Madness
 Madness
were at the forefront of the UK ska revival
at the end of the 70s. They ultimately shed the Two Tone image and
became one of the most consistent UK chart groups of the Eighties.
They were a motley crew, composed of stubbly pub-rockers and
baby-faced pop hopefuls, but their cheery pop and slapstick reggae
made them a nation's favourite.
The skinhead
menace of their early days soon gave way to an image of diamond
geezerdom, made believable by videos as witty as the hit singles
they accompanied. If you think of Britpop in the longer term, then
Madness were its early-80s standard-bearers, with their roots in
music hall rather than Jamaica.
In 1976 in Kentish Town, north London, Lee Thompson, Mike
Barson and Chris Foreman formed a trio called The Invaders to play
the Bluebeat music they grew up listening to. Over the next couple
of years, the line-up would expand to include Suggs (real name
Graham McPherson), Carl Smyth, Mark Bedford and Daniel Woodgate,
undergoing an osmosis into Madness.
Kicking off their recording career with the 2-Tone skank of The
Prince in the autumn of 1979, they went on to produce 21 Top
30 hits that grew steadily in sophistication whilst retaining the
sometimes silly, sometimes sad, always humorous English-ness.
Madness made the classic transition from fizzy funsters to
socially concerned grown-ups. Where once they wrote about Baggy
Trousers, they moved to heart attacks and the situation in South
Africa. They became more complex, but less energetic.
 By
the time of House Of Fun and Our House the group
really had no peers - They beautifully portrayed the English way
of muddling through in memorable three-minute pop songs that owed
as much to music hall traditions as anything else and which seemed
to appeal to absolutely everybody. Fittingly, Our House
(1982) bagged its composers an Ivor Novello award.
But like all good things it couldn't last, and the band began
to show signs that it had grown weary of being the music hall
clowns, and of a public who were game for a laugh and a knees-up
but less ready to a accept the sombre mood of songs like (Waiting
For) The Ghost Train or Yesterday's Men. A half-hearted
return as The Madness proved as brief as it was ill-advised.
Madness were the most prolifically successful British singles
band of the 1980s, chalking up 21 Top Twenty hits between 1979 and
1986.
TRIVIA NOTE
When Madness performed in Finsbury Park, London, in 1992, the
dancing fans created a tremor that registered 4.2 on the Richter
scale and local residents feared they were experiencing an
earthquake.
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