishy-washy and hard to get a definitive answer.

CARL: I was very upset that it ended up buried on a B-side. When I’d played it at Madstock, it amazed me when after the first chorus everyone got the words and was singing along. It was fantastic.

CHRIS: To be honest, by the time we came to make the album, the whole selection process was becoming a bit like survival of the fittest. It was quite nasty at times and Clive nearly quit. I didn’t even bother. We had more than enough songs, although I think some good ones got trampled over in the rush.

SUGGS: There was some argy-bargy about how many tracks should be on it and what to leave off.

MIKE: It was like elks squaring up and banging their antlers.

CHRIS: There were plenty of good songs, but it was a bit of a selfish atmosphere. Mike and Carl were sometimes pushing too hard for their songs to be on the album instead of thinking about the overall picture.

WOODY: It’s ironic that what eventually became Wonderful wasn’t all wonderful because some of those battles for supremacy re-emerged.

SUGGS: All seven of us had different ideas what it should be called. Ordinary Magic was mine, Excuse Us was another.

CHRIS: Suggs had suggested Excuse Us which I preferred, but of course there was the usual procrastination.

WOODY: Nice One was another one, but I thought that was a bit cheesy.

CHRIS: Wonderful was Carl’s idea as he’d written the song of the same name.

LEE: I’d wanted to call it You’re Wonderful, but that was a bit patronising, so we just dropped the first bit.

SUGGS: In the great tradition of Madness, it was left to the last minute, after lots of arguing.

WOODY: In the end, we were so tired of it, we just went, ‘Okay, fine, Wonderful it is.’

CHRIS: Incidentally Adam and The Ants had also released an album called Wonderful, so it must’ve been a popular name for an album. David Essex too, but I think that was after us.

BEDDERS (speaking in 1999): Maybe what sets this album apart from some of the others is that it’s a little bit more personal. There is a bit more personal emotion as opposed to say removing yourself and placing yourself within a character you write about in the song as a way of making everything a bit more kind of submerged.

CHRIS (speaking in 1999): The new material covers loads of areas. There’s a bit of everything on there. But it’s not an album that relies on technology, it’s the music of seven people in a room – it’s a Madness album.

STEVE PRITCHARD: We were really pleased with Wonderful; we thought it was a great record.

SUGGS: We’d tried to write what we thought would be an album to stand with anything else we’d done, which I think we did.

CHRIS: It was a good album and a good return to form but it could have been so much better. Musically, I definitely think some of the originally demos were superior.

SUGGS: We’d been teetering on the cusp of the whirlpool of 80s nostalgia and could have quite happily slipped gently down into the hole with everybody else. But doing Wonderful meant we flapped and flapped like mad and escaped.

CARL: I honestly think, after all those years waiting, it should have been so much better and so much more enjoyable to be involved in. Saying that, I’m pleased we did it and think it stands up well next to our other work.

SUGGS: It was kind of funny because it wasn’t a progression. We’d had such a long gap, yet we still weren’t moving forward, we were just finding ourselves again. So although it was supposed to be the beginning of us doing it all again, we just didn’t follow it through.

BEDDERS: I was really surprised how much the whole industry had changed by then. Records weren’t made and promoted Dave Robinson’s way any more – marketing had taken over and things were a lot more scientific.

STEVE PRITCHARD: I think we sold over 60,000 in the end, not as much as they’d wanted but it wasn’t a financial disaster. Around that time, though, there was that wind change at commercial radio. Capital said, ‘There are no automatic passes onto the playlist.’ That ageist thing kicked in. The first Madness single was the right side of that line and the other tracks just weren’t.

PETER RUDGE: The boys were stunned that the album wasn’t bigger. It got some momentum, some gravitas, but their fan base had moved on and the new people were discovering Madness through the back catalogue, which is historically what happens. Therein lies the rub.

STEVE PRITCHARD: On the day it was released, HMV were describing the people buying it as the people you saw at Madstock – core fans, stubbly-looking blokes. Despite the illusion of a hit single, it came and went in a week, an older male fanbase, and it wasn’t crossover family pop at all. That’s difficult for those older acts to re-capture.

PETER RUDGE: The band all had a whipping boy to blame. They couldn’t understand why Virgin or I couldn’t get it to translate but I knew there was a glass ceiling on them and it was always going to be tough.

CARL: From the top down, Virgin were committed to the album. If there was one factor which may have played a part in turning them off it was the fact that certain band members nominated stand-ins for TV promotion as they had more important things to do in their private lives. That may have had a part in demotivating Virgin and them thinking we weren’t taking it seriously enough. Who knows?

PETER RUDGE: The band’s insecurities were fuelled by their need to be contemporary. They couldn’t understand why their music was not recognised in the way it once was. They were looking back on past glories and trying to take shortcuts. They thought they were owed it rather than they still had to earn it.

CARL: I think another major factor in the lack of success was Radio 1’s lack of support with radio play. But it’s a democracy and they have the right to choose what they play, so what could you do?

CHRIS (speaking in 1999): I don’t know if we’ll do another album after this and that’s the truth. We’ll have to see how it goes.

SUGGS: I know it was only a bit of amusement, but I wish we hadn’t done it really. Luckily, I don’t regret anything else that Madness have recorded. We work very hard on all the songs we write and record and never really do anything we don’t want to.

LEE (speaking in 1999): This Christmas tour, I can confidently say, is going to be the tour of all tours for us, but after the New Year, personally I’m going to sit back. To be honest, I don’t give two tosses about the whole thing. I’ve done it once, I’ve been there and I’m happy now to let some other people have a go. I’m ready to polish up my Zimmer frame at this stage. My lungs are packing in, my teeth are dropping out, my hair’s gone and I have a nice beer gut coming on, so I’m up for the normal, easy life.

SUGGS (speaking in 1999): Touring is good but we won’t be doing it for too long. After 12 dates I get bored and I hate that feeling when you’re looking at your watch wanting your tea when you’re playing a raunchy rock number. Not that we ever do anything like that, of course.

PHILL JUPITUS (comedian): Carl gave me a bell and asked if I’d like to go on before the band and do some stand-up. At the time, it was a lovely idea; I was a huge fan of the band so it seemed a great thing to do. After Cardiff I realised I’d made one of my larger mistakes. Madness fans want one thing at the gig – Madness. They’ll dance and get pissed and have a laugh, but they want the chaps. The only place I even vaguely got away with it was at the Brighton Centre where I just made a virtue of the fact that I was dying on my arse. At Cardiff, one bloke in the front row shouted, ‘Get off the stage you English c**t.’ When I pointed out he’d paid £25 to watch seven English c**ts and he should feel a little foolish, he didn’t like it. Bournemouth and Birmingham were two of the worst nights of my life. If I’d been in the crowd, I’d have fucking booed me.

CARL (speaking in 1999): Performing a song is great live but after listening to it in the studio for months on end… not so much. The best part of it apart from writing it, is the recording of it, and then you’ve done it, it’s sealed in a sort of time capsule. So you do a song and then that’s it, you’ve done it and you move on and the challenge is to write something else and/or to perform.

CARL (speaking in 1999): The long-term plan is that there is no long-term plan. There’s no pressure, the album with Virgin is a one-off deal, so if we decide we don’t want to carry on then we don’t have to. We’re all grown men – some of us a tad overgrown perhaps – and we’re actually looking forward to heading out and playing plenty of dates.

CARL (speaking in 1999): As time moves on, we went through a phase of seeing loads of bands imitate our video style, say, and you think, ‘Oh look, they’re using that from that video, and that’s from that.’ Now it’s so ingrained that you don’t even notice it any more. So many people used our brightness, everyday-ness, that it’s become a staple, really, and you don’t even notice it. Musically, I think we’ve been so sort of almost humble in our effect. We couldn’t believe our luck that everything is going so well, it never really occurred to us that we’d influenced others. We couldn’t believe, we were kinda gobsmacked and shocked, when No Doubt came out and the Mighty Mighty Bosstones said we’d given them a lift in a limo years ago after Saturday Night Live. That’s the thing about history isn’t it? You don’t know the importance of moments till years later. It’s funny; it’s strange.

CARL (speaking in 1999): I love being with the band members, especially Suggs. I have fantastic conversation with him, my life is greyer without his company. But then we don’t live in each other’s pockets, we’ve both got families and we get on with being families.

CARL (speaking in 1999): Our attitude has remained the same. Our attitude was that we played pop music and we continue to do that. We’ve always been approachable – we were never on a ‘star trip’ and that’s resulted in a lot of goodwill. People vote with their feet. And we wouldn’t have it any other way.

CHRIS (speaking in 1999): Myself and Mark sign the cheques, so we meet up every week. But I usually hang around with people who have nothing to with Madness or the music biz.

SUGGS (speaking in 1999): I think part of the reason Madness are still held in great esteem is that we encapsulate something in people’s lives – that’s what people tell me anyway; that it was when they were growing up, or met their girlfriends. There are four or five Madness singles that they relate to some of the happier times of their lives. What made us so charming and real had been the fact we’d always been managed by our mates, and we’d always done our own thing.

SUGGS (speaking in 1999): At the moment it’s one day at a time. We’re all pretty amazed that we got on together enough to make a new album. For now, we’re just enjoying playing live and being serious again. Up to this point, it’s been dabbling.

CHRIS (speaking in 1999): We may go back to tour the US next year. We had a great time there earlier this year.

WOODY (speaking in 1999): We do have plenty of things half-written already, so the songs are definitely out here. As long as the enthusiasm is there, we won’t be able to help ourselves.

LEE (speaking in 1999): If we do make another one, it won’t be a case of, ‘Get in the studio now…crack-crack-crack’ like it used to be. We’ll just sit back and wait to be inspired.

SUGGS (speaking in 1999): One other thing we’ve been talking about is a musical – I don’t know if that’s naff or not. Doing Madness songs with a story in between might be quite a good idea, but it’s just a tentative possibility at the moment. I mean, all our songs are little stories – things like On The Beat Pete – so tying them all together could tell one bigger story.