Denys Bament <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>maestro_78372< grassyass
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
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