1982

CHRIS: We’d decided to do it straight, like serious musicians. The director was begging us to dress up as French Foreign Legion. In the end we cracked and really went for it, and it was one of the funniest things we ever did. Carl was spitting nails out of his mouth, Bedders was on crutches which we kicked away; it was nutty. After France, we travelled to Italy and did a 45-minute special in a circus. We spent three days filming and I fell off an elephant.

CARL: The title caused most of the aggravation that meant the song didn’t get played as much. Some people were offended without even knowing what the song was really about.

WOODY: Maybe if we’d stuck to the original song title, which was 7 Letters, the single would have gone top 10.

CARL: Yeah, we should have done that – the content wouldn’t have been so obvious. We got a lot of trouble over it. People writing to me saying, ‘How dare you write a song like that? My father had a heart attack, you don’t know what it feels like’ etc. But I did know what it felt like ­– my own father had a heart attack; that’s why I wrote it. It was born out of concern. The message was, ‘Relax darling, don’t get stressed.’ As the Arabs say, ‘Walk through life, don’t run.’

MIKE: The DJ at Radio 1 seemed to take it very personally, which I didn’t think was very fair of him.

BEDDERS: For the B-side, we used another version of In The City that we’d recorded in London and made into a three-minute song.

CHRIS: For the video, we went to this house in Hollylodge Estate, NW5 – a location Lee had suggested, which was another of his childhood addresses – and knocked on a few doors. We finally got permission for Carl to be seen coming out, after we had parted with £50. Carl was excellent as the harassed businessman type who stresses himself up, up, up and away. We also had hours of fun driving around London shouting at people from a real London bus, that we’d hired, with Lee as the conductor. We did get a few old ladies hailing it, so we collected a few passengers and pennies on the way, which went towards the budget.

CARL: I was made up to look older, and while we were making it I went into a shop to buy something, carrying The Times. I just squiggled on the cheque and they didn’t even check it cos I looked like a middle-aged sensible businessman.

MIKE: It was a shame the BBC didn’t play it more, because we were getting good at making videos, and this was a fine example.

CHRIS: We did film an entirely different version of us performing it, which never got used at all.

CHRIS: We flew to Los Angeles to do a second load of adverts for those wacky Honda people. The first ones had been filmed in a studio in Japan, but these second ones were filmed in LA because they thought those streets looked English. I spent most of the time watching Mike squirt tomato sauce in a girl’s face. This was considered the funniest part of the advert by the Japanese. The girl had nine costumes in order to make sure we got it right.

SUGGS: They had a few ideas about what they wanted us to do, but we didn’t know what on earth they were talking about. The production involved this huge chain of command. The director would only speak directly to the person below him, who could only speak to the person below him, so everything had to go through a chain of two dozen people before it got to us. And vice-versa, so if we had a suggestion it would take half an hour for that information to get back to the director. We just filled up the time mucking about as we would have done if we were making one of our videos.

CARL: We were told that if we did these ad we’d be really big overseas. But it’s the same as it is here – people see you on ads and think you’re a wanker.

CHRIS: We should have made much more money out of it too.

CARL (speaking in 1982): Now I’m trying to write more with video in mind. It can sharpen your focus, make things easier to describe and actually write what you’re trying to say. I mean, there’s loads of records I’ve heard that have loads of different meanings or different interpretations, like 2HB by Roxy Music… I only just found out it’s about Humphrey Bogart and now it all makes sense.

LEE (speaking in 1982): I write my best songs at one or two in the morning, I dunno why – the mood just hits me. It might be that I got an idea while riding about during the daytime, so if I’m awake for more than an hour, I just jump out of bed because I know I’m not gonna get to sleep unless I write that idea down. So, I get up at three, maybe four in the morning and whack it down. All my songs get written differently. Sometimes I put bits together from several different songs. Sometimes, I’ll do the whole thing in one night. Sometimes I write half a song and leave it for months before I pick up my sax and finish it. Hopefully it’ll get used at some point.

CARL (speaking in 1982): A lot of people put swear words in their songs but we don’t because it’s stupid… you’re a fool to yourself.

SUGGS: We’d turn up to do TV shows in France and they’d go, ‘Come on, be crazy’. So as a reaction we’d decide to be dead serious. They’d never go for it, though, and we’d end up being daft just out of exasperation.

CARL (speaking in 1982): We need someone to be antagonistic towards us to bring the wacky stuff out of us. We need to have some producer who’s a right ponce telling us what to do and we won’t do it and then we’ll start getting really stupid.

CHRIS (speaking in 1982): It’s also good to have Robbo cos he can order us about a bit. If I started ordering people about, they’d tell me to fuck off but it’s okay for him cos he’s outside and inside if you know what I mean.

CHRIS: We did some photos with Anton Corbjin at the top of the Scala Cinema Kings Cross. They were moody, they were black white… they weren’t used.

CHRIS (speaking in 1982): We used to do what people wanted for photo sessions. They’d say, ‘Put on your nutty suit… look nutty… Suggs, put your foot in a bucket’. Not any more.

SUGGS (speaking in 1982): I think people might think we’re freaks all the time. It’s a bit like being a well-known comedian who is always expected to be funny to order. It’s like you’re sitting down somewhere and somebody comes over and expects you to stand on your head or something. At the BBC they think we’re going to start running wild. They say, ‘No you can’t go into that cupboard’ and the security men think we’re odd. It only makes us worse when we go into the studio, it all really comes out then.

CHRIS: Photo session No2 was at the Alexandra Palace, with Lee hanging upside from a chain (as usual). The pictures were in colour by Eric Watson, but they weren’t used.

ERIC WATSON (photographer): Originally, I was asked to do the session on Primrose Hill, with Lee suspended from a crane above the band, but we couldn’t get permission to take the crane onto the hill and were forced to relocate to Alexandra Palace. It was midwinter, the light was awful and I had to run my lights from a noisy, smoky petrol generator which backfired constantly. The pictures were poor and we all got wet and muddy. Mike’s verdict was coruscating: ‘We could have done that in the studio. It looks like London’s just a painted backdrop behind us.’

CHRIS: Photo session No3 was done in a studio, again in colour and again by Eric Watson, and this time the pictures were used. At last we had an album cover to be proud of.

ERIC WATSON: The white background was my idea. It wasn’t prompted by any agenda other than I had a white background up in the studio when they arrived.

CHRIS: There was a red jacket that belonged to Clive Langer who wore it when he was in Deaf School. He ‘lent’ it to Thommo for photo session No3. So of course next gig, ‘man of the people, non-materialistic’ Thommo throws it into the crowd as a grand gesture. Clive was watching aghast.

LEE (speaking in 1982): All of us have hundreds of ideas we haven’t put to use yet. I’d love to make a TV series. But, between recording and touring and making videos, we just never seem to have the time. Still I write every idea down in my little book. One day an idea of mine might turn up in a song, or a video or a comic strip for our fan club tape.

LEE (speaking in 1982): Our aim is to send people home rolling about with happiness. When we first started going out to gigs to see other groups, the bands acted as though they were bored. We were all determined never to be bored – or boring.

SUGGS: I think that individually none of us are geniuses, but collectively we seem to be able to reach things.

CHRIS: There were three geniuses in Madness – Carl, Mike and Lee. The rest of us just try hard. But the strength of the band was to write songs in isolation that were, generically, Madness, in the same way that everything Monty Python did was Pythonesque.

WOODY (speaking in 1982): Me and Mark are most important in the actual feeling of the tracks – the way the actual records bounce. They either skip or plod. I suppose it’s the dance side of it. The rest of them, they just put all their fancy bits on top (laughs).

MIKE: I don’t like doing things in a weedy way. If we just put out any old tosh then it wouldn’t be Madness. If we’re ever been sloppy, I’ve always felt bad about it afterwards. 



CARL (speaking in 1982): We’re probably out of step with everybody else, but we don’t care. It’s nice, I suppose, to be fashionable. But we’ve always been out of step with whatever’s going on. The fact that we ‘caught on’ with the public was pure chance. It just happens to be a sound that we like – a mixture of jazz, soul, Blue Beat and R‘n’B. Punk went on about the depressing times but we’ve been through all that, and we don’t want to sing about it or glamorise it in any way.

DAVE ROBINSON: They’d done a lot of work over a couple of albums, and they hadn’t written very much for whatever reason. It was a good time to put it out; it gave them a breathing space – plus I always thought bands should put out a ‘greatest hits’ several times in their career.

WOODY (speaking in 1982): This album isn’t the end of Madness. It’s not, ‘They’re going downhill, The Human League are massive – let’s whack out a greatest hits’. Hopefully, it just closes the door on what’s gone on before.

DAVE ROBINSON: I thought we should add a new single to the album as well as the oldies, because their fans would buy everything, and you wanted to give them value for money. I used to pick a lot of new, upcoming singles just from little dabbles while we were making videos and waiting for the camera crew to shift or what ever it was. So when House Of Fun came up, I thought, ‘That’s really good, that’s the one for this greatest hits package.’

SUGGS (speaking in 1982): It doesn’t matter, honestly. We don’t have any real goals in life. None of us have any real musical ambitions. If it all goes, then so what? We’ve made a few quid for ourselves. Longevity doesn’t matter. Once it stops being a laugh, we’ll probably pack it in, anyway. It’s only pop music, after all.

SUGGS: When we made House of Fun we were definitely at the height of our collaboration – something just came together in the studio. It’s a very rare and weird thing.

BEDDERS: By that point we were making really good pop records and we kind of knew when it came to the craft and technique of them we had really got it down pat. House of Fun was a good example of how we wrote, with any old lyrics thrown on top of melodies just to sketch a song out. I’m sure odd lines were used elsewhere but, more importantly, the melody was probably coupled with other lyrics to make a new song. So Lee started with a rough outline for the story, which included: ‘Good morning miss / Can I help you son?’ There was no ‘Welcome to the House of Fun’ – that was added much later in the studio.

CHRIS: It’s about coming of age, which I can’t remember much about because it happened to me a long time ago. You could by a packet of fags, a pint of beer and a three piece suit for half a crown and still have enough left to go and see Rudolf Valentino at the Gaulmont. I can’t afford to go to the pictures these days but I hear they talk in them now.

MIKE: It’s about when you get to that age when suddenly there’s a lot of temptations of different sorts… welcome to the house of fun!

SUGGS: The inspiration for the song was the film Summer Of  ’42. The song’s about a kid entering into the world of adulthood. Basically he’s buying his first condom but has to buy loads of lollies and ice-creams before he gets enough courage to ask for one.

CHRIS: Lee said he’d seen the film and the bit where the guy goes in to the chemist really stuck in his mind.

SUGGS: It was originally called The Chemist Facade but the record label were quite worried about having a song about condoms. At that point, we weren’t conscious about having a message, we were just writing about things that we’d experienced. We were young and naïve [but] we were probably aware it was risque, so we probably were trying to cover it up. But it seems funny now that you should worry about telling kids to wear condoms.

WOODY: Nowadays of course, in this climate of AIDS and being sensible, I’m sure the BBC would be the first ones to promote a song like that or even reveal its true message.

JOHN WYNNE: The song was going round in Lee’s head for years. We were sitting in a pub called The Palmerstone and I remember him telling me, ‘I’ve got an idea for this song, all about buying condoms.’ He was working it out in his head.

CARL: It was another example of us writing songs about normal life and the kind of things that everyone can relate to. We just took a segment of everyday life and blew it up to cinematic proportions. But Lee, being Lee, didn’t say what it was about directly, instead he said, ‘A packet of party poppers / With a fether-lite touch.’  It was like a lot our songs – there was something pretty serious behind it, but it was very subtle. And people didn’t realise it.

WOODY: It’s another great example of why Lee is such a fantastic lyricist and why his writing is just inspired. The amazing thing is that he’s not grammatically correct, but that actually helps his writing; it means so much more and comes from the heart.

SUGGS: We’d finished it in the studio but it didn’t really have a chorus.

CLIVE LANGER: Up until then, it was really just an album track.

CHRIS: We hadn’t realised the song wasn’t too good until Robbo said, ‘It hasn’t got a chorus’. And at that point, we needed a new single.

DAVE ROBINSON: I went down the studio, and again we were right up to the edge with time. They’d finished it and I listened to it and I thought, ‘Where’s the chorus?’ At that point, what’s now the bridge was the chorus: ‘This is a chemist / Not a joker’s shop.’

JOHN WYNNE: Dave got up and said, ‘There’s no fucking chorus. Put a fucking chorus on it, I’ll be back in two hours.’ And he went. Alan and Clive just shat themselves.

DAVE ROBINSON: I made them listen to it four or five times, finally everyone said, ‘You’re right.’ So they got around the piano and banged out House Of Fun.

SUGGS: Me and Chris went into a back room and wrote the chorus – which we never got credited for, I hasten to add.

CLIVE LANGER: Me, Mike and Suggs sat round a piano while Alan went off to another studio to copy the drums so it would be the same tempo either side of whatever we came up with. This was on a Friday night, so we said to Dave, ‘Come in on Sunday evening or Monday morning and we’ll have the chorus in there.’ And we just huddled round the piano and worked it out.

DAVE ROBINSON: When I heard it, I said, ‘That’s it, get it together.’

CHRIS: We recorded the chorus in various bits and surgically edited it into the record.

SUGGS: Clive and Alan just had to cut the tape across all the tracks and slap it together, like they did on The Beatles’ Strawberry Fields Forever.

ALAN WINSTANLEY: We didn’t want to re-record the whole song, so I copied the entire multi-track from that bridge and just used the drums, and then we overdubbed all of the chorus instruments and vocals onto that before I had to re-edit it into the multi-track. In this day and age, with crossfades and ProTools, it would be a piece of piss, but back then it was a nightmare.

DAVE ROBINSON: If you listen closely, it’s got a slightly different beat and is not totally in sync.

SUGGS: You can also hear it change sonically from the verses to the chorus and becomes brighter.

CHRIS: The first line also sounds more like ‘…elcome to the House of Fun…’ as it was so tight to drop in you can still hear the joins.

ALAN WINSTANLEY: When Suggs sang ‘Welcome’ it was just before the downbeat of the bar, so when I edited it in it went ‘…elcome to the house of fun,’ completely missing out the ‘W’. The only solution was for him to go back in and dub in all the ‘welcomes’. That was quite a challenge – and all because the song’s focus moved away from the chemist shop.

CLIVE LANGER: Putting the ‘W’ in ‘welcome’ probably took up the whole of Sunday afternoon, but it was a fun weekend. At the same time, Mike put down the piano for the melody and then Suggs sang it, and we kept the piano in the final mix, so it had a kind of Abba effect, where they would do the melody on the piano and also sing it; it’s quite a pop thing. ‘Welcome to the House of fun’ really jumped out; if you took the piano out it would be a bit flat.

SUGGS: When we released it, someone wrote, ‘It sounds like a corpse bouncing on a trampoline.’ And it still went straight to No1. But that’s the great thing about a song. You write a song on your own and come up with some funny old lyric, somebody puts music to it, and then it’s out there, doing its own thing. It may keep resurfacing and it may not. It may keep you going, it may just wither and die. But when they keep going, ironically, you have more chance of coming back because then they keep relating to different generations.

CHRIS: Of course, as was normally the case, Suggs and myself got no songwriting credit on the track. But at the time I thought, ‘Well Barso has done enough bits on my songs’ so I wasn’t really worried about it. When it later became our first – and criminally only – No1, Barso sort of mumbled, ‘Yeah, er, that’s good ain’t it? Seeing as, er, well, er, we sort of all wrote it, didn’t we?’ in an almost embarrassed tone.

SUGGS: I came up with the title and wrote the chorus, but didn’t get credited. To this day I can barely mention the title onstage without wanting to throw up.

WOODY: I remember the whole controversy of it being about buying condoms. I mentioned it to someone in the press, and the next thing I was dragged in by Dave Robinson and told I must keep my mouth shut and mustn’t mention it because the record would be banned. He said, ‘If the BBC find out about it, we’ve had it.’ I was told I mustn’t explain a song I didn’t write!

CHRIS: This video was one of my favourites because everything that we filmed ended up on the flickering 20″ screen. There was nothing on the old cutting room floor.

DAVE ROBINSON: We spent around £12,000, which was a big budget for us really; the rest of them we shot as quickly as possible. I remember there wasn’t a great deal of catering, it was the local McDonald’s – we were firmly in independent record company land.

LEE: Doris, my grandmother, lived in Great Yarmouth and put me in contact with the owners of the fairground to work out times/schedules for the shoot. My dad got to speak to them first, as he was living there at the time and it was out of season time for the fairground staff so it was convenient. Stiff got the coach and video crew up there, and us of course. The rest as they say, was a right jolly-up.

CHRIS: Dave had got these little things called zap guns. They were like little video cameras about four inches square with fixed legs and they had four minutes of film. They were kind of developed in the war. So we did some of the video on that.

CARL: I like the bit where me, Lee and Mike are dressed as women dancing. That’s really funny. And I really like the shot where Suggs is on the helter-skelter with the flag.

MIKE: I remember admiring that one from afar too.

CARL: Do you remember, Bedders was too scared to go on the rollercoaster?

MIKE: Well, they hadn’t used it all year; it had been closed all winter and they’d opened up a week early just so we could use it. On we went before it was even tested – it was a bit risky. I thought, ‘Instead of actually going on the bloody thing, can’t we just put the camera on and send it round filming us here?’

SUGGS: We went round on that circular roller coaster about 54 fucking times.

WOODY: One of the best memories I’ve got is Robbo going on with us and his wallet and all his money fell out of his pockets. It was just hysterical because he lost every bean, and you very rarely see Dave Robinson part with any money.

SUGGS: It was the first time I’d seen any of his money.

CARL: It was probably ours anyway, which he hadn’t paid us.

CHRIS: The Joke Shop was Escapade in Camden High Street, a regular source for props, costumes, gags, etc.

CARL: The barber’s shop was Anastasi’s in Muswell Hill.

CHRIS: Other stuff was filmed at Denyer House in Highgate Road – another of Lee’s old addresses. Dave Robinson really didn’t want to film it in a chemist, but we eventually did it in one just off Kilburn Park road. The girl in it who Suggs talks to was Clare Muller, who used to take lots of our photos. She was really small, so she had to stand on a box.

NIGEL DICK (video producer): I organised the chemist’s shop/joke shop and rented all those costumes. It was done on a piece of paper which Dave had in his back pocket, with no writing, no script or pre-production meetings. I had to ring the bloke who owned the joke shop and do the deal so he’d close the store for two hours while we lit the set and shot it.

HECTOR WALKER (band assistant): On the second day of filming, I remember Matthew Sztumpf’s daughters, Hannah and Chloe, sitting at his desk listening to story tapes on his Walkman as the band and crew gathered ready for a day’s work.

CHRIS: We had a saying from Monty Python, which was, ‘It’s your funny.’ So if someone came up with an idea that was rather ludicrous, they would have to do it. In this one, Suggs really wanted to have people dressed as temptation and little devils, but I didn’t notice him in one of those stupid green suits.

LEE: It was getting more serious, in a childish sort of way.

DAVE ROBINSON: People remember the humour in videos like House of Fun long after they forget the good-looking haircuts.

LEE (speaking in 1982): We just rent a bus and camera and go where our ideas take us. When you make a film you have 30 or more other people who travel with you to take care of make-up and lighting and such. I do lose sleep over videos. We used to just go out with a camera and do something that grabbed our fancy. Now, we take more time over them – two days. We like to watch the ‘rushes’; the rough takes, then a few days later they get edited and we can play it back on a small screen. It has to look good on a small screen because that’s where most people will see it. When we first see them, they’re like old silent movies; no sound. But you can still judge whether the idea works or not. I think videos are great fun. You can reach so many people with them, it’s fantastic. It ain’t so much the ideas, it’s the people innit? Y’know, it’s the characters. A lot of people got embarrassed, they only get into it half-heartedly but if they’re only putting half their heart into it, it ain’t gonna work.

SUGGS: Even in our heyday, people in Camden would leave us alone a bit. There wasn’t that tabloid hunger in those days, and there wasn’t a lot of music in the papers. Also, we weren’t in the girly market. Girls didn’t like Madness, so there was no point in writing about us, so we avoided all that. 

CHRIS: We didn’t have a professional player in the side as some groups did and we drew one match, lost one and retired gracefully.

SUGGS (speaking in 1982): The image of the band is itself almost as strong as the music, if not more memorable, to the average person. I don’t know if it’s right or not, but musically we’ve been looked on as something instant, not really worthy of analysis.

CARL: Weirdly enough, the further away we were from England, the bigger the hits would be. We were actually in Japan when House Of Fun went to No1.

SUGGS: It was about 9am when we found out – not really a time for partying. The bass player from The Jam rang us to say congratulations.

MIKE: It didn’t really matter, to be honest.  I mean if we’d got to No1 really early on, it would’ve probably been extremely exciting.

BEDDERS: I’d expected that we’d go mad once we had a No1 and we’d have a big party. But it wasn’t as much as I thought it would be. It was more a sigh of relief than anything else, it wasn’t so much a case of jubilation as relief that we’d actually done it.

LEE (speaking in 1982): I suppose it was everybody’s dream to get big and famous and have our music heard, but me personally, I never thought it’d get to this. When we first started, Mike could play the keyboards alright, but I couldn’t tell a sax from a French horn. I can’t even play too well now.

SUGGS (speaking in 1982): Sometimes I get really embarrassed when I’m on stage. In England they go mad before you even come onstage. You feel like they’re not there to listen, really, they’re just there to go mad. I feel like doing something horrible so they’ll listen. Some days I’m totally overwrought by it all. I never intended to be a musician or be in a band or anything, and I wouldn’t make singing a career now if it wasn’t for Madness.

WOODY (speaking in 1982): The other unfortunate thing is that the music business is our life, and you can fall into the trap of continually talking about music and it can sound terribly ‘Yah Yah!’ It’s not that way at all. It’s just that it is your life – you don’t often go traipsing around the supermarket, unless you get time off, so what else can you talk about? You can get too wrapped up in it all, and that is a major worry.

SUGGS (speaking in 1982): Like anybody, you don’t really imagine or realise that you’ll be a great success. We always knew, when we were young, that anything we did would be brilliant. Every time we played we expected everyone to go mad, but it didn’t go beyond an immediate enthusiasm for impressing
people, as opposed to becoming nationally successful.

BEDDERS (speaking in 1982): I must admit that I feel detached sometimes from what is going on, you don’t realize you’re in the heart of it.

WOODY (speaking in 1982): I don’t think that we ever go out to look for success, success isn’t the thing that we’re after; it’s gratification and satisfaction for ourselves musically that we want. Obviously you’re going to appreciate what’s going to be popular and what isn’t, but that’s in single sales. When it comes to an album it’s nice to be able to sit back and do exactly what you want to do.

SUGGS (speaking in 1982): You get kids in the street, just down the road here and they say, ‘I like Duran Duran now, I don’t like your music much.’ I just go, ‘Uh, thanks.’
 But Duran Duran’s kind of success comes through the sort of attitude, ‘We are stars, pander to us please.’ We’ve never done that. I think maybe we could have been more successful that way if we’d wanted to but that isn’t the way we behave. I think there’s something obscene about thinking someone’s better than you just because they’re in a band but I can’t say it’s bad because that’s the way it has been and always will be. You just can’t tell people that they can’t idolise people any more.
You can appreciate someone for what they do if you think they do it well, which is a bit different. I think that’s what we’d prefer rather than mindless adulation. It just seems inane, stupid… we’re approachable, we try not to have that aura of speciality about us.

CARL (speaking in 1982): There’s so much conning and falseness in the whole set up, like when you go on TV there’s certain things you don’t say. You’re forced to draw the line, you’re not going to turn around to Jimmy Savile in front of 15 million viewers and ask, ‘Have you got any gear? Any good 16-year-olds up at Stoke Mandeville?’

SUGGS: We reached a certain level of success where I think we’re in the consciousness of most people but not in such a way as they are going to want to run screaming after me or the News of the World are going to be particularly interested. And thank heavens, because another great attribute and side effect of that is I can still write songs about the things that I like. Which are being able to sit at the side of the street watching the world go by. Normal things. You’ve heard that thing about why people like Rod Stewart stop writing great songs, he says himself it’s because he ended up in a big house in Beverly Hills.

MIKE (speaking in 1982): When you start out it’s really different because you’re doing everything yourself and you know exactly what’s going on. When people start doing things for you it spoils it quite a lot. You don’t have to lose control, but it happens because there’s so much work, you have to rely on other people. There’s too much going on – it’s got too big now.

SUGGS: The heyday of Madness was really the heyday of the great British pop single. There were so many great acts. But I should say our nemesis was Duran Duran, because you know we were making videos staggering along street corners with a popped balloon on a piece of string while they were in Monaco on a giant yacht and all that. At the time we thought, ‘What a load of pretentious old nonsense’. But yeah why did we want to stand on the corners in Kentish Town in the rain? I’m not entirely sure now – maybe because it was where we were really, our imagination didn’t stretch any further.

WOODY: The effect on the charts is just absolutely incredible. You get to the point when you walk down the streets and people go, ‘Oh hello Woody,’ and you’ve never met these people before in your life.  And people say, ‘What’s it feel like to be at No5 in the charts?’ and you kind of go, ‘Er, I don’t know, er, what’s it like to put your washing in a washing machine? Cos that’s what I did this morning’. It doesn’t change your life.  It’s more relevant in your life years down the line. It becomes real to you when you’re not in the middle of it all.  I’m really proud of what I’ve achieved and what the band have achieved.  But you can’t really see it for what it is cos you’re in the middle of it all, living it; you’re doing press, TV, gigs.

SUGGS: I always remember one time we arrived at Heathrow and there was thousands of screaming girls and I thought, ‘What’s happened since we’ve been away?Yeah this is it, we’ve left all the people like Paul Young behind – all the long hair yobbos; it’s a new horizon! We’ve made it! Go on lads, dive in!’ And we were crushed in the stampede as they rushed to get to Duran Duran who were on the next flight. As the dust settled, there waiting for us were two rather large girls in army jackets, holding carrier bags.

SUGGS: Showbusiness can lead to disasters. It’s a never-ending search for more adulation – if you don’t leave it all outside the front door, it’ll kill you. I’ve been very fortunate to have been with the same person since I was 19, who’s seen me start as nothing and become successful, become nothing again and become successful once more. She’s been with me through all the ups and downs.


SUGGS: The music business can be so all-consuming that it can get a bit unhealthy really. You find out your mid-week chart position on Thursday, whether it’s moved an inch one way or another, how many sales you’ve had in Yorkshire… two people in Margate took it back, and you can drive down there and find out who they are, give ’em a fiver each… or you just take it as it comes, hope for the best and if it doesn’t, it doesn’t.  Y’know, worry about something else; worry about your tomatoes, your bees.

NEIL FERRIS: I got a phone call from Matthew on the Friday afternoon saying, ‘Look, Suggsy is not going to do it. His wife is about to give birth to the baby. It’s due tomorrow, he cant do the show’. I said, ‘This is insane Matthew. First of all, no wives ever give birth when they are supposed to. Mine didn’t, yours won’t, you’ve just got to realise…’ I went through all the possibilities, fast plane standing by at Birmingham airport, if she gives birth he can get on the plane straight back, a car, limo waiting for him at Pebble Mill, went through every possibility, Matthew came back to me and said, ‘I’m sorry no, he won’t do it’. I put the phone down from Matthew and spoke to the TV show and said, ‘I assure you, we will come up with some way of doing it yet that you won’t be lost’. I get home and the show rang up, they said words to the effect of the band will never work again. To which Simon Bates rang me and said, ‘Don’t worry darling ignore them, carry on’. The phone calls were going backwards and forwards. I was getting phone calls from the TV people in Birmingham, the TV producer and production assistants saying the band are finished: ‘They have to do it, they are contracted’. Anyway they went on and they did it without Suggsy, and they used that dummy (from the video) to do the lead vocal and it was brilliant, absolutely brilliant and you wouldn’t have known that Suggs wasn’t there.

MIKE: At that time there weren’t many people writing about simple things like driving in your car. You know; rolling your window down, the little joys of life… simple pleasures. Ian Dury brought that quality, the enjoyment of the mundane, so I just took him as inspiration.

SUGGS: Some of the band didn’t like it at all really.

CARL: Listen, mate, you should’ve been on stage with a fuckin’ screwdriver goin’ ‘Donk donk, dink dink, donk donk, dink dink’. It was really annoying – I had to do that for a whole tour.

MIKE: I liked it – you’re out of town, you leave all your worries behind, you’ve got the window down (with a bit of trouble). You had the Americans all going to the beach with their surfboards in the back, we were a bit more practical. Just get the job done, A to B.

CARL: I thought it was really good, the words, ‘Built in a factory by the Tyne’, really literal, a celebration of British workmanship. When those cars came out, it was like ‘Here’s a family car that all the family can drive down to the coast in’, and that’s what Mike was writing a song about. A lot of people thought we’d sunk into a bit of a rut, but we didn’t quite get the kind of feel we wanted on it.

BEDDERS: Mike’s original idea was that during the song he’d switch on the radio and hear another song. Then he’d re-tune and there’d be another one, and so on. I often wonder what would have happened if we’d been a bit more courageous with the ideas.

CARL: I think it needed more work. I wanted it to be a bit more surreal, in the way that Grey Day is a bit weird. It was written around the time there was all that Cortina nonsense on TV and we wanted to try and convey the idiocy of being that attached to a car.

SUGGS: For the video, Lee turned up as an exploding traffic warden. There was nowhere to go after that.

CHRIS: I got the traffic warden outfit made especially for Lee, but because it wasn’t one of his ‘things’ he wasn’t too keen to wear it. It had little lights that came out the side and everything; what more did he want? I also got the hats made that spelled out M-A-D-N-E-S-S.

CARL: We were really into those little details.

WOODY: The idea of the vibraphone solo being played on the skeleton was nicked from The Goodies.

MIKE: We filmed it in a garage down Goldhawk Road. I’ve got good memories about making it – it was good fun.

CHRIS: Me, Carl and Bedders had appeared in a Fun Boy Three video, so we got them a small role in ours as a way of saying thanks, and they very kindly came along.

TERRY HALL (Fun Boy Three):We were asked to make a cameo appearance, standing on the side of the road holding a sign that said, ‘Coventry.’ It was great fun – very slapstick.

LEE: Driving In My Car was a good example of where the video was better than the song. We had a couple like that by the end.

LEE: Don’t ask me about the Royal Gala at the Dominion. I’d rather do gigs like this one every night.

CHRIS: After Suggs and Anne had their baby, much rejoicing was done that night.

CHRIS: When we were doing the Princes Trust they said, ‘You have to play the National Anthem.’ So we said we’d do it, but on kazoos.

MIKE: We could see Prince Charles was up in the Royal Box, so we were all rather shaking at the knees…

CHRIS: …but while we were playing it, I looked up and he was laughing away – he got the joke. Some monarchs would’ve chucked us in prison.

MIKE: Afterwards, they rolled out this lovely bit of carpet for him and we all dutifully lined up to shake hands.

CHRIS: When it got to my turn he asked me, ‘What do you do?’ in that classic voice. I said, ‘I play the guitar’ and he said, ‘How many strings does it have?’ I replied, ‘Six’ and he then quipped, ‘How do you do that with only five fingers?” So I said, ‘I use a plectrum.’ Oscar Wilde must have spun in his grave.

MIKE: I think he’d only come to see The Three Degrees really.

CHRIS: They were the days when that came out – straight in at No4, no fuckin’ about.

CHRIS: It was a laugh – they liked us. We went to rehearsals in a large building in Acton which had all the rooms marked out on the floor in white tape. The line, ‘You hum it, I’ll smash your face in’ was originally planned for the two budding thespians in the band and the most aggressive pair, that is to say Lee and Chas, who both had a ‘hard’ image. However, after a day of them walking around trying the line out in various vocal styles, wigs, costumes etc, I suggested that Suggs should say it, because you wouldn’t really expect him to.

SUGGS: People still come up and say it to me in the street.

NIGEL PLANER (Neil in The Young Ones): My favourite band was Madness. That was who I was most of a fan of. It really added to the whole show – having a band in a sitcom; it’s mad! Exciting as an actor to be there with the band on stage. That was cool.

CHRIS: The Young Ones itself was originally going to be called House of Fun. When it was changed to The Young Ones we were asked to record a version of The Young Ones but we didn’t, because we couldn’t be arsed.

CHRIS: Just before we did The Rise & Fall, there was a feeling that maybe Clive and Alan were becoming a bit too complacent, so we went along to see Trevor Horn. But we got the feeling that he couldn’t do much for us and that our records were fine the way they were. He was saying how he loved the strings on It Must Be Love, the way they were plucked rather than bowed, and the next thing we knew he had used exactly the same effect on an ABC single.

CHRIS: I remember recording at AIR was a right laugh. I taught Paul McCartney how to play Asteroids and The Human League had just got a new drum machine, so we helped them work how to use it.

SUGGS: George Martin came in and said, ‘This is the finest piece of work I’ve heard since A Day in The Life.’ Paul McCartney came in on his hands and knees with Linda on his back waving a vegetarian sausage… well, they came in anyway.

HECTOR WALKER (Suggs’s cousin and band PA): It was Madness’ second tour of Australia. They were the cream of the crop, really. They had a number one album and single. It was just very easy: two weeks, great venues, good transportation, nice hotels. An excellent fan reaction everywhere they went. Fans would crowd the bus and you wouldn’t be able to get through – which was pretty Beatle-esque.

CHRIS: Here’s a funny one – when our manager phoned them, a voice said, ‘Hello, Bruce Stadium, Sheila speaking.’

LEE: The audience in Adelaide was so lively that the first 15 to 20 rows of seats were passed to the back of the venue by security. They were so impatient that Carl had to tell some pack of sheep to stop making finger and silly bugger facial signs at the support. I would say it was the best reaction and the loudest stage sound.

BEDDERS: Known by the band as our Sergeant Pepper, this was an incredibly complex album, with the feeling of breaking new ground with every single song. It was the bridge between the Madness of One Step Beyond and the Madness of Mad Not Mad and, eventually, songs like Lovestruck.

DAVE ROBINSON: It was an odd record with an odd cover; they were trying to write something different.

SUGGS: I think we realised that maybe we’d been restricting ourselves, just like any bunch of kids will do. It’s like we weren’t ‘allowed’ to do certain things; none of us would have grown a beard, for instance, and musically it was probably the same. Certain things were ‘uncool’, like to do introspective stuff. Rise & Fall was generally more thought out and was the first album we made that was an album, not just a collection of songs.

LEE: Being hailed as pop’s clown princes of the UK, we were on a roll. But we had to grow up and lose the funny noses. Our fans could see the cracks appearing and we weren’t in the business of fooling the public unless it naturally tickled them.

CHRIS: We were definitely conscious of a change while we were making it. Maybe everyone was a bit mad – I don’t think I was too happy.

BEDDERS: The album was driven by our desire not to repeat anything that had gone before, so Woody and I tied ourselves in knots making the rhythm parts different. We were trying to write better songs and wanted to have a theme running through everything.

CHRIS: Originally, Carl had said, ‘Let’s all write songs about our childhood’.

CARL: I suggested we should do a concept album to do with our families because it seemed like a rich source – I thought all our individual home lives were very interesting so why not write about them? The main idea was I would say, ‘Go off and write about your own youth and your parents and that’, and then next week, after everyone had done it like good, hard-working boys, I would say, ‘Let’s all write a song about money and fame’ to try and get a bit of output coming, to try and discipline ourselves.

CHRIS: I started writing about places I used to play when I was a kid. Then, when we actually looked at the songs, we realized that even though they were written by different people, each track could be about the same character. We thought about linking them to make a story, and they could all be about the various stages in his life, so the person in Our House would grow up to be Mr Speaker and so on.

SUGGS: Rise and Fall, Primrose Hill, Sunday Morning and Blue Skinned Beast were going to be linked together, telling about the rise and fall of a normal person in a particular area that was falling into bad times. The idea was an average bloke going mad; Madness in all its shapes and forms.

CHRIS: Because we were trying to make it like a play, we were also going to have this little story with dialogue between each track. But we thought it’d get a bit too much to listen to, so we scrapped that idea. We thought, ‘Nah, people will get bored of it.’

SUGGS: As other songs started to be written, the idea kind of lost its way. We realised you had to write songs to fill in bits of the story to keep it moving, but that they might not be very good or able to stand on their own. If you don’t do it properly it can be dreadful – like Toyah or something.

CHRIS: It was the closest we’ve ever come to a concept album and I still think there’s something about it that still sounds very complete.

SUGGS: In the past we’d said, ‘This is the rock ‘n’ roll song, this is the ska song…’ this time it just flowed. I wanted it to be quirky without being banally nutty, and it ended up being a very ambitious album. Clive and Alan always wanted to push themselves as producers, and we wanted to push ourselves as songwriters. The thing is, the arrangements were getting so complicated that we couldn’t fucking play them any more. We just weren’t ready to make an album like that then.

BEDDERS: You can trace a direct line through In The Middle Of The Night to E.R.N.I.E. to Mr Speaker, but on this album, the songs’ characters had more depth; I suppose a horrible word for it would be ‘crafted’. It was justified in some ways because Chris and Carl later won the Ivor Novello award for Our House.

ALAN WINSTANLEY: Many of the songs essentially weren’t up to it, and that was maybe due to them being on the road and Mike beginning to get a bit pissed off with the whole situation, but I still enjoyed making the album.

SUGGS: It wasn’t consciously thought out but we were definitely reflecting a change in our environment. Musically, we just wanted to go deeper. Clive was very prominent in this – like us, he was a psychedelic child, too.

BEDDERS: I think a lot of the songs were quite dramatic and Clive was keen to use lots of strings to highlight that.

ALAN WINSTANLEY: Even though the songs weren’t all that commercial, they were colourful and we could go down a certain road with each of them, whether we were adding a brass band or getting a bit of Bhangra in there. So, it wasn’t boring.

CHRIS: It’s the one album where I wrote most of the music, more than Mike. Plus we were recording in the West End, which was great.

BEDDERS: It was made like all the rest; we rehearsed for a few weeks before recording and everyone brought their songs in. We had a list of 20 and would then work our way through them. Some were complete with tune and lyrics, pretty much ready to record. Others were in pieces and we’d all work on them, rehearsing to try and get finished versions. Obviously some stuck out – Tomorrow’s Just Another Day for one.

ALAN WINSTANLEY: By this point, Suggs had become quite a proficient singer. Earlier on, he wasn’t particularly great, but his voice was part of the band’s sound. It wasn’t hard getting a performance out of him. Occasionally, we might have to take him to the pub, get a few beers in him to loosen him up and then go back to do another vocal, but most of the time we’d do three, four takes and pick the best one. Occasionally, we’d do a composite, he’d go back in and do another three or four takes, we would re-comp it and that might go on three or four times.

CLIVE LANGER: As far as the sax was concerned it was more a case of ‘make it out of tune’ than ‘keep it out of tune’. When Lee found out he’d been playing it wrong, he did learn to play it properly, but slightly out of tune was still what we wanted.

SUGGS: Rise & Fall succeeded because there was so much collaboration. Everyone had to stay interested, or we wouldn’t know what was going on. We were all in the same groove and same vein when
we made it, so there was no pressure on any one person to think of a concept or do all the songs.

LEE: The only thing that I felt was lacking overall was the sound; it sounded like you were listening to it though a tranny radio – no compression.

SUGGS: It was a bit miserable. I think a lot of kids took their copies back and swapped them for Nick Hayward LPs.

CHRIS: They definitely put it out too soon after Complete Madness. They could have held it back for ages and it put us under pressure to do something new. I think it suffered from the fact that Complete Madness was still on the shelves, so many people chose the record with all the singles instead.

LEE: Chris is right – Complete Madness and House of Fun were a hard act to follow. It was a mistake by our record company and I’ll not have anyone say different. Had we taken a year off after promotional commitments for the album I believe that personally, I would not have developed a drink problem. Saying that, the oncoming burnout would have happened around that period anyway. A year out would only have delayed the inevitable.

CHRIS: We were victims of our own success because Complete Madness was out and that was the album everybody bought for Christmas. But you get a song like Our House and you just want to release it straight away.

CLIVE LANGER: I thought the cover was great – it reflected the fact that they were developing year on year, growing up and moving towards a more sophisticated and detailed way of writing and producing songs.

SUGGS: We did the photo shoot on Primrose Hill as it was somewhere that had featured in most of the band’s lives. We all came from the surrounding area so we’d always had good memories of the place. It was somewhere you could play football or, in the winter, go tobogganing, so it’d always been a place of fun and frolics.

BEDDERS: I think the idea to represent one of the songs each on the cover came from Chris.

CHRIS: We sat on top of the hill, each dressed as various characters from the songs. I was Our House, Lee was Blue Skinned Beast, Bedders Calling Cards, Woody Sunday Morning, Carl That Face, Suggs Tomorrow’s Just Another Day (Mr Speaker surely? Ed), and Mike New Delhi, which nearly didn’t make it onto the album.

SUGGS: Some titles were too abstract, so it came down to doing one you could visualise. You had first choice on a song you’d actually written; no one could bagsy it.

CHRIS: We gave Mike a good-natured Maddie ribbing. Comments like, ‘Are you sure it’s worth getting blacked up for?’ echoed over Primrose Hill on that cold and misty morn as a stiff breeze blew in from the Camden bakeries, giving a pungent smell.

BEDDERS: Laurie Lewis took the picture with a special panoramic camera. The sepia was a bit more dramatic than black and white.

LEE: We’d done black and white in a studio and colour inside and out on previous album covers, so brown seemed like a different move. I’m not sure who suggested the sepia, but it’s not really justified unless seen in its original sleeve. It could be said to have expressed the mood of the moment.

SUGGS: Everyone needed to be in the right place as the camera swung round. We had to sit, very, very still.

LEE: Later, we all marched up to Ally Pally for another album cover shoot. They got a crane in to hang me upside down amongst the band for what seemed like forever and a nose bleed. It was eventually used in some teen mag.

BEDDERS: The video is one of my favourites because we reached new heights of choreography…

WOODY: …and there was a lovely Jacuzzi.

CARL: It was the first Jacuzzi in England, I believe, and was shot down at a place belonging to Victor Lownes, the Playboy fella. It was quite a nice house.

CHRIS: We filmed other bits at this grand old house. I really felt sorry for the old boy who owned it. He was sitting there in his kitchen while we were causing chaos.

MIKE: It was another good video – possibly one of the best.

SUGGS: On the day of filming, we ended up ad-libbing about 50 per cent of it.

WOODY: The knocking-on-the-door bit where somebody comes out, goes, ‘Where are they?’ And the others sneak in and close the door… that’s pure Fred Flintstone. We stole lots of ideas from the Keystone Cops and Benny Hill.

LEE: Unlike the Baggy Trousers video, the harness they used to make me fly was made of leather and metal and bits of foam, so it was quite comfortable.

CHRIS: For my guitar solo, I thought, ‘I’ll do a Thommo.’ So we had a young kid with a tennis racquet, then a rocker from the 50s, a 60s Beatles fan and finally a 70s glam rock star. I was supposed to represent the spirit of rock and roll; a wild trip through time, maaaan.

MIKE: I remember we had to hang around for hours while Chris got ready.

CARL: If you look carefully, at one point I’m dancing like Kevin Rowland and taking the mickey out of him.

MARISA MERRY (resident of Stephenson Street location): I remember the band having races on our bikes up and down the street and at the end of the day, the crew bought all the kids fish and chips for tea.

MIKE: By now it was like a 24-hour thing. I was writing songs and we were touring a lot and the record company just push you and push you; they want to milk everything out of it that they can.

SUGGS: The world is such a big place and some bands love to tour all the time, but we never did. Our problem is that we’re lazy, so we decided to stay in Britain and be a big fish in a small pond.

LEE: The United States, in particular, is so huge that it doesn’t feel very comfortable. We went everywhere – Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego – but no matter where we were, we dreamed of only one thing: to return to England.

SUGGS: And anyway, the music that was happening in the States at the time was so far from what we were doing that we were never ever going to be adopted there.

CARL: We just had this feeling, ‘God it’s three years up the road and we’re not seeing our friends, we’re not seeing our family… who are we working for? We started out to do this for ourselves and enjoy it.’

DAVE ROBINSON: They were busy times, but I didn’t push them at all, whatever they might say otherwise. To a degree, there is a certain time for you, and you grow through that time. It wasn’t like you could drag Madness screaming anywhere – they wouldn’t go.

CARL: I’m really pleased that I was fortunate enough to come out of school, do some horrible fuckin’ jobs and then land up with this mob, and not have to do manual labour. It’s a feeling of solidarity you’ve got with a few people in life. This is a bit idealistic, but I’ve always thought it’s better to have four people who’re really good friends than know 50 hardly at all. Once, we were in Japan and I thought I was going mad. It was really nice to have Chris in another room that I could go to, ‘Help, I’m freaking out.’ In Japan, you can’t jump out the windows because they’re suicide proof, so it’s really lucky to have someone you can turn to.