Good morning!
Hope you had a smashing weekend,
We’re going to keep that footloose and fancy-free feeling going with a highly enjoyable natter with chief nutty boy and all round bon vivant, Suggs. Madness have just released one of the best albums of their career and Suggs was in a rightly buoyant mood, treating himself to a morning fag and a Guinness when we called him up to talk about the record. Cheers to that. We’ll see you all paying New Cue subscribers on Friday for more new musical recommendations, albums to blow your mind and more. If you want to join us, just click that subscribe now button down there.
Enjoy the edition,
Ted, Niall and Chris
Start The Week With… Suggs
Camden Town tearaways turned national treasures, Madness are one of the finest pop groups this country has ever produced. Earlier this month they released their 13th studio album, The Theatre Of The Absurd Presents C’est La Vie. An at times despairing look at Covid-era Britain, it’s one of the best albums they’ve ever made and, rightly so, is currently sitting at the top of the UK album charts. Unbelievably, given their copper-bottomed run of hit singles in the 1980s, it’s the first time Madness have had a number one album.
Chris called frontman Suggs up last week for a quick chat about the record and all things Madness. Impressively, given it was quarter to twelve in the morning, he was already down the pub…
Hello, Suggs. How are you?
Hello, hello, hello. I’m good thanks, mate.
The new Madness album came out last Friday, how have you been finding people’s reaction to it so far?
It’s been great. The album seems to be very well received. Often, you’re doing promotion for things and you think, ‘Why am I doing this?’ But it all seems to be going down very well. This album seems to have tapped into some sort of zeitgeist, or whatever the fuck you call it.
It’s great. I’d say it’s up there with [2009’s late career comeback] The Liberty Of Norton Folgate as one of your best records.
Thank you very much. It’s funny because we had Norton Folgate in mind when we were making it. We did a similar process, which was we found a space, just an old industrial unit, which meant that we didn’t have to have to stress about professional studios or rehearsal rooms and we just spent a lot of time there on it. We recorded forty songs so we got something that we could can boil down into something bigger than the sum of its parts.
Were you in [junction on the North Circular] Staples Corner?
Yeah, Cricklewood. [Starts singings] Cricklewooooooood! If we were Ray Davies, we would have written a song about it. We spent about four months in there and then we thought, ‘Why don’t we just record in there and see if we can capture the feeling that we had?’ We’d seen that documentary Get Back - not to compare ourselves to The Beatles by any means - and that scene where they’re all sitting in a circle. So we set ourselves up in a circle which we’ve never done before, normally we’re set up like we’re on stage, and it was great. After all we’d been through, just to be playing music together again started to make sense.
Had you started prior to Covid?
We wrote most of the songs during or just after Covid. The songs are obviously about our own individual experience of that rather awful period. Hence, The Theatre Of The Absurd. I felt like I going a bit absurd. It was like a tsunami of creativity once we got back into it. We’d been communicating on email and trying to sort of Zoom, but none of it really came to anything. We did a couple of online things which were relatively enjoyable, but nothing beats being in a room together making music or performing. We did a thing at The Palladium with Charlie Higson which was great, but when it came to being on stage, performing to an empty auditorium was so bizarre because every fibre in your body goes, ‘Fuck, there’s nobody here!’ It was like your first gig, ‘Fuck, no one’s turned up…’ But we’re back on the road next week so everything is coming together very nicely at the minute.
This album seems to come from a darker place than people might expect from Madness.
Yes. I think Madness have always had that element. It was [Pet Shop Boys singer and former Smash Hits journalist] Neil Tennant that said the word ‘pathos’ about us, which I’d never heard before. Apparently, it means happiness and sadness at the same time. I mean, we had a lot of arguments, we were all disagreeing about what was right and wrong about the pandemic. But once we got in the room, everyone expressed themselves about their own feelings, and they were very divergent. But the democracy of our band means that if someone’s got a song, we’re all give it everything we can. Even if we don’t agree necessarily with all of the sentiments, we have tolerance for each other.
Where did the idea of presenting it as a three-act play and getting Martin Freeman to be compere come from?
It’s a strange sort of business, creativity. We got in the room and we started playing each other’s demos and then it starts getting somewhere. I had the song The Theatre Of The Absurd and it seemed like a good way of looking at the world. Martin Freeman is an old friend of ours and we had the idea, why don’t we make it like one of those old fashioned concept albums, like [The Who’s] Tommy or Quadrophenia and add another layer to this? It worked well, I think.
It gives it the feeling of a post-war matinee; you can see it in an old Soho theatre.
Yeah, that faded glamour. We’ve always liked that. What you might call music hall, we’ve always liked that colour. The wallpaper peeling off the walls and all that.
Is London and its history a big inspiration for you?
Of course. We have always been affected by the environment we’re in and the people that we meet and I’m very proud of that. Not to say London’s any better than anywhere else, but it is. I remember looking at the Buena Vista Social Club and thinking they couldn’t have come from anywhere but Havana. We couldn’t have come from anywhere but London, and it informs what we do. Our biggest influences were The Kinks and Ian Dury, certainly lyrically. For me, singing in your own vernacular about your own part of the world were big influences.
On Norton Folgate, for instance, we just picked one part of London and then dug down to the bones of it. I’ve written songs about Camden Town because that’s so much of our history and I was trying to think of a song about London, but there’s just too much there. I came across this phrase, The Liberty Of Norton Folgate in some book and just that tiny little bit of the East End has so much history.
This is the 13th Madness album, unlucky for some…
It’s lucky for me because I was born on Friday the 13th, so it’s perfect.
Was it ever conceivable when you joined the band that you’d spend your whole life doing this?
No, no, no. You get a gig in a pub and you think, ‘Wow, that’s great!’ And then you make a record and you think, ‘Well, you know, at least no one can take that away...’ And then suddenly we were on a very fast trajectory – excuse me, I’m just going to roll a cigarette.
A colleague of mine said he was once interviewing Brian Johnson from AC/DC and while he was answering a question Brian rolled a cigarette with one hand.
Ha! That’s an old trucker trick. I’m just in The Blue Posts in Soho.
Is the fact that Madness is a democracy like you were saying a big reason for why you’re still going strong 46 years on?
Yeah. We’ve always been a democracy, but mainly because everybody gets an outlet of one sort or another and we all put as much effort into everyone’s songs as our as our own, even if we don’t particularly think they’re the best. [Breaks off] Hello Charles, can I have half a Guinness? Thank you.
I was talking the other day about The Specials, how sad it was that Terry Hall passed away without him Jerry Dammer ever having patched it up.
I know. It was very sad. I was close with Jerry and Terry and you can never take sides. I mean, we’ve been friends since we were at school, so we know each other and there’s a lot of tolerance. I think tolerance is a very undervalued word.
Would you welcome [second vocalist and trumpet player who left Madness in 2014] Chas Smash back into the fold?
Yeah, yeah, yeah! He seems very happy in Ibiza at the moment, but who knows what the future might hold.
One last thing. You said earlier that you’d never compare Madness to The Beatles, but I’ve long had a theory that Madness are an as good, if not better, singles band than The Beatles.
Hahahahaha! Make that the headline.
Seriously, single to single you’ve got Love Me Do versus The Prince. No contest. Please Please Please in the blue corner, in the red… One Step Beyond. They’ve got you on She Loves You versus Night Boat To Cairo, maybe, but if you go through song by song you give them a run for their money.
That’s hilarious. They were a huge influence on us, but I can’t compare us to them. We have done some good singles.
It’s been a pleasure chatting to you, Suggs. Enjoy your Guinness.
Cheers mate!
CC