That Close

by Suggs

  ‘Plasterboard joining, my son. It’s like plastering, but easier, same money but ten times easier.’ We found our way to our designated room. The job was to invisibly join the gaps in plasterboard that had already been screwed to the walls with plaster and strips of tape. Simple: all we had to do was soak an appropriate length of tape in the plaster mix and fill the gap, vertically. Easy, this can’t be too hard. I soaked and Thommo applied the first strip, and attempted to smooth it down with a little roller-shaped implement. It wasn’t easy. I had a go, and the thing kept crinkling and wrinkling and would not, whatever we did, stay straight or smooth. We tried flattening it with our hands. Invisibly joined it was not. My days on the building site were numbered.

  I decided to take a job at a second-hand car showroom around the corner from our new flat above the carpet shop. There were a few car showrooms down there, as it was a wide street, which meant cars could be displayed on the pavements. My job, or at least that’s what they said when I applied, was to clean cars. Hot water and soap suds. Great. The only problem was they’d failed to explain that the cleaning would also involve a process called T-Cutting.

  T-Cut was a product that looked like white emulsion. You applied it to the whole car with a rag and then rubbed it off. In rubbing it off it took a small layer of the car’s paint with it, thereby bringing up a lovely shine and removing the evidence of any small scratches. Applied with a cloth it rubbed on lovely and waxy. I was about to rub it off with a clean cloth when I was told to leave it for a minute to set. Leave it to set. That sounded ominous. It was because in order for the T-Cut to work its magic and cut through the layer of paint, it turned into a kind of hardened grit. You could only T-Cut a few times before you were down to the bald steel.

  I got going with a cloth, trying to rub the stuff off and, fuck me, you needed the forearms of Popeye to remove it. But after what seemed like a gruelling age of hard endeavour I finished the car and it looked sparkling.

  ‘Right, that’s ready to go on the forecourt.’ The boss, Fred, sat in the driving seat and we pushed it out onto the pavement. Fred was pleased because with a T-Cut and a fiddle with the mileage he could put 300 quid on the price.

  We went back inside and my arms felt like jelly. ‘Right, great stuff, now then, what about the Rover?’ said Fred. At the back of the showroom was a gigantic 3.5 Rover coupé, more tank than car. This may have been the final straw in convincing me that I might not be T-Cut out for manual labour. A career in a band, precarious as that may be, was definitely the way forward.

  MAKING MUSIC

  The funny thing was that although we were clowning around, we weren’t idiots and we were starting to take songwriting seriously, as well as getting somewhere musically. We knew there were better bands than us technically, but we felt we were on to something a bit different and original. When we were making the early records, things like New Romanticism were being taken a lot more seriously than what we were doing. It took a while for people to understand how much effort we were putting in. Some in the more intellectual trendy press saw us as some sort of novelty act.

  The songs were a lot more complex than people thought. I remember some quite serious musicians in a band once saying that they tried to do a cover version of ‘House of Fun’, which does sound deceptively simple until you try and play it. The song has many strange key and chord changes. The strangeness is in no small part due to the fact that when we’d finished recording the song, which at that point was called ‘The Chemist Façade’ Dave Robinson heard it and announced it didn’t have enough of a chorus. We only had about two hours left in the studio so we went in the back room, wrote a new chorus, and recorded it onto a separate piece of tape. Alan the engineer then had to splice it very delicately onto the master tape we’d already finished. If you listen very carefully, a bit like the middle of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, you’ll hear a change in tone when it gets to the choruses.

  All seven of us wrote. Our drummer was the first person to write a song, and I remember thinking: Well, if he can write a song then I effing well can. Soon we were all at it, odd, as there were so many different combinations. I’d write the words and Chris would write the music, or Mike would write some music and I’d write the words, or Cathal would write words with Chris, or Lee with Mike, there was never one formula.

  But no matter how the song started, when it went through the Madness process with the way Lee played his sax, Mike played his piano, the way I sang and the way Cathal harmonised and sang as well, it came out sounding like Madness. It might be reggae, or start with a Motown or soul or pop or even calypso sound, but it would always end up Madness.

  The other thing you have to take into account is that Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley, our producers, were very important to the process right from the beginning. We called Clive the eighth member of the band and he produced all our records. Clive went to school with Mike’s brother, Ben, a great keyboard player with whom Clive had played in The Boxes. Clive came to see us rehearse and liked what he heard. He was very good at arranging, and he would add those complexities which sounded quite simple but made our songs very much not novelty songs. I remember other people trying to sound like us, and ending up sounding like those commercials you hear on the radio for trade building companies. They all sound a bit like what they think Madness should, but aren’t.

  There was a lot of depth and richness to the music, An element of Syd Barrett, psychedelia and that British influence, as much as the ska and R & B music and Ian Dury, Ray Davies and all the other more obvious elements to what we did. Although the seven of us had a lot of similarities, like everyone we had different interests and tastes and we were always adding those things to the pot. So the sound got bigger and richer.

  Although seen as happy-go-lucky, we’d often write happy words and put them to sad music in minor keys. Or conversely we’d write really sad words to happy chords. I’d never really heard the word, but Neil Tennant used the term ‘pathos’, which I now know is a mixture of happiness and sadness. That’s certainly a huge element of what we tried to achieve, although it was unconscious. And I must say I’ve been called pathotic a few times since.

  For singing and indeed songwriting, my two biggest influences were Ray Davies and Ian Dury. Both of them wrote songs about ordinary working life, made everyday life situations cinematic, and sang in their own vernacular. Unlike most people, who were trying to approximate west coast America. There were a lot of similarities between Ray and Ian. They often wrote songs with lists of everyday objects – Ray Davies’s ‘The Village Green Appreciation Society’ is a great example. And Ian Dury wrote a song called ‘England’s Glory’, again just a list of all the great eccentric things about England.

  They were both influenced by music hall. For me as a kid, music hall didn’t mean much more than a funny old programme on the BBC called The Good Old Days, which seemed primarily to involve blokes with stripey jackets and moustaches and boaters, pushing ladies in big nylon skirts on festooned swings, singing ‘Daisy, Daisy, Give Me Your Answer Do’. Which wasn’t much competition for The Avengers.

  But it was through Ian Dury that I started to learn a bit more about music hall, and the connection with all the people we’d been watching on TV who we liked, Tommy Cooper, Morecambe and Wise and Les Dawson. All those people who’d come from that vaudeville tradition, that black comedy, gallows humour. And also I feel there was a bit of a musical lineage from music hall through the Small Faces, The Kinks, Ian Dury to us. Ribald street music.

  Funnily enough I’ve only met Ray Davies once. He was organising a Meltdown Festival at the South Bank and he asked us if we’d play one night. I was in my dressing room, and they said: ‘Ray Davies is next door and he wants to say hello.’ I walked in and he had a camera on. The first thing he did was interview me, which was a very surreal experience, as I’m sure I had a lot more questions to ask him than he had to ask me.

  Ian Dury and I only met a few times. Although we were both on Stiff Rec
ords, as was often the case you rarely came across fellow musicians because they’d either be on the road themselves or making their own album, so your paths didn’t cross very often. But I got on well with Ian. He liked us, but I think he thought there was an element of us usurping his mantle, which we kind of were, because we were so influenced by him. Especially by his first band Kilburn & the High Roads, which had pretty much the same line up as us – saxophone, piano and all the rest of it.

  It’s an amazing feeling hearing your own song being played by the rest of the band for the first time. A mixture of excitement and trepidation. You can never know until it’s in full flow how it will turn out, and that takes a while until everyone in the band gets the hang of it and works out their own parts. You can have written your best lyric, enthuse it along, sing the best you can, but it’s ultimately in the lap of the gods.

  My short-lived psychedelic phase

  Some songs work and some songs don’t. That’s the great joy and mystery. When you hear a song on the radio you can’t always tell if you really like it until you’ve heard it a couple of times. And yet when you’re writing a song, you’re creating something from nothing. An instinctive impulse tells you whether you’re getting somewhere or not. But it’s only when the whole band are playing it that it really comes to life.

  With ‘Baggy Trousers’ it was pretty instant. I’d had the idea after hearing Pink Floyd’s ‘Another Brick in the Wall’ with the line ‘Teacher, leave them kids alone.’ Roger Waters had obviously had a very different experience at school from me. For all the stupidity I showed at my school I always felt it was more like ‘Kids, leave them teachers alone …’

  I was thinking about these things as I lay on the floor of Lee’s flat in the Caledonian Road. We’d been up the Hope and he’d kindly let me kip at his. On the way back we spotted a scooter outside the swimming pool which had been there for some time. Thommo reckoned it was dumped. So we took it upon ourselves to rescue it and wheeled it round to the wasteland at the back of Lee’s flats. I’ve had my karmic comeuppance as a number of my scooters over the years have befallen the same fate.

  Lee and Deb had gone to bed and I was lying face-down on the floor in a sleeping bag, pad and pen in hand. I started writing a list of all the things I could remember about my days at Quintin Kynaston school. It wasn’t the easiest job at first, as I’d hardly been there for the last few years. But the memories began to trickle in. ‘Naughty boys in nasty schools …’ In a couple of hours I had the bulk of the verses done – all sorts of old nonsense that we used to get up to.

  I hoped that at some point, a title and chorus would emerge. And they did. ‘Baggy Trousers’ just sounded like an unusual title; I couldn’t think of anything better. Although when the record came out, some thought I was referring to Dickensian work-house clothing, it was in fact a reference to them horrible great big trousers that were all the go in the seventies. Great flapping things they mistakenly called Oxford bags. With four-button waistbands and for some peculiar reason pockets down by the knees, the ensemble set off perfectly with a lovely pair of snub-nosed stack-heel shoes.

  The chorus was a bit trickier, as I was trying to get across the craziness that occurred at school in the battle against boredom, but balanced with a certain sympathy for the beleaguered teachers.

  Oh what fun we had, but did it really turn out bad,

  All I learnt at school, was how to bend not break the rules,

  And oh what fun we had, but at the time it seemed so bad,

  Trying different ways, to make a difference to the days.

  By the morning it was done. Lee and Deb had gone to work and I realised I had no money to get home, which is why I’d kipped there in the first place. Thommo had two round biscuit tins on a shelf in the living room. One was full of mint-condition Blue Beat 45s, and the other full of twopence coins. I borrowed 12p, just enough for ten fags and my bus fare home.

  I must pay him back one day.

  I turned up at rehearsals with my new words. Chris had a bit of a tasty ska riff on the go, and the words just slotted in perfectly. The melody, if you can call it such, materialised spontaneously. Humphrey Ocean, a great painter and old pal of ours, who’d also played bass with Ian Dury’s first band, Kilburn & the High Roads, did a fantastic pencil illustration of the group standing outside Chalk Farm station for the cover, and a video was made at a school in Islip Street in Kentish Town. It’s the one in which Lee flew over our heads hanging from a crane while the rest of the band performed in the playground staring up at him. And into the bosom of the nation it disappeared, only to reappear some thirty years later.

  Yes, who’d have thought that some thirty years on, we’d be rearranging and deconstructing ‘Baggy Trousers’ for a huge Kronenbourg campaign? I thought they were joking when they first phoned up, asking if we could do it in a sort of ballad style. I think the whole premise of the promotion was things slowing down. Which always struck me as a bit odd, lager isn’t a drink I immediately associate with drinking slowly, but anyway, that’s not my problem. And as those of you who’ve heard ‘Baggy Trousers’ will know, it is an up-tempo and not overly melodic song. When we first started rehearsing and trying to slow it down it seemed like an impossible task.

  We got to the point when we started to sound like Tom Waits, then someone, Chris I think, came in with the bright idea that maybe we should do it in the style of a French chanteuse – I’m not sure if Kronenbourg is French or Belgian, but anyway, somewhere on the border there – with accordion, violins and all that. But still we were struggling a bit, and then Woody suggested we did it in a waltz style, and suddenly it all came together. It was a rather fascinating and extraordinary thing, to see this song that we had been playing for thirty years, refilled with life in a completely different and unexpected way.

  We were then flown to Prague, and I’m very pleased to be able to talk about this, because it’s an example of quite how hard I work for my money, having to sit for three days in a bar in Prague doing nothing except sip cold lager. Believe me, I don’t know how I stood it. Well, I certainly don’t know how I stood up at the end of it. So there we were with a director who looked like he was twenty-five, thirty years on, taking all the references from the original video: Lee flying, people’s hats changing shape, and doing a vague impression of the nutty train as we left the bar.

  In fact someone recently sent me a clipping from Smash Hits in which a twenty-year-old Suggs tells the journalist: ‘There’s no way that I’ll still be playing that song “Baggy Trousers” when I’m an old man … of thirty.’

  ARLINGTON HOUSE – ONE BETTER DAY

  Arlington House, address no fixed abode, has loomed over the people of Camden Town for over a hundred years. Envisaged and financed in 1905 by Lord Rowton, private secretary to Disraeli, as an antidote to the common lodging houses of the time. Described as the worst public housing ever, before or since. Dozens of lodgers would be crammed into one room, where there would not be enough room to lie down. A rope would be tied from wall to wall, and the men would drape their arms over it and try to sleep standing up. These places were not cheap, but the alternative was the risk of death from exposure, as it still is for the homeless today, on the streets.

  In 2005 Madness were invited to play at the hundredth anniversary of the place, which also coincided with its total renovation. It had been transformed, the rooms doubled in size, each with its own washing facilities. And it now even has its own recording studio and radio station. I dunno what old Rowton would have made of that.

  The gig was a jolly affair with a lot of locals, and Arlington residents, squashed into the cobbled street at the back, where the market traders still keep their barrows. Afterwards I took a guided tour of the place with Joe McGarry, a one-time resident who’d risen to become the manager of the whole place. A terrific man who could obviously empathise with the chaps staying there, and it was plain from my short visit that the residents loved him.

  As Joe took me through
the new improved Arlington House, which he was very proud to be involved in, he remembered it as it was when he first arrived as a destitute young man one Christmas in the mid-seventies. He’d walked for miles for the privilege to stay there, as many did. It was raining and he’d been on the streets for months when the ‘Big House’, as he called it, finally loomed in his direction. He said it was like arriving at a giant ship of safety. Not that it wasn’t a tough place. In the cramped space and with an often heady mix of booze and emotional damage, things could get pretty rough. But Joe didn’t have a bad word to say about it. As far as he was concerned, Rowton’s working-man’s hotel saved him.

  For me, a budding songwriter with a keen interest in the everyday, Camden Town was a very fertile place to sit and watch the world go by and imagine the former residents’ lives. Hanging about in the launderette, in their string vests and suit jackets as they washed their only shirts and trousers. Men sitting on a bench outside the Londis mini-market on Inverness Street, in trilbies and string round their coats, drinking cans. There was a fella they called The Shroud who would march up and down Park Way dressed as an undertaker. Men in sea captain’s and army uniforms. Men who’d fallen on hard times, as Joe explained hard times that mainly came from falling out of love and relationships gone wrong. There was also a lady who moved a huge amount of carrier bags filled with rubbish into the doorways at various shops, creating a rather cosy little nest. The volume of which was such that it would take two days to move her on again. It was street theatre of infinitely more richness than the trustafarians juggling and unicycling about the streets today. Mostly the residents of Arlington House were just ordinary men going about their daily lives, who had nowhere else to kip. Arlington House became the inspiration for a number of songs I wrote. Particularly ‘One Better Day’, imagining a love story about one of the chaps from Arlington falling in love with the lady with the bags. ‘She has bags of time.’