|
Start of part five.
"You mean nostalgia?" I said
earnestly.
"No, I mean drinking," he said
with a great guffaw. "I probably drink more than I should," he added. "Because
it's part of the fabric of my being. but as far as I can gather it's only a
problem if it starts interfering with your life. And it hasn't yet. But I am
feeling a bit rough today."
After Madness split up, Suggs
tried his luck as a stand-up comic. It was disastrous because he assumed he
could keep an audience amused for fifteen minutes without any preparation. He
numbed himself by drinking so much he feel into the audience leaving an empty
stage.
Even so, he is prone to
nostalgia. His mother Edie still lives in Soho near her old haunts and they both
lament the passing of the seedy place that Soho once was. "All this
pedestrianising stuff," says Suggs scornfully. "All those pavement cafes.
That's suburbia isn't it? There's something about
not having cars that kills the spirit of the place."
He regrets the way Britain's
cultural tribes are now taken up by the media and sanitised. "That bohemian,
eccentric, theatrical side of British life is very much what Madness has
always been about. And it's been destroyed by advertising agencies and
people with mobile phones. Everything is gobbled up by the media. It's like when
you get Salman Rushdie writing about football..." He shakes his head at the
absurdity of it.
Suggs himself was a victim of
media hype after writing the theme for The Avengers, last years movie
flop starring Ralph Fiennes. "By the time I started doing the publicity rounds,
the film had been dead for two weeks. I was doing the rounds as the apologist
for the film. I was on a train and I couldn't get off. It was a disaster. But
then I have a favourite saying: you should always temper success with a certain
amount of failure. It's a British thing."
Relishing his ordinariness, he
is always wary of pretension. When they toured America, Madness were described
as "awesome". Suggs finds this hilarious. "Awesome is God coming down from a
mountain. Madness is not awesome. Madness is a not bad pop band from
England."
That's it. I hope all the parts that I have typed
out get through to the list, as some of my messages recently don't seem to have
been getting through. Anyway, I hope you have enjoyed reading it and I look
forward to hearing any comments that you nutty lot may have.
On The Beat Pete
|
