In 1981, when I was 11 and on a school trip, I discovered the magic of popular music. Robert Hutchinson brought along a copy of Madness's 7th single, which the teachers let us play on the hotel record player. The single reached number 7 in the charts and was called The Return of the Los Palmas 7. When I got back home to London, I bought it. And later that year, a new LP was released, which the 7 members of Madness agreed to assign a simple title to. '7'. (Noticing a theme yet?) My first single and my first album and the start of a (near) 40 year love for a band that has gone (dare I say, 'one step') beyond any other music in how it has wrapped its way around my life.
Over the next 5 years, until they split up in 1986, I indulged a need to buy every record they released in every format - single, album, picture disc, 12" single, imports and even cassette versions of the albums. Most of this collection, I still possess, all in mint condition, cared for protectively. But while I was away at university, my little brother opportunistically decided to sell the 12" singles to fund his pub visits. He's not forgiven.
From the age of about 13, I was allowed to get the 29 bus down to Bayham Street, Camden Town, in order to buy each newly released single straight from Madness's record company, Stiff Records. I would go down with my mate Kevin Keady and we'd be given free button badges and posters along with the records. The badges bolstered a collection I obsessively added to every time I went to Carnaby St or Brighton promenade or Walthamstow market. I had about 100 badges and I once put these all onto the back of my Harrington jacket; but this didn't prove to be particularly practical. And the posters helped fill a huge amount of bedroom wall space, alongside anything I could cut out of Smash Hits magazine or obtain from any source.
Smash Hits also provided lyrics to the singles and I unleashed my inner geek to create a book of facts and lyrics and cut out pictures for every single, including each chart position (from The Prince in 1979 to Waiting for the Ghost Train in 1986, the chart placings are 16, 7, 3, 6, 3, 4, 7, 4, 7, 4, 14, 1, 4, 5, 8, 2, 5, 11, 17, 18, 21, 35, 18... most of that consigned to memory as a result of making that book).
After one trip to Carnaby Street with Kevin Keady, to buy more Madness merchandise (and consider buying dog-tooth patterned drain-pipe trousers), we were upstairs on the 29 bus as it went along Camden Road and were stunned to see Mark 'Bedders' Bedford get on. The Madness bassist was with two of the Belle Stars, a much less successful female version of Madness. We shot downstairs, said hello (and what a lovely bloke he was) and I got him to autograph the back of a Madness mirror I'd just bought.
Kevin Keady remained my best friend for a short time - on account of his equal love of Madness - until he suddenly decided that he'd gone off them and was into Duran Duran. One minute, we are watching the Madness film of how they started out (in which they play themselves), Take it or Leave It, at Enfield Town cinema, and the next minute, he's grown his fringe into a long wedge and started to show interest in girls (and girls' music, evidently). To his credit, it kind of worked for him, he got girlfriends and I didn't, but Madness weren't worth the sacrifice, I still maintain.
Things went downhill from there. Madness had run out of steam and they split up, just as I was moving on musically and was snobbishly heralding 'serious' rock music as superior to Madness's more jaunty, fun-loving pop sensibilities. I probably stopped listening to them for a while in my late teens; and then in 1992, they returned to play what was intended to be one off weekend of gigs at Finsbury Park, cleverly named 'Madstock'. By this point, I'd met my future wife. We were engaged and having inflicted a really poor Bob Dylan gig on her in the early months of going out together, we discovered a shared love of Madness and went to Madstock with huge expectations and anticipation. I had not been old enough to see them in concert first time around and the 6 years in which they had been absent felt like an eternity to me, as it would to anyone who found that time to fall between their 16th and 22nd birthdays. We were not let down. Madness were amazing and the impact of tens of thousands of fans jumping up and down caused a minor earthquake in the Finsbury Park area.
The following year, there was an easy and obvious consensus between us in regard to our choice of song for the first dance at our wedding: It Must be Love.
Madness were back and they weren't going to go away. Well not for long. They would tour occasionally after this, usually around Christmas (we saw them again around the millennium at Wembley Arena) and from 1999 onwards they even managed to release albums of new music - not far off as good as their early stuff and sometimes equal to it - every 5 years or so.
We had two children and inflicted Madness on them with ease. Both our kids love Madness and in 2014, the 4 of us saw them at the O2, the only gig we have attended together as a whole family. I'm not one for dancing, but Madness are one band that can push me beyond my self-conscious reluctance. Nonetheless, it took until the encore and Night Boat to Cairo for my daughter to convince me to join the family in dancing along. And then when I did, she just laughed at me and asked why it looked like I was just jogging on the spot.
Madness are also the only band I would sing karoke to. Because I can't sing. But then, nor can Suggs really. His voice suits the music, because it has that wonderful North London brogue that I have grown up surrounded with. Much as my love of Madness has been all about the songs, there are additional layers to them that make them special and part of that is the North London link. They hail from the areas around Camden Town and have imbued a plethora of North West London characteristics into their lyrics, their attitude and the visuals for their music. Living in some of these areas as a young child, meant that the nostalgia I have as an adult is interlinked with this aspect of Madness. For example, I lived opposite Chalk Farm tube station (location for the Absolutely LP cover), and used to walk up to Primrose Hill to play (location of the Rise and Fall LP cover). Camden Town was another short walk away, passing the Roundhouse as we left our flats, and here is the spiritual home of the band.
Another layer of specialness for me was the much overlooked depth to their music, their completely unique blend of different styles of genre (ska, old style R and B, boogie woogie, soul, rock and roll, 60s pop with a Kinks feel to it) and the unpretentious ordinariness of the subject matter for each song, which managed to provide an insightful social (and sometimes political) commentary or convey a dark humour (or humorous darkness) that made me want to listen to them closely rather than just dance along and laugh at the funny videos like casual fans did.
Madness songs - from the well known to the obscure - still give me a tingle when I listen to them after all this time. The way in which they have seeped into my life, had an existence beyond the turntable, and projected a character which echoes my own, make them utterly special to me. And to share that love with my family brings me pleasure that I can't put into words. My daughter is the one whose love of Madness equals my own and this is partly reflected by the fact that we have matching Madness tattoos. And this shared love was best celebrated last year, when the two of us went to see their 40th anniversary gig at the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm, which started with a short set of those obscure B-sides and albums tracks that they would have played when first starting out in 1979.
What more can I say? Madness, madness, I call it GLADNESS.
