That Close

by Suggs

  We went to Berman’s and Nathan’s, whose floors and floors of the most extraordinary clothes from serious dramas included a whole floor of props and costumes from Lawrence of Arabia, so we got these very authentic pith helmets and khaki shorts and shirts.

  Off we set to a sound studio in West London. Dave had gone to the enormous expense of spreading the floor with what must have been an inch of sand. There were two potted plants and Dave’s dog running around, to add a bit of atmosphere. Instead of having back projection, which was what you usually did if you wanted an exotic background of any nature and clarity, we were using the new technology of blue screen. What we didn’t realise was is that you need to keep the camera still, so what you see is the pyramids and sphinx all bobbing around to the music. But it added to the anarchic quality of the video.

  When we’d finished ten or so videos, we had enough to compile a VHS called Complete Madness. Chris would go out and shoot intros to each song, and this particular one was in Clissold Park in the sandpit. Mike, the keyboard player, and Mark, our bass player, were pretending to be buried up to their necks, blowing out ping-pong balls. Of course. What else! Then we’re straight into the song, with Lee playing the farting intro on baritone and someone wiggling a pot plant to make it look like it’s being blown by the wind.

  We also revisited ‘The Nutty Train’, which had been a symbol of our band for some time, and that iconic image you see on the cover of One Step Beyond taken by Cameron McVey. It happened by accident when we were walking down the street one day for a photo session, and they wanted us to be closer together than we were. It was pragmatism because there were a lot of us in the band to squeeze onto an album cover, so we all squashed up. We wanted a bit of motion in the photo, so we were actually walking past the camera, but of course it was tricky for the photographer to get us all in the middle. So we had to stand still but crouched, which made for very painful work on the thighs.

  In ‘Night Boat to Cairo’ and a few of our videos I thought I’d jump off the top of a ladder, another hugely expensive prop. I’d land in the middle of the set and look like I’d just dropped out of space. I can’t remember whose idea it was, but in the ‘Night Boat’ video we have the words on screen, with one of those jumping dots to help you sing along like in old kids’ TV programmes. We were always speeding things up and slowing things down, like in a Benny Hill sketch, and on this particular occasion we slowed down the film and the music, then sped it back up, so it made for a very special effect that you can hardly notice.

  The video ended with Dave’s dog trying to bite people and us all falling about having had a few beers. It sums up the fun and exuberance we had in making the videos. People often ask me if we had as much fun as it looks, and we really did. Seven extroverts all fighting for the limelight, so any excuse to dress up and mess about. The costumes got more and more extreme until Lee turned up as an exploding traffic warden. If you’re going to dress up and mess around, then make sure you dress up properly and mess around properly, don’t just do it half-heartedly. It made for a sort of enlightening process sometimes. Transcending self-consciousness, if we ever had any.

  When we made the video for ‘Baggy Trousers’ we actually filmed at a school in Islip Street in Kentish Town, close to where we were all hanging around at that time. Lee had had the idea of flying, I can’t remember where from. It just so happened there was a building site across the road, and Dave Robinson asked them if we could borrow their crane for half an hour. We literally had a rope hanging from the crane attached to Lee’s belt hoop. We swung him around in the air for a bit, and the extraordinary thing is that you can’t see the rope in the video. But you can tell from watching it that we’re all a bit nervous, looking up in case Lee falls on our heads.

  We had this natural instinct for visual comedy. There was only so much time on the screen, and you wouldn’t actually get on there unless you did something quite inspired. As soon as we were in a room with a camera it was, and still is, like spontaneous combustion of competition as we all tried to outdo each other. It makes for a very energetic atmosphere. And that’s why the fun really does exude from those videos today.

  TURNING JAPANESE

  In 1983, when we were really at the peak of our success, we were asked by Honda, the Japanese car company, to go to Japan and make some adverts. We’d been to Japan and played there, and got a really good reaction, but I’ve got to say Japan is one of the most culturally different places I’d ever been to. It takes a bit of getting the hang of. People with white gloves gesture the lift doors open, even though they don’t open them manually any more, or they gesture you up the escalator. Cab doors open automatically and because we were doing a commercial we had our every whim looked after. We each had about five people following us around at all times. Everyone being humble and deferential all the time was a bit of a culture shock.

  It did get quite alienating. We’d been on the road for quite some time, and one night we all ended up in my or Cathal’s room on the seventy-second floor, a vacuumed room that had no windows or doors that opened and in which everything was automatic. The whole room, including the bathroom, was made out of one piece of plastic. I remember looking down on a big park in the middle of Tokyo at eight in the morning and suddenly, on the dot, all these people would pour out of the subway and do an hour’s tai chi and then disappear, like ants going down the drain, back into the subway.

  Everything did seem so ordered and structured. Even the businessmen in the bar would head off to bed at exactly the same time, all wearing their blue suits. It all started to get very disorientating, and I remember I got a bit freaked out at one point.

  And it was odd because making commercials was kind of frowned upon, certainly in England. It certainly wasn’t a cool thing for a rock ’n’ roll band to do. Obviously now we’ve had Johnny Rotten advertising butter, Iggy Pop selling car insurance, and some other idiot flogging fish fingers. But back then it was a bit like Bill Murray in Lost in Translation, lots of actors and musicians making uncool adverts in Japan and hoping the outside world would never see them and they’d be buried for ever. Of course the internet has messed all that up.

  But we ended up having a lot of fun because of the extrovert way we were. Even to this day if you put the seven of us in a room and turn a camera on, I don’t know what it is or what you call it, idiocy I suppose, but we’re all leaping about and messing around. Like children in a sandpit. You could also call it fun.

  *

  I think we were due to make three or four commercials, and they had a few vague ideas about what they wanted us to do, but we didn’t know what on earth they were talking about. Some of them were in full traditional kabuki costume and were asking us to do serious and symbolic things that we didn’t really understand.

  The production involved this huge chain of command. The pecking order was such that the director could only speak directly to the person below him, who could only speak to the person below him, so everything had to go through a chain of two dozen people before it got to us. And vice versa, so if we wanted to make a suggestion it would take half an hour for that information to get back to the director. There was also the language barrier, which made communication even harder.

  We filled up the time just mucking about as we would have done if we were making one of our videos. Whether it was leaping off ladders, or doing the old nutty train, which became a bit of a bane after a while because of the physical nature of it. Or squirting ketchup in people’s faces, doing cod kung fu, hitting each other on the head with truncheons or dressing up as a pantomime horse. All the usual old carry-on.

  They loved us in Japan and we ended up loving them too. There was this area called Harajuku where everyone dressed in all the phases of pop culture from the 1950s to now. They were all so authentic, so you had your Teddy boys, mods, punks and all the British tribal cultures replicated perfectly on this huge street in downtown Tokyo.

  It’s funny because although we’d traversed the world any
number of times up to this point, the mad and ironic thing about touring with a band is that although you’ve been round the planet, you’ve actually seen very little of it. You arrive quite late in a city, play your gig, stay up a bit in the hotel bar, then you wake up quite late and it’s time to move on to the next city because of the financial constraints of keeping your crew and equipment in any one place for too long. You have to stay on the move. So ironically, because of those adverts, we ended up knowing more about Japan than half of Europe.

  It’s been in the periods between working with the band that I’ve seen more of the world than I did on all those world tours.

  Rooming arrangements for the 2 Tone tour

  LIQUIDATOR STUDIOS

  When our tenure at Stiff Records unfortunately came to an end we signed to Virgin Records. In the process of signing to Virgin we decided we wanted our own record label. It was a bit of vanity really. I think Paul Weller had his own label, obviously 2 Tone had been a great success under Jerry Dammers, and everyone else seemed to be having their own label too.

  We didn’t really know what we were going to put on it, which was the mad thing, and we also decided to build our own recording studio. There was some sense, we thought, to this because to record an album in those days cost about £30,000, and it cost about £30,000 to build a studio. I may not have got those figures entirely correct, but we thought that if we recorded more than one album in our own studio then it would have paid for itself. And then we could rent it out.

  We found this rather charming building on the Caledonian Road and built Liquidator Studios. It went quite well at the beginning. We did some recording there, but then unfortunately Mike left the band and we began wondering why we were going to run a label if we didn’t know who we were going to sign. The first person we made a record with was Feargal Sharkey. Cathal wrote a song called ‘Listen To Your Father’ and it was a hit. But being the young naïve chaps that we were, we hadn’t exactly signed Feargal to a contract, so having had a first hit he just left and signed to a big American record label and we were back to square one.

  Unfortunately this was all just at the point where technology was starting to move along, and the recording process was becoming simpler and the computer was starting to take over. We didn’t realise how quickly the equipment we’d bought would become redundant. Also renting it out as a business proposition required hiring staff and paying wages. We were still hiring a permanent crew, even though the touring was starting to wind down as we all wanted to spend a bit more time with our young families.

  We had our own fan club, which had, I think, thirty-odd thousand members, and of course this was when you had to do mail-outs. We were printing our own monthly magazine and Nutty Boys comic. It was the old Micawber syndrome of annual outgoing twenty pounds and six pence; annual income twenty pounds; net result misery.

  You can’t be top of the pops every day of your life, and there always comes a moment when you aren’t as hot as you were. If we’d just taken some time off I think we could have put the pieces back together a bit quicker than we did, because by the time Mike left in 1984, the whole thing kind of collapsed. The studio, the record label and the band itself. It was depressing and I certainly didn’t know what I was going to do next. It wasn’t for another eight years that all seven of us would play again.

  HOLLYWOOD

  I’ve had a remarkable string of unsuccessful attempts at acting in movies. The first was while we were recording the album Mad Not Mad in 1985. It was a difficult period. We had been really successful for six years, the biggest-selling band of our time. But the schedule was relentless and we were very rarely at home.

  Now we were getting tired, really tired, and probably should just have taken some time out. But we had emerged in an era when the record industry was still being run like it was in the sixties. We were expected to make one album a year, release at least three singles, and tour and promote for the rest of the year. There was a feeling that if you took your foot off the gas, even for a second, then the whole thing would run out of steam and disappear into oblivion. We had no idea, as later bands would discover, that it might be advantageous to have a break from each other and the business for a bit, to recharge the batteries. Reignite the inspiration and rediscover why we were making music in the first place.

  But here we were in West Side Studios without Mike, one of our founding members, and preoccupied with trying to make an album, our last album as Madness and one that was different from the ones that had gone before. We had been constantly evolving and getting better as musicians. And even if we had wanted to, it would have been impossible to emulate the naïve enthusiasm of One Step Beyond, but having said that, the baby went out with the bath water on Mad Not Mad. Not to say there weren’t some great songs, because there were, but there were also a heap of kitchen sinks and the whole thing had strayed off the track into the land of eighties pomposity.

  A veritable army of session players had been assembled. In the middle of this chaotic process Clive and Alan had been asked by an old schoolmate of Clive’s, Julien Temple, if they’d like to work on the soundtrack to a movie he was directing, an adaptation of Colin MacInnes’s Absolute Beginners. It’s a novel set in the late fifties about the beat generation, the story of a jazz-loving white kid caught up in the race riots in Notting Hill Gate. Clive and Allan were riding high at this point, having just produced Dexys’ ‘Come On Eileen’, which was number one in America. I’d heard the demo on the sound system of Clive’s newfangled VW Golf. The title at the time was ‘James, Stan and Me’, but it sounded great even then.

  One afternoon, while we were putting down another layer of shrieking synths, or something, on Mad Not Mad, Clive asked if it would be OK if Julien Temple popped by to talk about the film. He duly arrived and we took a break while he chatted to Clive. After an hour or so Julien came into the recreation area where I was playing pool, and asked if we could go outside and have a chat. Somewhat confused, I agreed.

  For some peculiar reason I remember that, after strolling aimlessly, we ended up in a graveyard round the back of Notting Hill. I don’t know why, but there you are. After some preamble Julien asked me if I’d ever thought about acting. I told him no, because I hadn’t. Apart from the fact I’d hardly ever seen a decent performance from a pop star turned actor, I always thought it had a touch of the footballer turned pop star. I had a lot of actor friends, people who’d trained and put in the hours in the same way we had to become a half-decent band.

  ‘Well, think about it,’ said Julien. ‘I think you’d be perfect for the lead part.’ The lead part!? ‘Look,’ he said, ‘in your videos you were acting; you weren’t just singing the songs.’ Which was partly true. But I said no, because to me it just felt too much like a bricklayer thinking he could plumb. But Julien was insistent. ‘The character’s your age, and look, it’s set in the late fifties, you’ll be dressed pretty much as you are anyway! Apart from which the story’s great. Have a read of the book, think about it, and I’ll give you a call next week.’

  The recording sessions continued, percussionists, string quartets, backing singers came and went and finally Mad Not Mad was complete. Clive had accepted the job of producing the soundtrack to Julien’s film and went straight back into the studio. The first exercise in the soundtrack was to record the theme written by David Bowie, ‘Absolute Beginners,’ which turned out great, and Clive and Mr Bowie became pals.

  In fact I ended up staying in David Bowie’s house with Clive once, in Gstaad, in the Swiss Alps. He invited us to go skiing with him. We turned up with our respective families in Clive’s Range Rover, and there he was beckoning us up the driveway. ‘It’s David Bowie!’ The garage doors swung open automatically, and Clive drove in. There was a huge crunching sound and before we realised the car was too big to fit, we were stuck halfway. Not only that but all our suitcases had been knocked off the roof rack, leaving our underwear blowing about Bowie’s drive. Not the coolest start to meeting the coolest m
an in the world.

  He was an absolute gent, I must say, and his son, Joe, was a charming young chap who it turned out was a big Madness fan. But it was hard, sitting opposite his old man throughout the evening, to not keep going, ‘Shit! It’s David Bowie.’ It wasn’t the first time I had met the great man. In the early eighties we were to support Bowie at the gigantic Anaheim Stadium in the US of A. Two hundred thousand people, it was by far the biggest audience we had played to. I made the mistake of travelling with Lee. He wanted to pick up a second-hand dinner jacket he’d spotted on Melrose Avenue.

  Travelling with Lee more often than not ends up in an adventure of some sort, especially in his more light-fingered days. I don’t know if he was trying to pinch it or what, but he was in the shop for ages. He finally re-emerged, leaving us half an hour before we were due on stage. The traffic was terrible and we arrived fifteen minutes late. Our manager of the time, Matthew, was pulling his hair out. David Bowie’s enormous production was not going to alter its start time, so our time on stage was quickly evaporating. The rest of the band were on stage and already starting up the first chords of ‘One Step Beyond’ while I was still getting changed. Dressed, I legged down the tunnel and out onto the enormous stage. The stadium was huge, overwhelming. I felt like an ant.

  A feeling I didn’t have long to dwell on, as in my haste to get on stage I overshot the edge and started falling, Alice in Wonderland style. Twenty feet onto a scaffold pole, right onto my coccyx! With watering eyes and ‘One Step’ still blasting away overhead, I clambered back up the scaffolding to the stage above. I crawled up and on to the stage just in time for the song to end. The audience went wild, I think they thought it was a stage act! I could barely move. I was lucky I hadn’t broken my back.