So what's your favourite Madness record?: Baggy Trousers, One Step Beyond, Our House. If not any of those, chances are that it's one of the other 21 hit singles they had between 1979 and 1986, when they brought a touch of welcome "nuttiness" to bear on those ever-so-earnest New Romantic times. The seven-piece Camden Cowboys, who were always more like a gang than a pop band, remain one of the most fondly remembered acts of the era.
Although they imploded - "we had run our natural course"- back in 1986, there was a reunion of sorts in 1992 when they started to play their (now annual) Madstock giant outdoor gig in London every summer, but despite clamours from the public for full national and international tours, they resisted the "chicken in a basket" circuit, saying they didn't want to tarnish their image. Until now.
Unlike others on the "Remember us?" trail, they have come back with a fresh batch of songs in the shape of the studio album, Wonderful, and mercifully it's a rather good, verging on very good, affair. There was a lot at stake - given their near-impeccable back catalogue, to come out now, 13 years later, with a substandard bunch of songs would have demoted them to the Nationwide league of pop acts. More than 60 per cent of Fantastic can sit easily with anything they've done in the past. But why a new album, when surely all the fans want is a Greatest Hits night out?
"When we got back in 1992, we were doing some live concerts and they were going down very well," says the primus inter pares band member Suggs (real name Graham McPherson). "We were promoting our old hits, and as the years went by we needed something a bit fresher and newer. We always need something to inspire us, to make us excited. So people brought new songs forward - but it was never really the right time to record them, until now. Seven years later it seemed like the right time because it was our 20th anniversary and I think, most importantly, we had enough good songs for the album."
A strange vibe being back in the studio together again? ""Funnily enough, if you analyse our relationships, we're pretty much the same people that we always were - some slightly bigger in certain areas, and some slightly smaller, but basically the same people." When the band first formed in 1979, it was under the name "The Invaders". They were first signed to the ska label, 2-Tone, with whom they issued their first single, The Prince - a tribute to blue beat maestro Prince Buster (the band took their new name from a Prince Buster song called Madness). At a time when punk had mutated into New Wave and the synthesiser was still regarded as an unnecessary musical instrument, the Ska beat (an indigenous Jamaican musical form - faster than reggae and a bit edgier) was quickly becoming the sound of the suburbs as bands like The Specials, The Beat, Bodysnatchers and The Selecter took over the charts and the clubs.
Suggs remembers the time well. "The 2-Tone wave was really important for us. We did the first 2-Tone tour, along with The Specials and Selecter. It was a mad mix of music, fashion and culture with a strong anti-racist message." Despite this message, and rather bizarrely in spite of the music's origins, Ska and Ska bands still attracted a small, but violent, right-wing skinhead following, although this has largely diminished over the years.
"It's funny but we never really saw ourselves as a Ska band," says Suggs. "Our attitude was always that we played pop music. We played songs like One Step Beyond in our own style." As a reflection of this, the band then left the 2-Tone label behind and hooked up with the Stiff label, mainly because it was then home to their heroes - Ian Dury and Elvis Costello. Hitting home the message that there was more to their sound than Ska, the debut album, One Step Beyond, was a nutty mix of jazz, pop and R'n'B, alongside the odd ballad-type track like My Girl.
They had succeeded in creating their own, identifiable sound: a mix of the energetic dance rhythms of classic Motown with the three-minute pop melodies of 1960s pop and a vaudevillian attitude to performance. All, of course, undercut with a Ska sensibility. Over the next few years there was no stopping the Madness hit machine: Baggy Trousers, Embarrassment, Grey Day, It Must Be Love (a cover of a Labi Siffre song) and although they were the archetypal "fun" band, there was a lot more going on under the surface. Both Our House and Grey Day were about London working-class life, while House Of Fun was written about teenage sexuality and the use of condoms and was in fact a "message" song, despite its jaunty rhythm. Other songs, such as Yesterday's Man, revealed a more melancholy side. "The darker side of the band came as a reaction to the 1980s recession," says Suggs. "When we toured in Britain, we saw that a lot of our fans were going through a tough time. There was a gloomy mood in the country. We picked up on that and, naturally enough, it started coming out in the music."
By the time of 1985's Mad Not Mad, and just after the departure of pivotal member, key-boardist Mike Barson, the initial momentum had waned and with diminishing record sales, the band broke up the following year. After a few years, a "Greatest Hits" record went racing to the top of the charts on its first week of release and Madness were continually cited by a number of the newer bands as a major influence. "Myself, I can't see that we've influenced anybody, but there's a band called No Doubt in the US (a multi-million ska/pop outfit) who quote us all the time. They say we are a great influence on them but you can't really hear it in their music."
After they reformed for the supposedly one-off London gig in 1992, there was some measure of how strong their legacy was when, without any promotional activity whatsoever, the singles House of Fun, It Must Be Love, and My Girl began to climb the charts again. At the same time, a musical about homelessness on the London fringe, called One Step Beyond by Alan Gilbey, which featured 15 Madness songs, played to packed houses for the duration of its run.
Now that they have finally bowed to public demand, does Suggs detect any discernible differences between classic Madness and reformed Madness? "I think we're all more relaxed as musicians. I think we know our instruments a lot more and we've all grown up, hopefully. But we've still got a bit of freshness about us. We're still a bit hungry, and for better or worse we're not as naive as we were then. When we started we didn't have a clue what we were doing really, we just went in the room and bashed and banged and blew things and generally had a marvellous time. Now, we know what we're bashing and blowing and banging," he says.
Wonderful by Madness is on the Virgin label. The band play The Point, Dublin, on December 13th
