by Suggs
But anyway, here I was, newly married with two young kids and a band that was fast falling apart. At this point we also had the recording studio and record label, both of which were draining whatever resources we had accrued up to this point.
It was time to sell up and ship out. The big house had to go. It was a sad day when we moved, and there was nothing fun about moving out. But the house went for a great price, Anne found a lovely Victorian terraced house just down the road in Holloway and we were back in the black.
Strangely, I remember the day we moved was the day of Live Aid. It was a hot day and the concert was blaring out of every open window in the street. ‘Feed the world, let them know it’s Christmas time …’ But the words ringing in my ears were, ‘What’s that Bob Geldof ever gonna organise?’ Which is what we replied when asked if we would like to take part in an earlier photo session.
We’ve been living in our house for twenty-five years, and now the kids have left we’re rattling about in a place that’s a bit too big. We keep talking about moving, but we never do. The kids are only down the road in Hornsey. I call them kids, they are of course grown women, and beautiful people with it. They’re round every other night, decimating our fridge. And we always have Sunday lunch together in this funny old house that’s witnessed the majority of our lives.
When the girls were about eight and five respectively, we had topsy-turvy day, something Anne had read about in a Swedish children’s book. Adults and the children reverse their roles for a whole day. First off was a trip to the supermarket so the girls could do the shopping. As we waited at the till, Scarlett inevitably came down the aisle pushing a trolly loaded with sweets and fizzy drinks. Half-way down she had a second thought and started unloading handfuls of sweets onto random shelves and replacing them with tins of tuna, bread and salady things. So for lunch we had tuna sandwiches, sweets and lashings of pop. The kids spent the afternoon eating sweets and watching cartoons on the video. We had tuna salad for dinner and then the girls disappeared downstairs to see our lodger, Mo. Mo was a lovely girl who had come with the house, which gave us a great baby-sitting option. After an hour or so of Soul II Soul blasting out of the basement I went downstairs for a look. Mo and Viva were dancing round the room as Scarlett leapt up and down on the bed sloshing a glass of shandy, her cheeks as red as apples. ‘It’s 7.30, time for your bed,’ she happily announced. Which it was in topsy-turvy world, we headed upstairs. ‘I’ll come up and read you a story in a bit.’ About an hour later she did come up. The colour having drained from her face. She stuck her head round our door. ‘I’m sorry I can’t read a story, I feel sick.’ As she headed upstairs to her bedroom we could hear her saying to Viva,
‘I don’t like this bit about being a grown-up.’
This house has seen the lot. The fighting, the parties, dancing on the kitchen table, all of them pet funerals, exams, the ceilings falling in, rows about the hedge, the loving, the ups, the downs and indeed the sideways.
And here we still are, in our nice little terraced house. Scarlett and Viva’s names still written in the concrete path with their fingers, the odd letter the wrong way round.
THE LIBERTY OF NORTON FOLGATE
When I heard of the Liberty of Norton Folgate it just sounded like a great song title, something Syd Barrett might have come up with in his psychedelic pomp. Madness hadn’t made an album for a couple of years, the previous one having been an album of covers of the kind of music we started out playing in the pubs and clubs of North London in the late seventies – ska, reggae, some Motown stuff. We recorded it under the pseudonym ‘The Dangermen’, and the idea was that a return to our musical roots would be a great way to revive and rejuvenate the reason we made music in the first place. We launched the album at our ancestral seat, the Dublin Castle in Camden Town. We ended up staying for a week, and it was enormous fun playing that great old dance music again in a sweaty pub, and, boy, was it sweaty. On the third night I half-heartedly asked the owner, Henry, son of Alo, the guy who’d given us our first break in 1978, if there was any air-con. ‘Air-conditioning!’ he bellowed, ‘I’ve been turning the heat up!’ A chip off the old block.
The Dangermen project went great and ironically became a big hit in France. The whole thing was rejuvenating and revitalising, and now we were back in the mood it was decided our next record would be a dense British pop record, basically a great Madness album, utilising all of the influences that have informed the band for nigh on thirty years. The word ‘concept’ was being bandied around, a word that up to this point had always engendered thoughts of fellas in capes playing twenty-minute synthesiser solos in a swirling fog of dry ice. But our conversations got as far as the idea of a concept album about London. Despite the observation of my esteemed colleague, guitarist C. J. Foreman, who remarked, ‘What?, we thought the majority of our songs were about London.’
We were all brought up in London and it has informed most of our work. I’m not saying London is any better than anywhere else, but it just happens to be the place I was sitting in as a budding songwriter, as the world of inspiration strolled by. I’m sure someone who was brought up in Paris, New York, or wherever might feel the same way about his own city.
I’ve written songs about the characters and indeed the areas of London I’ve known over the years. I tried once to write a song about London as a whole, inspired by Peter Ackroyd’s great book London: The Biography, in which he tried rather successfully to capture the personality of this vast metropolis. But I was defeated. For me, the subject was just too big for a song. Ackroyd had hundreds of thousands of words to play with. A smidge too many for a pop song. North, east, south and west, there’s just too much diversity and local history in this vast collection of what was once small villages to fit into three verses and a couple of choruses. But chatting to Mike from REM in a bar one night an idea that had been fermenting in the back of my mind for some time resurfaced. We were talking about where I live in North London and he was fascinated to hear how and when the street was built, the layers of history that lie beneath London’s pavements. And it got me thinking about that, going down through the pavement through those layers of history in one small area, all the comings and goings of the various migrants who make an area their own, before sometimes moving on. That might be a way, a small way, of painting a picture of London as a whole. A song about a street or an area in its full historical context. Not looking side to side. Not just a song about now. But a song that starts from then, right at the beginning, and takes us to now, via all the various generations of people who’ve come to this great city to make their way in the world. An X-ray view, going down through the street surface of today’s city, peeling back the layers of grime and history, shrapnel and shoes, broken pots and broken dreams. I started to do some research on my own street, and in the process came across a book called This Bright Field, written by a chap called William Taylor, which had the intriguing subtitle of ‘a travel book in one place’. Words that couldn’t have been more appropriate to what I was hoping to convey in this as yet untitled song. Taylor discovered an area of Spitalfields known as ‘The Liberty of Norton Folgate’. Originally a rubbish tip, it later became a refuge for actors, writers, thinkers, louts, lowlifes and libertines – outsiders and trouble-makers all. Sounds like our kind of place, does it not?
Which fitted perfectly into a concept the band had had for some time, about making a concept album about London. The city we’d all grown up in and the city that had made us what we were. One by one songs were written which seemed to fit the concept, so the album of Norton Folgate began to come together.
We started out in an 8-track studio in Hackney called Toe Rag, trying to capture some of the feeling of our early records. All of us in the room together, recording live. Chris, the guitarist, had left the band during the Dangermen stuff, but decided to rejoin halfway through so we moved to a bigger studio for the second half of the record.
It was hugely critically well received, more than we cou
ld ever have imagined, and was a big hit. Once again we were back in the frame of current musical acts. None of our previous records had ever been reviewed like that. It felt as if people were looking back retrospectively over our career and realising we’d added a bit more to the pot of British pop culture than they’d originally assumed.
Old Jack Norris, the musical shrimp and the cadging ramble,
A little bit of this, a little bit of that, but in weather like this you should wear a coat, a nice warm hat,
A needle and thread, the hand stitches of time, it’s Battling Levinsky versus Jacky Berg,
Bobbing and weaving an invisible line,
So step for step and both light on our feet,
We’ll travel many a long dim silent street,
Would you like a bit of this, or a little bit of that,
A little bit of what you like does you no harm and you know that,
The perpetual steady echo of the passing feet, a continual dark river of people,
In its transience and in its permanence,
But when the street lamp fills the gutter with gold,
So many priceless items bought and sold,
So step for step and both light on our feet,
We’ll travel many a long dim silent street, together.
Once round Arnold Circus,
Up through Petticoat Lane,
Past the well of shadows and once back round again,
Arm in arm with an abstracted air, to where the people stare out of the upstairs windows,
Because we are living like kings and these days will last forever.
Cause sailors from Africa, China and the archipelago of Malay,
Jumped ship ragged and penniless into Shadwell’s Tiger Bay,
The Welsh and Irish wagtails, mothers of midnight,
The music hall carousal ends, spilling out into bonfire light,
Sending half-crazed shadows dancing up the brick wall
Of Mr Truman’s beer factory, waving bottles ten feet tall,
Whether one calls it Spitalfields, Whitechapel, Tower Hamlets or Banglatown,
We’re all dancing in the moonlight, we’re all on borrowed ground.
Oh I’m just walking down to,
I’m just floating down through,
Won’t you come with me, to the Liberty of Norton Folgate.
But wait, what’s that? Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem.
Purposefully walking nowhere, I’m happy just floating about,
On a Sunday afternoon, the stallholders all call and shout,
Avoiding people you know, you’re just basking in your own company,
The technicolour world’s going by, but you’re the lead in your own movie.
Cause in the Liberty of Norton Folgate,
Walking wild and free,
In your second-hand coat,
Happy just to float,
In this little piece of Liberty,
A part of everything you see.
They’re coming left and right, trying to flog you stuff you don’t need nor want,
A smiling chap takes your hand and drags you in his uncle’s restaurant,
There’s a Chinese man trying hard to flog you moody DVDs,
You know you’ve seen the film, it’s black and white, it’s got no sound,
And a man’s head pops up and down right across your wide-screen TV.
Cause in the Liberty of Norton Folgate,
Walking wild and free,
In your second-hand coat,
Happy just to float,
In this little piece of Liberty,
Cause you’re a part of everything you see,
Yes, you’re a part of everything you see.
Cause it’s steady old fellows, pickpockets, dandies, extortioners and night wanderers,
The feeble, the ghastly, upon whom death had placed a very sure hand,
Some in shreds and patches, reeling inarticulate, full of noisy and inordinate vivacity,
Which jars discordantly upon the ear and gives an aching sensation to both pair of eyeballs.
In the beginning was a fear of the immigrant
He made his home there down by the riverside,
They made their homes there down by the riverside,
The city sprang up, from the dark mud of the Thames.
And here we are again with the latest album, Oui Oui Si Si Ja Ja Da Da, as well as a fantastic new management team. I always felt like Norton Folgate was a bit like an episode of Star Trek. We were being dragged towards a sort of black hole of eighties nostalgia, and The Liberty of Norton Folgate was warp factor 10 and we’d got ourselves out of the black hole, and were now in search of distant planets, of which Oui Oui Si Si Ja Ja Da Da is one.
People often ask where the title came from and the simple answer is we couldn’t actually decide on a title. Lots of them were being bandied around, but we were arguing, as we often do. The only thing we could agree on was to go to Peter Blake, the great British pop artist, to do the cover for us. Of course he did the iconic Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
We’d already been negotiating with his wife, Chrissie, if he’d be interested in doing our album cover when she asked if we’d like to play at his eightieth birthday party at the Albert Hall, which was a great honour and an enormous amount of fun. It was duly arranged to meet him in his studio, so an excitable delegation was dispatched. What a place! An old warehouse down an alley, Fulham way, with two floors of the most weird and indeed most wonderful. Stuffed squirrels playing snooker watched on by a life-size waxwork of Joe Louis, Max Miller’s shoes, Tommy Cooper’s fez, huge collections of model cars, boats, trains, fruit machines and paintings covering every surface.
After the most fantastic guided tour of the place with the great man, we settled in the kitchen. ‘To tell you the truth, lads’, he said, ‘I’m always a bit wary of doing album covers’. We looked deflated. ‘Because the band will often come up with a title’, Peter continued, ‘only for the bass player to ring me two weeks later to say they’ve changed their minds.’ We looked at each other in the full knowledge we weren’t quite sure what the album title should be. ‘No, no, that won’t be the case here’, we said confidently, ‘this record’s gonna be called Circus Freaks.’ In fairness it was the most popular title we had at that time.
‘Great’, he said. On the tour of his studio, amongst the many other wonders he showed us was, of all things, a marvelous montage of circus freaks. ‘I’ll get going right away.’
Two weeks later we rang to say we’d changed our minds. With the sound of montage being binned he said, ‘Right, what is it now then?’ and so it began. Men of Steel. No. Deolali. No. Dial ‘M’ For Madness. 2Pop Music. Ten Commandments. Wait, we’ve got it, The Rake’s Progress.
‘Right’, he said. ‘I’m just going to write down all the different titles you have suggested to me, and cross them out one by one until the album is ready for release. And did we change our minds again? Oui oui, si si, ja ja, da da, indeed we did.
In deference to Peter Blake, and his original idea, and to celebrate the deluxe, limited edition version, Cathal had the idea of re-doing the cover in the spirit of Peter’s idea and bringing the various rejected titles to life. As you can see, Lee Thompson is ‘Circus Freaks,’ or is he? Chris Foreman is ‘Deolali,’ Mike Barson is ‘Man of Steel’. Cathal Smyth as ‘The Rake’. Daniel Woodgate as ‘Dial ‘M’ for Madness’. Peter Blake is Moses in The Ten Commandments and me, I am of course ‘Zoltar’ the fortune-telling character in The Machine on the Pier, who, when Tom Hanks asks if he can be big, prints out the ticket which just says … yes.
UP ON THE ROOF
So we turned up on Sunday afternoon and everything seemed quite normal, like a municipal park with a few tents in it. We could hear a bit of music drifting out behind us, Elton John and the like. Next minute we get a call to go and rehearse on the roof. We jump in some golf buggies, and it was like a scene from The Matrix, the Mall eerily empty and silent as
we entered the gates of Buckingham Palace. Policemen saluting us, Household Cavalry unflinching as we waved and smiled and drove through an arch into Buckingham Palace proper.
We were then escorted by two heavily armed policemen up the stairs, and took a lift that led to the servants’ quarters on the fifth floor. There was a corridor, like a hotel, with lots of open doors and mini staff parties going on in the rooms. We were invited in to a few, but we had our own dressing room. It was No Smoking, but I opened the window and had a cigarette, and could have sworn that I felt a red laser dot on my forehead – there were definitely silhouettes walking around on the roofs opposite.
Then we’re called to do our rehearsal and we climb up some rather rickety wooden stairs and out onto the roof. We realise at this point that it’s pitched, not flat, so we have to scrabble over the guttering. Around the corner they’ve built us a flat platform out of scaffolding and planks, and it’s jutting over the building so the audience can actually see us. It’s quite precarious and I’m not great with heights.
But before I get the chance to feel vertiginous, I look up and it’s the most extraordinary sight. I realise that the whole of the London skyline was built around the view you get from Buckingham Palace. The Queen must have ordered it so. It was literally like the Post Office Tower there, the Gherkin there, Big Ben there, the London Eye. Every single landmark was displayed in order. And then the realisation that I’m actually standing on the roof of Buckingham Palace looking down the Mall, which let me tell you, was an extremely odd experience, to say the least.
Then of course it started to rain. I mean really started to rain. And didn’t stop raining. But we rehearsed the songs, which went fine, playing ‘Our House’ and ‘It Must Be Love’. I resisted the urge to sing a few lines from The Beatles’ ‘Get Back’, especially the one about ‘California Grass’! The next day was the Jubilee Pageant and I went down to see a friend of mine, Eduardo, who has a houseboat in Chelsea Harbour. It didn’t stop raining and it looked like the whole weekend was going to be a complete washout. I saw the poor old Queen going by, in a flotilla of people looking like they were freezing and getting pneumonia.
