by Suggs
The only recordings we’d made up to this point were some dodgy old tapes recorded in the various rehearsal rooms we’d been in. Invariably they cut out halfway through, where Lee had re-recorded sax parts he was practising over them.
We managed to save up 200 quid to record some proper demos. Clive duly booked two days at Pathway – he thought this would be just enough time to record three songs. It was decided that we would have a go at ‘The Prince’, ‘My Girl’ and ‘Madness’. On the day we piled all our gear, and ourselves, into Mike’s trusty ex-GPO Morris 1000 van with ‘That Nutty Sound’ spray-painted on the back door, and set off for our first day in a proper recording studio. Woody was gonna meet us there on his motorbike, but unfortunately got completely lost and didn’t turn up.
We lost the first day’s recording, which was not the most auspicious start to our professional career and meant we’d lost our hard earned savings. But Clive managed to draw on Rob’s enthusiasm to borrow some cash and extend our recording time. Pathway studios had an anonymous-looking door in a small street round the back of Stoke Newington. Poor old Woody had ridden past it a couple of times as he buzzed round and round North London till he ran out of petrol. (Ah, the days before mobiles and satnav, the kids today don’t know what they’re missing.)
The studio was tiny, with a slightly out-of-tune upright piano. (An upright that would turn up thirty years later, when we recorded ‘The Liberty of Norton Folgate’.) Elvis Costello had recorded ‘Watching the Detectives’, a song we all liked the sound of, in Pathway. But his band were only a four-piece. There was barely enough room for us lot to fit in the tiny live room.
It was an eight-track studio, which meant exactly that: you could record eight different things. By the eighties studios had forty-eight and even seventy-two tracks. The possibilities could become endless, and often did, as we would later discover.
But with Pathway’s limited technology the only thing we could add once the basic tracks were recorded was for Chris to overdub a loud twang! through an echo machine during the piano solo of ‘The Prince’. The atmosphere was great and the tracks were sounding good. With a couple of hours to spare at the end of the second day, it was just a matter of mixing them down. Which basically involved three of us, the maximum you could fit in the control room, pushing faders up and down as the songs went onto the two-inch tape, until we all felt the right balance of instruments and vocals had been achieved. Which at about midnight we all did.
We then took it in turns to sit in the control room and listen to the tracks on the BIG speakers. All studios tend to have at least three sets of speakers, one really small one, to hear how your songs might sound on the radio, medium ones that you might have at home, and fuckin’ BIG ones you normally saved till the end of the session to hear what your songs might sound like in a club or disco.
We all agreed they sounded great, even if we said so ourselves. We then spent an hour or two recording the mixes onto cassettes, one at a time, so we could all take the songs away with us. Happy days! Really, joyful and innocent times. A feeling I still think you get today if you listen to those recordings. Which I certainly did at the time, over and over again, on my mum’s music centre at home.
Rob Dickins liked the tracks and offered us a publishing deal and we were off. The possibility that none of us were going to have to work for the council or polish cars any more was getting to be a reality that was coming our way across the horizon.
It’s pretty remarkable that in those two days, and with our very first experience of being in a studio, the three songs recorded would all become such important milestones in our musical career, and are still firm favourites some thirty-odd years on.
‘Madness’. Although never a single, the song that gave us our name, our unofficial national anthem, still sending the crowds wild to this day, as our perennial first encore. ‘The Prince’. Our first single, and a big hit on 2 Tone. And Mike Barson’s ‘My Girl’. A song that would alert the world to the fact that as much as we loved the music, we were more than just a ska band.
The next time I was to be taking in the back of Clive’s head was when we went into TW studios in Fulham. Dave liked what Clive had done in Pathway, but suggested it might be good if he teamed up with a thrusting young engineer he knew called Alan Winstanley. Alan had worked with the Stranglers and on ‘Knock on Wood’ by Amy Stewart, an odd combination I’ll give you, but it sounded good to us. Alan and Clive became a great team and went on to make pretty much all of Madness’s records together, as well as an amazing array of fantastic records for Dexys Midnight Runners, Teardrop Explodes, Elvis Costello, Catatonia, Bush, Morrissey, David Bowie and Mick Jagger.
Dave booked us in to TW on Alan’s recommendation for ten days. A whole ten days, and twenty-four tracks. But these were songs that we’d been playing live for nearly two years, so we knew them inside out.
When we arrived at TW, we discovered that the band that had just left were The Specials, having just finished their debut album with Elvis Costello at the helm. The first thing we noticed when we got in there, apart from the faint whiff of Rico’s extra-long cigarettes, were some short lengths of tape lying about the floor next to the two-inch mastering machine. While Woody was setting up his drum kit, Alan put them on. They were only thirty seconds or so, obviously bits of music that had been edited out of the final mixes. We were intrigued. We loved The Specials, and I genuinely thought they were one of the best bands I’d ever seen live. But it couldn’t be denied that there was a healthy competition between us.
With a bit of a fiddle Alan managed to get the two ends of the first bit of tape round the spindles of the tape machine and we waited with bated breath. What on earth would their record sound like? How much production would Elvis have added, given all the extra tracks you could use in this studio, to their electrifying live sound? Strings, brass ensemble, gospel choir? Alan pressed Play and we waited, the tape spun and then, clang! That’s all we heard. Literally, the tape was so short it just flew off after one alarmingly loud snare beat.
The recording went swimmingly and we did add strings to one of our tracks, ‘Night Boat to Cairo’. ‘Night Boat To Cairo’ was a strange song. As was often the case, I was climbing the stairs to Mike’s bedroom in his house in Crouch End and I could hear some music drifting out that he’d been writing before we arrived for rehearsal. On this particular occasion it was a rather strange Egyptian-sounding thing, an instrumental with no words. ‘Do you have any idea what it’s called, Mike?’ I asked. He said, ‘Yes, I’m gonna call it “Night Boat To Cairo”.’
Then I went off and wrote two verses, I think, with the full intention of expanding them into a chorus and middle eights and all the rest of it. But it never happened. So the whole song ended up as this peculiar mix of one minute of instrumental at the beginning, two verses in the middle and one minute of instrumental on the outro. With a fake ending.
Amusingly, Clive had asked the arranger, David Bedford, to score an ‘Egyptian’ string part, but over the phone David had misheard him and arranged a ‘Gypsy’ string part. But still it sounded great, as did the rest of the record.
The ten days were up and we all felt we’d done a good job. Dave came down the studio to hear a playback of the whole thing through the BIG speakers. Dave was pleased, pencil behind his ear, beaming, but in the words of Columbo, ‘Just one more thing …’ He’d become obsessed with a short piece of music we had played at his wedding. A bit of old nonsense really, a strange one-minute instrumental we used as our entrance music. We’d been starting the set with the theme from Hawaii Five-0 but had got a bit bored of it so had replaced it with an instrumental Prince Buster B-side. Dave was convinced the short piece should be the first single from our debut album, but the recording was finished. We’d run out of studio time, and anyway there wasn’t enough in it to make a three-minute single.
But while we were down the pub Dave snuck back into the studio and extended the length of the song by repeating the end section a
nd gluing the two pieces of tape together. He put the whole thing through a harmoniser to smudge away the join.
With Chas Smash’s now infamous clarion call ‘Hey you, don’t watch that, watch this …’ ‘One Step Beyond’ did become a big hit, and the title track of our iconic first album.
One day Mike was messing about on the piano with an old Labi Siffre song and Dave comes in and says, ‘You’ve got to record that.’ It was a great tune but we didn’t feel it was right for us – a bit too sentimental. It must be love? Nothing more, nothing less? Love is the best? Who’s going to go for that? But Dave was convinced to the point that he said if ‘It Must Be Love’ didn’t get in the Top 5 then he would give us his record company. ‘It Must Be Love’ got to No. 2 so we never did get to own Stiff Records.
Back from Bath, 180 miles I’ll have you know
ME AND MY GIRLS
In 1981 things carried on getting better. ‘It Must Be Love’ was flying up the charts and it, indeed, must be love, cos Bette Bright said ‘I do’ to me. It was a beautiful wedding in St Luke’s Church in Kentish town. A beautiful white wedding. We’d had two foot of snow the night before. The day didn’t get off to the perfect start. In the morning I was round at my mum’s going through the day’s events with my best man, Chalky. Everything was looking great, the rings hadn’t been lost, the flowers were sorted, cars sorted, seating plan arranged, no teeth lost during the stag do, which in itself was a miracle as the evening had kicked off with a lemonade bottle of Pocheen brought over from Ireland by Cathal.
We checked and double checked: all present and correct. The only thing left was for us to get dressed. Well, I must say, we were looking terrific in grey top hats and tails. A real couple of swells. Perfect. These yobbos don’t scrub up too bad. Until I went to put my shoes on and realised they had holes in them! I’d just come back from a three-month tour and all that skipping about on stage had worn them through. What to do? I couldn’t go home as Anne was there preparing with her maids of honour, and I was in no way allowed to see the dress before the event. The alternative was the pair of blue Converse I’d arrived in. I think not. ‘Hang about’, said Chalky, ‘isn’t the shoe shop Holts on the way to the church?’ Brilliant.
So off we set to Camden. When we got in the shop my feet were nearly frozen, slushing through that snow with holes in my shoes. Alan was there to greet us and before we got too far into reminiscing about the early days of the band and how that Elvis Costello bloke still owed him 30 bob for them creepers, I explained my predicament. The shop was a veritable mecca of alternative footware, but amongst the brothel creepers, DMs and monkey boots he did stock black brogues. Just the job. ‘What size are you, nine isn’t it?’ ‘Yes, Alan, spot on.’
He disappeared behind the piles of shoe boxes stacked to the ceiling, but after five minutes he reappeared empty handed. Scratching his chin. ‘Hmm, we haven’t got any of them in a nine.’ He looked around the shop, there had to be something else. Yeah what, pink pointed brothel creepers, nine hole DMs. I’m getting married, not going to a Sex Pistols concert.
I was starting to panic. ‘What a about a pair of loafers’, he said, ‘they’re smart’.
‘Hmmm, a grey mohair dress suit and oxblood loafers, I don’t think so, Alan.’
We stood in silence, the only other shop for miles was Dunne & Co., the old man’s gaff. Great, a pair of beige carpet slippers and a trilby would give the in-laws something to think about. Probably more than what they were going to think about giving their lovely daughter away to a spotty herbert kneeling at the altar exposing holes in his shoes.
Time was running out, I was doomed. Maybe you could feign a sudden conversion to Islam as you enter the church and take your shoes off, ha ha. Chalky suddenly piped up, ‘I’ve got it, at no point in the service does the best man have to kneel down. You’ll have to borrow my shoes.’ They were well worn and a size too small but the soles were intact. So with the help of a shoe horn and three strong men, on they went, and off we set for the church.
It was a joyous and momentous day. Anne looked gorgeous in Anna Karenina-style wedding dress, it was like she’d booked the snow to go with her outfit. And everyone was there, my mum, my aunt and cousins from Wales, the band and all my friends. Culminating, having changed my shoes, in a big party at Lauderdale House in Highgate where we danced the night away. Chalky having lost his best man’s speech, much to the relief of everyone.
My honeymoon consisted of two idyllic nights at the Ritz Hotel as I was still in the middle of a Christmas tour. I had to borrow a tie from reception to go in the bar, which looked great with a crew-necked jumper. And the tie was all I was wearing at the freshly delivered breakfast table in our room the following morning. I was just about to tuck into my kippers when the door burst open and room service appeared with a second wave of silver-clad delights. I yanked the table cloth around my midriff nearly sending everything flying. ‘Would that be all, sir?’ Unfortunately I didn’t have a tip about my person.
On the second day of our honeymoon I got up early and sneaked out. I was off to buy Anne a wedding present, a car, a Karmann Ghia, Anne’s favourite. One she’d dreamed about ever since seeing her next-door neighbour get one when she was a child. I’d seen one in Exchange and Mart, racing green, £1,000, lovely. Only problem was, it was in Luton. Lee came with me, he knew a bit about cars and would kick the tyres and give it the once over. The car looked and sounded great. Dosh was handed over and we were off. The previous couple of days’ snow had turned to ice and I’d never driven a car before. Apart from that what could possibly go wrong? Oh, that and the fact the visibility was almost zero, the back window was the size of a postage stamp and the heating in the Karmann normally just got going on arrival at your destination.
Lee, my co-pilot, hollered increasingly desperate instructions as I kangaroo leaped and skidded my way back into town. Fortunately it was Sunday and there wasn’t much traffic about.
Finally we arrived at my newly purchased house in Camden Mews. It had been part of the stables for the bigger houses at the back. It was pretty, but tiny. One half of the downstairs was a garage, which we were eventually going to convert. The furniture at this point consisted of one jukebox with one record, ‘Cry Me a River’ by Julie London. Which did make our house-warming somewhat limited, as did the fact that my mate who’d been in charge of the bar got fed up halfway through the proceedings and locked all the booze in the bathroom (we’d filled the bath with ice as a makeshift fridge) taking the key with him.
After what must have been a twelve-point turn I managed to get the damn car in the garage, tied a ribbon round it and set off back to a bemused Anne at the Ritz.
The years flew and we had two lovely daughters, Scarlett and Viva. The Karmann Ghia became too small and sadly had to go, as did the mews house.
I have lived in North London on and off most of my life, and for the last quarter of a century in the same house in the same street, in, as they say, Tufnell Park if you’re selling, Holloway if you’re buying. I live in a nice little part of London. Landmarks it doesn’t really have none. It’s not famous for anything really, except the prison, which you can see quite clearly.
Holloway was exactly that, a hollow way through the woods out of London up to the sunny slopes of Highgate. It was plagued by a notorious highway man called Le Fevre, a Frenchman, who would hang about the Nag’s Head, a coaching inn on the corner of Seven Sisters Road. ‘Your money or your life, mon ami.’ Having your chattels removed with menace is one of the few local traditions that survives to this day.
When we eventually settled the family home in Holloway, it was completely by accident. Madness had been riding high, not that we still aren’t I hasten to add, but particularly high in the early eighties, we were arguably the biggest band of the decade, certainly in terms of weeks spent in the charts. I bought an enormous place in Camden Square, one of the posher spots in North London. Unfortunately the great god of timing had other things in mind. We had a row with St
iff Records thinking they owed us some money. And in 1983, just four years into our chart-topping career, cracks were starting to appear in the band.
Mike Barson was getting tired of show business. We should have spotted the signs when he turned up at a photo session wearing a balaclava. Then he stopped turning up altogether. In 1984 he left, and the magic started to evaporate. The band was born in his bedroom and without him it wouldn’t be the same. And it wasn’t: things went downhill. If we’d had the knowledge we have now we would just have taken a break. We’d been working to the same model that bands of the 1960s employed. One album and three singles a year, the rest of the time was spent on the road. Not that we didn’t have a great time, cause we did. Going round the world playing music with your best mates. We really never stopped laughing, and if it looked like we were having a lot of fun, that’s because we were. But at this point we were all newly married with young kids and we were very rarely at home.
After the first four years or so, we needed to spend time apart. We split up and it was only on reflection that we realised we should have had a rest. Up to that point there was no sense that you took time off. In fact there was a real terror, not from the band but from the people around the band, that if we stopped even for five minutes then we’d be usurped by somebody else.
We should have had more confidence in the fact that we’d had twenty-odd hits and Madness wasn’t going to go out of fashion all of a sudden. But it was only when we came back in 1992 that we realised the enormity of what we’d achieved.
A lot of people say the best music is written by bands when they’re young, and that is often the case when you think back to all the great bands. But I think Madness has transcended that a bit, and with Norton Folgate we made a really great album, as good as any of the stuff we wrote when we were young. That’s partly because we learnt to re-energise ourselves by not doing it all the time. Also it helps a lot for playing live. We now do twenty concerts a year and that’s enough for us to keep it exciting for ourselves and not get weary. If I do any more than that I find the music starts to become abstract noise, and you can’t really feel it much any more.