Madness: Classic Or Dud?

stick to the music geir. Please.

then the future of Labour seems black

Is this a Norwegian pun?

Anyone who says "dud" is the nemesis of fun,

They played at the 50th birthday party of the Conservative Party treasurer. They had a choice.

I've been waiting for this from Dom for years. Strange, this moment just arrived now.
And naturally, Dom's wrong.

There isn't a great deal of fun in the later works of Madness.

If you are speaking post-comeback, no.

Dom is Rong. Suggs was good on the Paul Morley thingum last night. Last couple of Madness albums (pre split) were bleak in places, but still great records...

You feeling Suggs as a Virgin Radio drivetime DJ, big man?

I'm feeling killing Suggs for those twatting fish finger adverts.

Shows you how bad that Morley thing must have been if Tory Suggs was the best he could manage.

Is he out as a Tory or are we just running an exciting McCarthyite witchhunt? Which I'm totally cool with by the way.

Presumably, Madness' agency booked them for the gig, so it's more about "were they violently opposed to whoever it was" as opposed to "are card carrying tories" right?

Suggs, the Madness frontman, chaired a special Question Time for local teenagers at Camden Town Hall earlier this week as part of Local Democracy Week.

Over 50 teenagers from schools and youth organisations across Camden fired questions at a panel of Councillors representing the Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrats parties. Among the topics covered in a very lively discussion were education funding, leisure facilities, voting for 16 year olds, anti social behaviour, environmental issues and how relevant politics was to ordinary people.

Tory Suggs commented that the party gave them an opportunity to see "how the other half lived."

But they took the thirty thousand pieces of silver and THEY HAD A PRINCIPLED CHOICE

Oh I didn't read upthread. OK cool Tory Scum. Ban.

they are pay cheque whores though aren't they.
they have always moaned about how during their peak years they were all broke and got ripped off by Stiff (though having 7 members in a band is always going to make the money a lot less per person) and always go on about it via little digs here and there (video commentaries), so i'd suggest that this was just a way to earn a few extras.
as for the music - well i still think that Wonderful is just that.
I hate the Party Pleasers a lot, but as i stated ago up there ^^^ i still love this band.

xpost : oh fair enough. they are tory twats.

The sight of Suggs gurning and doing his jerky dad-can't-dance dance in a Phil Jupitus cast-off big loud suit, singing Cecilia on TOTP in the mid 90s still haunts me for some reason.

Morley was right though, My Girl wasn't a bad song.

Tracey Ullman's version is better though.

i would listen to suggs drivetime djing if he did not play anything off their playlist.

Madness represent archetypical North London Cockney culture, and I guess for some people that is automatically Tory as it is so typically English in a traditional way.

http://img172.imageshack.us/img172/7201/geirbotee0.jpg

Geir, you're a moron.

Madness represent archetypical North London Cockney culture, and I guess for some people that is automatically Tory as it is so typically English in a traditional way.

-- Geir Hongro, Wednesday, 9 January 2008 13:14 (17 minutes ago) Link

http://www.freewebs.com/gutman/sabo2.JPG

"This is a chemist not a joke shop"

Does anyone have any ill-informed opinions about Norway they'd like to get off their chest?

As regards the thread title, total Classic.

Having written the likes of Return of the Las Palmas 7, Our House, Embarrassment, One Better Day and House of Fun, they can be forgiven a bit of middle-age toryism, if indeed that is the case. There must be a thread somewhere about the political skeletons in one's record collection...

I enjoyed the Paul Morley programme, by the way, and I found Suggs' contribution thoughtful and insightful.

they can be forgiven a bit of middle-age toryism, if indeed that is the case.

is there any more evidence of middle-age toryism on their part than rote Marcello witch-hunting? i don't think its cool they played that gig. i also don't think it makes em tories, or invalidates their previous activism/writing.

What's Marcello got to do with all of this?

http://www.mdk-design.com/images/blog/guyincognito.png

Phil O'Donnell morelike

What's Marcello got to do with all of this?

*frowns*

xp EXACTLY dom

It'th a mythtery.

Anyway all middle aged Tories should be rounded up and shipped to Kenya, same as the rest of them. Especially traitors like Madness and their domed Cameron-loving audience.

Guy Incognito OTM

SUCKS morelike

No, I meant your last comment was on the money, "Dingbat".

In a 1979 NME interview, Madness member Chas Smash was quoted as saying "We don't care if people are in the NF as long as they're having a good time."

And then they recorded "Don't quote me on that" as a comment on that, um, Quote.

I'm waiting for that ARE MADNESS RACISTS?! thread. Will be great fun!

You know what's really pretty "One Better Day".

Watching them play "The Sun And The Rain" was a highlight of my Glastonbury 09 experience.

People don't really talk about "Return Of The Los Palmas 7" though do they? It got into the top 10. Think about that for a mo. A self-consciously cheesey instrumental muzak cha-cha-cha that isn't really designed for dancing like "One Step Beyond" was. It just quietly rounds off "Absolutely" - an afterthought. It's as if Blur had released "The Debt Collector" and it had got really popular. I wasn't really around at the time to witness it charting, but was this considered weird practice at the time?

Return of the Los Palmas 7 didn't seem weird at the time. Perhaps because they had previously had a hit with an intrumental and another semi-instrumental but more likely because in the UK pop charts, novelty is king and you never know what form it's going to take. Madness were on Stiff Records - an indie who would take chances that major record labels might not.

Coincidentally, Absolutely and 7 were reissued today in 2CD deluxe versions.

I had Absolutely on vinyl when I was a kid.

In hindsight, Las Palmas was a stroke of genius, but at the time it seemed, to (13-year old) me at least, a huge mistake and not what I wanted the world to hear off Absolutely.

Why a stroke of genius, and why a huge mistake Daniel? The reason I ask is I'm writing a piece at the moment which refers to the track, but only being semi-consciously aware of it at the time and being unable to find much about it online other than Stiff wanting another instrumental following the success of One Step Beyond, I'm interested in hearing personal recollections. To me it's the sound of street parties (royal wedding was about this time right?) but then again, I was still in nappies in 1981 so I doubt I'd even have been conscious of it.

Stroke of genius, because I now (obviously) recognise that there was much more to Madness than the "nutty sound" and ska. TROTLP7 now sounds ambitious, witty and fun, and in terms of their career it consolidated their position as a band that set its own rules and simply had a good time. The song doesn't look in any way out of place in the Madness canon.

Back in 1981, though, I loved Absolutely and there were seemed to be so many other strong candidates for singles to follow up Embarrassment and Baggy Trousers. I couldn't believe it when I heard that TROTLP7 had been chosen as the single - I was gutted.

Firstly I was a Madness fan so why couldn't they release a single that, as far as I was concerned, sounded like Madness?

Secondly it was quite cheesy, and when you're a serious kid the last thing you want is 'cheese' even if it's done knowingly.

I was also in that ska mindset whereby it was a disappointment when the bands from that scene produced anything that wasn't ska, especially so when it was a single and the rest of the world would hear it and may even mistakenly believe it to be ska.

Worth mentioning, just looking through the tracklisting of Absolutely, that there weren't that many songs that could reasonably be described as ska on it!

No they moved away from the ska thing very early on, but then first impressions and big hits will prevail. (thanks Daniel). Thinking about it, The Specials appeared to be moving in a similar direction as Madness at the time, More Specials also moving away from ska to a kind of eerie/cheery Zirkusmusik. All those Bontempi tango rhythms on tracks like International Jetset, the purposefully cheap-sounding end-of-pier organ sounds are a parallel to ROTLP7's fun-in-the-sun cha-cha-cha, both bands displaying this perfectly English creeping melancholy.

They're such a slippery band for me. I always liked their singles, as simple and overplayed as they were, but was also struck by how sophisticated the album cuts were. Absolutely finally arrived a couple days ago. It's only their second album and they had already largely left the "nutty" sound far behind, and had more in common with The Kinks, The Jam, Squeeze, Elvis Costello, etc. On the other hand, while the deep cuts have great lyrics, their lack of hooks sometimes leave my mind wandering and I have to go back to re-listen because I hadn't remembered what I just heard. I get in a Madness phase once every few years since the 80s, and I'm still not sick of them. Absolutely is nearly as rewarding as The Rise And Fall... and includes a cracking live BBC concert on disc 2. I probably should go ahead and get 7 too.

looking forward to getting these 2 cd editions.
the one they sorted out for OSB last year had a great Peel session.
weird how Mad Not Mad is not going to be given the same treatment though as for all the over production involved (drum machines !), there are a couple of cracking songs, and the singles had some lovely remixes (Yesterdays Men especially ..)

Mad Not Mad deluxe is out now. Lots of extra content and still not gone through the liner notes or dvd which both look like they should be pretty good.

Suggs talks his fave albums:

http://thequietus.com/articles/07068-madness-suggs-13-favourite-albums-bakers-dozen