[total-madness] music365 - excellent Wonderful review

John Lawrence Sun, 12 Dec 1999 16:23:04 -0800

Title: music365

	Reviews		MADNESS : Wonderful

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(Virgin 7243 8 48406 2 4)

Madness are back - every single one of them - with an album as fine as any they ever made...

If you're the supplier of raw materials rather than the venture-capitalist cartel running the show, not only does pop offer no pension scheme, there's no ISA for dignity, either. Not only can you not salt the adulation away against a grey (haired) day, it usually has to be repaid, with interest, in contempt later. Quit when you're ahead and join the straight world - as, say, Madness's deft-fingered keyboardist and chief songwriter Mike Barson, now a graphic designer, did - and you'll hear "didn't you used to be...?" forever. Keep eking it out through a sense of mild desperation - provoked through having grown unfit for any other work besides television presenting, as, say, Graham "Suggs" McPherson did - and you risk the old "wot, you still around?" Or, worse still, "yeah, we liked the old stuff, back when you woz good". Damned if you stay or if you go.

Which may be why for some of us, surveying a career that included a dazzling number of cheekily cockerney (TM) hits and summed up a particular kind of Londahn-ness - or at least, the way a particular kind of Londahner (not always the nice kind) liked to see 'imself - cheekily cockernee ska-popsters Madness' most affecting album was, paradoxically, 'Mad Not Mad', the one at the very fag-end of their (first) career. Downbeat, bittersweet and oddly vulnerable in comparison to its predecessors' cartoon laddery, its gritted-teeth 'I'll Compete' and wearily autumnal 'Yesterday's Men' had perspective. Or, as was surely the point and as Spinal Tap put it best, "too much fucking perspective, mate".

One decade and one protracted breakup later, all of Madness, including Barson, are back, the success of their semi-annual Finsbury Park Madstock dates having proven that the (oh, awright, nutty) boys could still turn out shows tight as hospital corners. And, what's more, that their fan base still included the tens of thousands of Londahners (mostly the nice kind, if you didn't look too hard down the front) in amongst those improbable flocks of American East and West Coast teens who weren't, unfortunately, of record-buying age when it might have mattered. So here's the new, reformed Madness record, then, and it's as good, consistent, bright and sparkly a thing - minus anything quite as big as their biggest hits or as interestingly knackered as 'Mad Not Mad' - as they've ever made. And if it sells less than any of its predecessors, it'll probably be because thirty-five year olds don't buy as many records as seventeen year olds. And the seventeen year olds, outside Orange County anyway, aren't buying.

Which isn't, of course, Madness' fault. In the meantime, there mightn't be a surplus of older- and-wiser insights here, reflection never having been their strong suit, but there's not a really weak track either. At worst, '4am', 'Going To The Top', a Beatley 'Elysium' and string-section-y 'If I Didn't Care' tread lyrical water, but still acquit themselves professionally. On the plus side, Suggs still does his knowworrimean winky frontman thing to a T, and set-closer 'No Money' offers up a deliciously tight horn section and velcro-sticky chorus. On the more-than-plus side, Barson's irrepressible ol' joanna lopes all over a lovely, lolloping pair of sad-words/happy- melody gems, 'Lovestruck' and 'Johnny The Horse'. And for those of a certain inclination, the obligatory jump-up of Cathal Smyth's 'The Communicator' shows there's life in the ol' (apparently, one and one only) skank tune yet.

And, easily best of all if you're not put off by the traditional cockernee practise of glamourising people who beat people up for a living, there's the irresistible 'Drip Fed Fred'. It's driven by a fantastically filthy panto-Kray voiceover courtesy of Ian Dury, who oozes Londahn baddy-ness over the knees-up proceedings with such sweaty relish he sounds like a black cab driver wiv that Satan in the back of his taxi, en route to Hell, NW1.

Which, on the evidence, rather knocks limbo, as a second choice destination, into a cockernee hat. Madness, of course, have sussed that one already. ***

Jennifer Nine

Thu Dec 9 1999 23:32 GMT

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