Suggs

February 2013

SUGGS never knew his father growing up. The man who left home when he was a small child was rarely spoken of although he knew a few, shocking details. “I knew he was a heroin addict and I knew he ended up in an asylum,” says the Madness frontman. “My mum was a jazz singer and she came down from Manchester.
“My dad was a big jazz fan and a photographer. They met in Soho.
“When they married she didn’t realise he was a heroin addict... not until she came home from work to find him with a needle sticking out of his hand. Then life started to get difficult and he became impossible to live with.
“So they went their separate ways.”
Heroin was rife in the jazz clubs of Soho during the 50s.
“I remember a chemist in Shaftesbury Avenue and one day a week they’d give out free heroin to registered addicts. There’d be queues of people.”
Suggs, who was born Graham McPherson, only discovered more about his dad when he turned 50.
“After he left my mum lost touch with him and we never really talked about him. It was one of those very British things; the elephant in the room.
“But when I turned 50 I started feeling retrospective. The kids had left home and my cat died. So I asked my ‘what did happen to dad?’ She started to fill in a bit more about who he was so I thought I’d find out what happened to him.”
He figured it would mean months of research in the local archives and visits to his family in Scotland.
“But then someone suggested I look on Wikipedia. And half of it was right there!”
His research also uncovered some shocking details of why he ended up in a psychiatric hospital.
“There was a story that he’d injected himself with paraffin,” says the 52-year-old. “He’d started injecting himself with anything he could find. I think the authorities thought it was the safest place for him. But I don’t really know much more than that.”
Although his dad died in 1975 at 40, Suggs was still taken aback on finding his death certificate.
“It was like he’d just been a figment of my imagination until then.”
He adds: “It made me think twice about (using) heroin, I must admit.”
His dad’s story is the narrative thread in the show he brings to the Theatre Royal in May.
“The conclusion is that you can dwell on the past, especially when it’s something bad and you can keep dragging it around with you like a ball and chain or you can just get on with life now. The people around you now are the most important people.”
The show, called My Life Story, also includes tales of his upbringing, life with Madness at 18, his career in TV and radio, and his own family, which includes a wife of over 30 years and their two daughters.
“It’s not stand-up, it’s not An Audience With... and it’s not a monologue either. We ended up with a sort of tragi-comedy musical sad thing... which is uncategorisable,” he says.
“When I wrote it, it was about five hours long. But I’ve got a director who showed me how to condense it. And he showed me ways of theatrically jumping around in time. If you leap from side of the stage to the other and shout ‘It’s 1992’ and the lighting changes a bit, then people kind of believe you.
“The only problem was learning it. There was a bit on a train where I kept getting off in 1975 when I was supposed to be in 1992,” he laughs.
He has a guitar and piano accompaniment for a few songs during the show.
“They are songs that illustrate the story. Baggy Trousers explains quite a bit about my childhood.”
Most of the band have seen it, when he took it on the road last year.
“They’d shout out at certain points that I’d got the date wrong or that I’d made it up,” he laughs.
“But they were all very supportive.”

Suggs: My Life Story, Theatre Royal, Wednesday, May 8, £24.50, www.trch.co.uk

Suggs

May 2012

FOR the second time in my life, Chelsea have got to the Champions League final and I was once again on holiday with my wife.

This time we were in Spain. Actually, it was brilliant because I was sitting a bar full of crazed Spaniards who all wanted Chelsea to win. Probably because we’d knocked out Barcelona in the semi-final. It’s that mentality where if we go on and win it, that means they would have won it if they’d beaten us.

When it went to penalties everyone was going berserk. To beat the Germans (Bayern Munich) on penalties in Germany was possibly the greatest thing that ever happened in my life.

My mates were all texting like mad. A lot of them were at the game in Munich. I would have been there if the wife hadn’t booked this holiday. But in another sense I was better off. I’ve been to cup finals with my mates before and the last thing I’ve seen is the football; because it all starts at ten in the morning with a couple of drinks. There have cup finals where I’ve got home and I genuinely couldn’t remember the result.

My wife was across the road ranting and raving because she was with friends who were all waiting to have their dinner. There were daggers flying through the windows at me.

But I wasn’t about to leave the game during the penalty shoot-out. By the time it finished all the food had gone cold but I didn’t care. I was behaving like an idiot, running around the car park.

Actually the last time we were playing United in the Cup Final and I was in Rome. And because there were no Italian teams in the final I couldn’t find a bar that would show it. I had to bribe this guy in a Chinese restaurant 20 Euros to put it on his small black and white TV. And that’s how I watched it, with an American family that had absolutely no idea what was going on.

We’ve just announced a new tour for the end of the year and called it The Charge of the Mad Brigade, because we’re still charging about. People of our age should probably be tucked up in bed with cocoa. For whatever, peculiar genetic reason, we still have this youthful vigour that makes us want to charge about the country.

We start with The House of Fun Weekender at Butlins in Minehead. We did it last year and it reminded me of the soul weekenders that we used to go to at Camber Sands. We had the Madness Olympics, which involved crazy golf, darts, pool and a swim in the sea at 10 o’clock in the morning in November.

It was a fun way of starting the tour, so we’re doing that again. We’ll be in Nottingham in December and there will be some festivities, of course. We’re probably the only British band of any consequence that hasn’t recorded a Christmas single. We’ve always talked about it. But by the time Christmas is coming round we realise we haven’t written or recorded it. Then by the time the summer comes back round again, when we should be doing it, it’s the last thing we want to think about. I’m sure that one day we will.

But yes, Nottingham has always been good to us ever since we first played Rock City over 30 years ago. We prefer those smaller gigs to be honest. Places like Rock City have the best vibe. But we’ve got lots of big stuff going on. We’ve the new album coming out, we’ve got the Butlins thing, we’re doing the Queen’s Jubilee. We’re playing at Buckingham Palace with Sir Elton and Sir Paul... we’re hoping for a group Knighthood. Sir Madness will be fine.

So we’re going to the arenas this time. It’ll be equally fantastic but in a different kind of way.

The new album will be out in October and we will be playing some of that on the tour but we’re not about to launch our jazz fusion album on an unsuspecting Nottingham audience. You’ll get all the songs you want to hear. You pay your money and you get a great night out seeing Madness is what it boils down to.

We have fun and we appreciate that people pay to see us having fun... and have fun themselves.

Madness play the Capital FM Arena on Thursday December 6. Tickets are £35/£45 from the venue, call 08444 124 624 or go to www.gigsandtours.com.

Suggs

July 2010

I LOVE football. And I must say I’m rather bereft at this particular time, in this very small window between the World Cup and the Premier League starting again.

I am a Chelsea fan and I do go. Not like I used to - I used to go every game -- because in the last two years I’ve been busy with the band.

I thought the World Cup was dreary on the whole. It never really sparked in to life. There were brief moments from Argentina and the Germans. Obviously we were shambolic, an absolute disgrace.

My missus has gone away this week and I’m just watching any old (rubbish) on the television. I keep turning to Sky Sports in the full knowledge that there’s no football on but I’m still doing it, hoping there’s going to be something on. It’s like being a drug addict. I’m sweating on the sofa, watching Come Dine With Me.

I’ve been asked to go on Come Dine With Me, of course I have. I’ve been asked to go on every crappy reality TV show. The last one was I’m A Celebrity Traffic Warden. Yeah, that’d be something really lovely to spend the afternoon doing.

On a Saturday morning I’ll work out what football’s going to be on the telly and have a big fry up. Then me and the missus will go for a walk on Hampstead Heath or Primrose Hill.

I am one for DVD box sets but they just sit there. I never watch the things. I’ve got The Wire, the last part of The Sopranos still to go and Alfred Hitchcock. The Wire’s the one that’s really bugging me because everyone says it’s a must watch and I’ve 25 hours of the thing. I’m halfway through series two and it’s got me for sure but it’s finding the time.

We eat out quite a lot. One of the great things about London is its cultural diversity and you can eat anything, any day of the week, from Vietnamese to... the other lot.

I’m very fond of Dim Sum, which is like a Chinese luncheon thing. There’s a big place in Soho called the Chuen Cheng Ku and it’s about the size of Wembley Arena. They come around with all these trollies and you’re not sure what’s on any of them, you just point at stuff.

I go to the gym now and again, when I can. I do like it but my discipline is all over the gaff.

When we’re on tour, that’s about two hours of aerobic exercise every night and that does keep you fit. I’m very happy with the state of my health, given the pounding my body’s had.

I live on the outskirts of Camden Town, I’ve been there for the past 35 years, and there are lots of fantastic venues, where you get lots of new bands. But I don’t think for a man approaching 50 it’s my role to be in every nook and cranny of modern culture. But I like to hear new things. I’ve a couple of daughters in their twenties and they’ll say ‘dad, there are a couple of great bands on’ and I’ll go and have a look.

My perfect weekend would be a fry-up, then rowing on the boating lake at Regent’s Park, with a bottle of white wine on a piece of string. Then I’d watch Chelsea at Stamford Bridge beat Man United 10-0. I’d come back and we’d go and see a show or a band or the pictures. On Sunday I’d play football in the morning with some of my mates. I’d score a hat-trick and be carried shoulder high down Camden High Street. I’d have three jugs of beer, go home and my wife will have cooked a feast of a Sunday dinner. Everyone in the street would be in my house and we’d carry on until four in the morning.

It’s happened before - but not all in the same weekend.

Madness have announced a date at Rock City on Tuesday December 7, with Paul Heaton as their special guest. Tickets are £35, call 0871 310 0000.

Splendour 2009

July 19 2009

Splendour

July 2009


RESIDENTS of Wollaton, you won’t want to read this. Your back garden, that glorious park with its majestic hall on the hill, is Nottingham’s greatest asset.
This is the bit you won’t like.
Wollaton Hall and Park is Nottingham’s greatest asset to get the city on the national music festival map.
No other festival this summer has such a backdrop.
Imagine you were one of the bands on the main stage at
Splendour on Sunday. A sea of people, 12,000 or so, stretching up the hill to the breathtaking Elizabethan mansion.
OK, we’re not getting over excited. It’s not in the ball park of Glastonbury or Reading and Leeds or T In The Park or Latitude or any of those established summer weekenders.
It doesn’t even have the prestige of Summer Sundae in Leicester.
But judging by the positive reaction of bands, fans and organisers,
Splendour is on the way.
Suggs, singer with main stage headliners Madness, even remarked on the setting.
“Any idea how much that house costs?” he asked the thousands who’d spent a day getting wet thanks to a typically annoying British summer Sunday.
Out of your league big fella. Besides, it’s not for sale.
It had been a day of rain. And this may be a cliche but from what I witnessed during Madness, stood towards the back of the crowd, no one seemed to care. Oh that cliche: Spirits weren’t dampened...
They were singing along to My Girl and doing their best Nutty Boy moves.
And around a quarter were from outside the county, according to the city council.
So we’re starting to attract outsiders already.
Do we want them? Isn’t 12,000 people descending on Wollaton Park enough to deal with?
It can hold more. A lot more. It was more than double when The Corrs headlined City In The Park ten years ago. Remember them? Ronan Keating, All Saints, Squeeze and The
Pogues. The first one, a year earlier, was headlined by The Saw Doctors and pulled in 12,000 people. There are numerous big name bands who could shift, say 25,000 tickets.
And how about two days or even three? Last year’s inaugural
Splendour was a Saturday and Sunday but while 4,000 people on each day isn’t a failure, it’s not the numbers one would have expected for Kate Nash, Paolo Nutini, Rufus Wainwright and The Lemonheads.
Splendour band bookers DHP had said they’d struggled to find a suitable second headliner for this year. Blondie had been approached among many others.
Instead, the efforts – and budget
– were concentrated on just one day. And it worked.
There were more stages (three music and one for comedy), more stalls and more people. So it worked.
When it does go to plan on the day, when all the tickets are sold, when everyone had a good time, when there’s no trouble
– we want more.
Splendour will return in 2010 – the city council had budgeted for three years. But we want two days next time, don’t we?
While scribbling notes watching Ash headline the Big Top on Sunday, I was approached by two women curious about what I was doing.
I think they call them groupies. At least I’d like to think so.
One recalled the Heineken weekends in Wollaton Park of the late 1980s and early 1990s, sat atop her mate’s shoulders right near the front watching Blur.
Why do we remember them with such affection? Probably because they were free.
It could happen again with sponsorship. But with the recession looking like it’ll continue, securing a sponsor could be a struggle.
Besides, Splendour was £30 for a day. You pay more for an arena gig. If you were a city resident it was half that. A tenner for teenagers. Free to under 11s.
The council and DHP got it spot on this year. Please can we have more?

Madness

July 2009


Daniel 'Woody' Woodgate is sitting at home, a five-bed townhouse in Beckenham, Kent, looking out on a fine day of sunshine but is concerned about the dismal forecast for the weekend ahead. Madness have three shows, back to back, starting tonight in London with their annual Madstock bash and ending on Sunday in Nottingham topping the Splendour bill.
Not many bands can command such big audiences after 30 years. And it's not just in the UK.
In the past two months the seven strong Nutty Boys have played Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Serbia, Portugal, France, Holland and Spain.
"They react very much like the rest of the world," he says.
"Jumping up and down and having a jolly good time."


The latest album The Liberty Of Norton Folgate is your first new album in a decade. Were you nervous about doing it?
Not at all. Rather the opposite. We were itching to get on with it in fact. We had loads of new material that we needed to get off our chests.
We booked ourselves into a tiny little studio in north London and started the process of recording on an eight-track machine with old cranky equipment. And it was really good fun. That was just Suggs, Mike (Barson), myself and a bass player called Graham Bush. Lee Thompson used to come in. Then when the rest of the band got to hear what we were up to one by one they all came back.

It doesn't sound like a rough recording. It's quite polished.
It is. We took a lot of those ideas and recordings into a more upstream studio.
But by starting off with basic equipment there was more emphasis on getting the song right in terms of melody.
And the vibe. It was recording tracks like we used to. Memorising them, playing them a lot. Because these days you can literally play a couple of bars then paste them together on a computer. That just hasn't got the same feeling.

It's had both great reviews and chart success.
It's very nice that people have said that this is the masterpiece. It's wonderful but to be honest we just do what we do.

How much of the new album will you be playing at Splendour?
Well, instead of presenting the thing in one big dollop which I think would put people off, we've slowly integrated the new songs into the set. At the moment we have up to about four songs. So when we come up north, like...

We're not that far north.
North of the river (Thames) is north to me. You should get at least four new songs. Probably Dust Devil, Forever Young, Clarkenwell Polka and NW5.

Madness are well-versed in playing the festival circuit. Have you any advice for other bands on how to fill the stage? A lot of running around perhaps?
There is a bit of that. But there is a danger of what we call ego-ramps where the singer will disappear for a good five minutes as he goes and basks in the splendour of the audience. Suggs is very good. He's very much a man who is part of the band. Lee Thompson, our sax player, loves to run around. He likes to climb lighting rigs and fly in the air. He needs a lot of attention.

When you played Rock City in 2005 he dived off a speaker stack and flattened a few members of the audience.
Yes, he recently broke his ribs by some antics where he was on a human pyramid at Glastonbury and fell off. Or they collapsed under his weight. I don't know which one is true (laughs). He landed on a bottle and has broken a rib.

Do you miss the opportunity to mess about like that, having to stay behind your kit?
I never miss any of that. I like being behind my kit. I'm happy to stay there, thank you very much.

Have you worked with any other Splendour bands before?
We've come across Kid British. They're a nice bunch of lads. Bless them they do come from Manchester but that's not their fault. Suggs and I met them on Soccer:AM. They did a cover of Our House. It's nice to have such young fans. The Pogues are brilliant. I don't think we've ever been on the same bill. They're old favourites of ours. They have the ability to get a crowd going which is the idea of it all.

What memories have you of gigs in Nottingham?
We've always gone down very well in Nottingham. Rock City was always fantastic. I remember once playing the Royal Concert Hall and not being allowed to leave the stage because we had to do about four or five encores. So we've always gone down very well in Nottingham. It's fantastic. I do like it. I'm not just saying that.

You are just saying that.
No. I'm quite fond of Sheffield as well. Nottingham and Sheffield. They're two cracking places up north.

Do you all still live in the London area?
We do apart from Carl - Chas Smash. He now lives in Ibiza. He's in the hills, not where all the banging raves happen.

Suggs has said his favourite Madness song to still perform is Embarrassment. Which is yours?
I'm enjoying the new ones. We do a really cracking version of I Chase The Devil aka Ironshirt which is an old reggae song we did on The Dangermen Sessions album. People think that we're covering Prodigy's version but we took it from the original. I know it's a cover but It Must Be Love is a cover as well and I love doing that one.

How different are you to say 20 years ago on tour? Do you still travel together?
We do. There is a slight split in the band between people who smoke and people who don't. The people who smoke are getting fewer and fewer. So Suggs and Carl are on their own quite a lot (laughs). I gave up cigarettes 17 years ago. I'm one of the worst type of ex-smokers. I'm a pain in the a***. I'm unbearable. I snub people who smoke. We have a good bus and a naughty bus. And I can't even tell you what goes on in the naughty bus.

At what point has it felt like a job being in Madness?
When you begin to repeat the same things over and over again. When you've done the same set night after night. When the crowd start looking the same. This year is the 30th year of the band and we've done more gigs than ever before. There has been times when you go 'I'm not feeling it now'. Because it's just repetition. If you do the same thing, no matter how wonderful it is, night after night, you do begin to lose it a bit. But we are very aware of that so we tend to not overdo it. We try and maintain a freshness by simply not playing that much and it seems to work.

What plans do you have for the rest of the year?
We go to Moscow in August, then Ireland and we're doing a gig in Paris. I'm sure there will be something at Christmas as well. But we don't want to spread ourselves too thinly. People can think 'oh Madness, they're always around, we can catch them later.' Well, there might not be a later. We might just knock it on the head.

Everyone knows you as Woody but who still calls you Daniel?
Only my ex-wife. And that's why she's my ex-wife.

Madness play Splendour July 19 2009.




July 2010 Interview with Suggs