Whether it was because I was the kind of eleven year old who saw the doc martens, the crew-cuts and the ill-advised dancing as somehow threatening, or whether it was because I had the kind of humour ordinarily found at the end of a ward for the terminally ill, I was never able to share with my classmates the joy of catching the latest Madness video on Thursday night’s Top Of The Pops. ‘Baggy Trousers’ might have been a right old riot to some of my peers, but to me, it was a frighteningly real account of all the worst characteristics of school-life: lots of smells, lots of noise, naughty girls and naughty boys, pulling hair and eating dirt, back of the ‘ead with a plastic cup. There it was in a nutshell, a nutty shell, in fact. Whereas Alfred Lord Tennyson’s ‘Charge Of The Light Brigade’ captured the depraved, bloody sweep of battle at Balaclava, Madness’s ‘Baggy Trousers’ captured the grubby, weary violence of life at Tupton Hall Comprehensive. Not for me the frenetic ska beats and the creepy fairground piano. Not for me the wild, chaotic joie de vivre or the unruly behaviour of the bunny hopping band members. Indeed catching a glimpse of it on your brand spanking new Beta Max VCR was a little like bumping into the school bully in the sanctity of your own bedroom wardrobe. School was school. Home was home. And the wardrobe in your bedroom was the wardrobe in your bedroom. There was life on the radio, and there was life outside the radio and never the twain shall meet. At least not until Madness came along, anyhow.
Madness was one of the very first bands to offer us an uncomplicated and unromanticised look at the life of the great British underclass. All sounds rather grand now doesn’t it, but sure as eggs as eggs it’s true. Madness was like Ken Loach’s ‘Kes’ with ska beats, sunglasses, small saxophones and a boxful of practical jokes in place of the grim Yorkshire dialects and a perishing ninety-minutes on the football field with a Bobby Charlton fanatic. Duran Duran may have had the edge in dancing on valentines and lording it around like tarts and old-fashioned caramels, but Madness had the edge in authentic North London accents, drainpipe trousers, bowler hats and comedy glasses. All that was commonplace, everyday and trivial suddenly (and tunefully) erupted into the spotlight; from inconsequential domestic spats (‘My Girl’), teenage-pregnancy and family divides (‘Embarrassment’) traditional English weather (‘Grey Day’) having your collar felt by the law (‘Shut Up’) buying condoms (‘House Of Fun’) family-life (‘Our House’) to poignant tales of identity loss (‘Michael Caine’). And rather than sweeten the pill with fanciful literary flourishes and shovelfuls of melodrama, Madness performed every one of the sweet twenty-four tracks here in their own natural dialect, catching not only the idioms of the English language, but the idioms of provincial hopelessness; an expression they managed to perfect with that old bedfellow of English hopelessness: humour. What made these stories real was the fact they were sad and amusing in equal measures. It was a true reflection of life, the finer details of which were best grasped through a handful of common phrases, platitudes, world-weary routines and amusing comic escapades – a philosophy of inconsequence wrapped in a comedy of errors and relieved by the occasional escapist flight (‘Wings Of A Dove’, ‘The Return Of The Los Palmas 7’, ‘Driving In My Car’). It wasn’t always profound. It was occasionally repetitive. But it always sounded like it came from experience; a place where wisdom is its own reward regardless of the scars that are there to prove it.
But there’s much more than just music here. This Sight and Sound release of Divine Madness boasts a staggering 28 visual nutty aids, each with a sometimes poignant, sometimes critical but always amusing commentary from the mighty Chas Smash, Chris ‘Chrissy Boy’ Foreman and Mike ‘Barso’ Barson.
If there’s any one surprise, then it likely to be learning the sheer volume of input put into the videos by the band themselves; not least, the mighty Smash and the great Mike Barson – who are revealed to be the band’s chief incendiary figures. Madness was no ordinary crock of campers living off the fat of the chart-landscape; they had ideas. Shitfuls of them and the evidence is spread generously across the brilliantly well-choreographed ‘House Of Fun’, the dark and oppressive ‘Embarrassment’, the hammy ‘Cardiac Arrest’, and the tenderly riotous ‘Our House’ – chockablock with little devices, minor details and intriguing little links. Whilst die-hard fans of the band are likely to have heard many of the anecdotes already it’s still amusing to hear some of the stories again: The Clash flushing their stash down the loo as several of the nutty boys pay them a surprise visit during a break from filming ‘Shut Up’ wearing the video’s customary Police uniforms, the propensity shown by nutty-in-residence, Lee Thompson for being able to secure prominent roles in just about every one of the vids shown here, the news that ‘Bed & Breakfast Man’ was filmed in a Masonic temple, Smash’s confession that he took to shaving his legs like Laurence Oliver after catching the acting bug post ‘Cardiac Arrest’, or even that early hit ‘My Girl’ was based loosely on Elvis Costello’s ‘Watching The Detectives’. Add to this the faintest of tensions arising as the boys dissect ‘Michael Caine’ and the incremental departure of Barson and you have a something approaching ‘precious’.
If truth be told, this collection of amusing little vignettes and set pieces, pisses on the likes of 90s commentators like Albarn and provides something of a surprising forebear to the current crop of observers like The Streets. There’s laughter, there’s tears, there’s men in dresses, there’s funny glasses. Let’s face it; if it weren’t for the relentless energy of the boys themselves, this would be a pretty exhausting account of one of pops most exhausting success stories. Leave the punk-elite to those middlin’ middle-classes and order some up of this…
Waiter!