Madness for all ages
Four gigs in four nights confirms that on-stage or off, you're never too old nor too young for live music.
The week I turned 15, I went to 5 shows in 5 nights. All I can say is a: I don’t know how I got away with it either, given that 4 of them were in licensed venues, and b: we grew up fast in London in those days!
This past week, aged 60, I went to 4 shows in 4 nights. While I don’t keep track, this would be the longest streak in a long time; it’s neither something I aspire to these days nor especially want to do, not with tinnitus constantly knocking at my eardrums’ door. But three shows lined up in direct chronological order and given that I was in NYC for two of them with a rare, free, delightful crash pad all to myself, I decided to tack on a fourth, outdoor freebie.
Back when I was 15 (“back when I was a kid,” I hear my teenage son echoing sarcastically, with everything but the “Ok, boomer” tacked on at the end), we didn’t have cameras, though at one of those 5 gigs in May 1979 London Weekend Television turned up and I can be clearly seen on YouTube bopping around behind the drummer of The Chords.1 These days, it’s almost impossible not to have a top-notch digital camera with unlimited storage potential right there in your pocket, and the temptation to document one’s gig-going is too rich for most of us to ignore.
So for this weekend’s long read, and in the hope of making it less long than usual, here are some snapshot reviews of my 9 acts in 4 nights across 3 venues in 2 cities. Spread across 2 posts because my “less long” remains Substack’s “too long for e-mail.”
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GEESE/NATIVE SUNS, Tubby’s, Kingston, NY, Wednesday May 29.
Geese played my number one show of last summer, at the Maker Park Radio Festival on Staten Island. While that outdoor location and line-up and all-round vibe is hard to beat, there was a cachet to this local gig that rendered it an equally special occasion.
For those who don’t know them, Geese are a precociously talented, critically acclaimed, and credibly popular quintet from Brooklyn who decided to eschew the predicted path of prestigious colleges when their high school band turned out to be too fucking cool for school, landing a deal with PIAS/Partisan.
Geese are also my younger son Noel’s favorite modern band bar none, and partly because of this precious talent, they fascinate me. You see, Geese are of the new generation who have grown up with access to all music at any time, and as such, fail to distinguish – at least in their output – between generations and genres. If visually, they exude the coolness of great NYC predecessors like The Strokes, it’s evident that they’re also immersed in Radiohead, and it sounds to my ears like they’ve then gone further back to the musicality of a King Crimson….
None of which would indicate that in the middle of this sold-out-in-two-minutes gig at our own cooler-than-school back-room-bar-venue Tubby’s, bassist Dominic DiGesu would abruptly put down his instrument and charge straight at me –my bad for standing in the middle of what passes as a dance floor, I guess, unless it truly was personal!– and start moshing.2
The group is a visual feast all round. Front man Cameron Winter rightly draws attention for his looks, his presence, his ability to sing falsetto and yelp while playing keys, and for refrains like “I see myself in you.” Nonetheless, I found myself especially drawn to the interaction between De Gesu, drummer Max Besin and guitarist Em Green, the latter happily grooving on jazz guitar chords in a rocking style from an understated position side-of-stage. (Touring member Sam Revaz is on keys and keytars, having replaced the lone member of the original quintet who decided he was not too cool for school after all and returned to his higher education.)
Certainly, I prefer Geese live to on record, where their last album 3D showcased all the aforementioned talents and yet arguably lacks for the sort of songs that stick in this aging man’s head. But this is not about me and my taste: I’m not their audience. I am just glad I was able to make a connection, and get myself and my teenage son on the guestlist for this rare all-ages show, so I could have the fun of watching him have fun watching Geese in a venue far far far below the station of a group that is playing Forest Hills Stadium in August. As I can vouch from being 15, these are the memories you carry all your life.
Support came from Native Sun, a more conventionally loud and abrasive quartet who also made the drive up from NYC. Noel and I had seen them previously, opening for the Bobby Lees at the Colony, and given that Noel was first turned on to Geese when they had opened for the Bobby Lees at the Colony in Woodstock, we had paid attention. I like Native Suns: they’re raw, they’re real3 and they make a glorious racket, though I do worry about Danny Gomez holding on to his voice if he carries on screaming quite so vehemently.
But I’d also seen them before I first saw them, if you know what I mean. Of course not every band needs to reinvent the musical wheel nor, indeed, listen to and absorb everything on streaming platforms just because they can. But what I would love, and call me old-fashioned, is to get a better sense of the lyrical content because a group that is, “singing about grief, disillusionment with our time, and lovingly documenting the lives of the outcasts and misfits” deserves, de facto, to be heard doing so.
MADNESS/FISHBONE, Hammerstein Ballroom, Manhattan, NY, Thursday May 30.
My personal relationship with Madness dates back to the summer holidays of 1980, when Nick Logan, editor of The Face, packed me off to Nottingham to spend two days and nights with them for my first proper professional assignment. Almost twenty-four years later, at an after-show held in a dingy Hammerstein basement, guitarist Chris Foreman (still Chrissy Boy to his friends despite being 67) introduced me to another friend as “being about 12 years old” at the time.
I was actually 16, but either way, frighteningly young to be sent on such a dangerous assignment. I was also complete devoid of cynicism, which was why, after initial and understandable guardedness from Madness, I was welcomed to the camp and began a life-long association by acquaintance.* When I added it up for the compendium, turned out Madness were featured more often in Jamming! than any other band (including the Jam), and I am happy to see them in concert, in person, or both, whenever our paths cross.4
As with any group that aspires to longevity and especially one that decides to reform after a breakup, Madness’ trajectory has gone up and down over the years. The last time I saw them play NYC was at the decidedly smaller Irving Plaza venue in 1999, though the last time I saw them in the UK, they were headlining their own festival on Clapham Common, where the audience of aging skins, mods, punks, and general good-time pop fans skanked and moon-stomped as if their knees would never give out.
Maybe it was the sheer weight of numbers at a jam-packed Hammerstein for a show that must hold the record for originally being scheduled pre-Covid, but I suspect it was the advancement of age, because this New York crowd, though equally exuberant in spirit (and spirits of the alcoholic kind) were to be found skanking at a much more gentle-on-the-joints half-speed shuffle.
The same measured restraint is noticeable now in Madness themselves, the original sextet (MC/dancer/singer/toaster/songwriter Carl Smyth/Chas Smash left for a life on Ibiza many moons ago) augmented by a brass section and percussionist to form whatever word we use for a ten-piece band. It’s a suitably professional presentation: Madness shows have always been about giving the audience what they want, and while singer Suggs certainly appears to improvise in the moment, he had his inter-song cheeky-chappy banter act down pat a long ways back. Likewise, Foreman gets a pre-ordained slot at the mic to lead the audience on some karaoke, though he admitted afterwards that ‘Highway To Hell’ had only recently replaced ‘Living On A Prayer’ as a more blatant invitation to participation.
Madness could easily fill an entire two-hour set with their incredible run of UK hit singles, but the group wisely figured along the way that if they were going to do more than an annual Madstock and vie to become a legitimate touring act once more, they needed to stay creatively engaged too. 2023’s Theatre of the Absurd presents C’Est La Vie justified this intent; it’s a proper concept album, in three short acts, with some deep material that could still never be mistaken for any other band. It also topped the charts in the UK, beating off Taylor Swift, according to Suggs at the Hammerstein – “for one week,” he added drolly – and the group duly played three songs from it, each of which was warmly received.
Madness proved back with the unveiling of ‘Baggy Trousers’ in Nottingham that summer of 1980 that they could write an enduring pop song alongside the best of them, but the group got its initial rep with covers, and Suggs gave the necessary shout-out to Prince Buster, whose ‘One Step Beyond’ and ‘Madness’ gave the group their first hits, their name, and whose role-model-ska-status inspired the hit ‘The Prince’ likewise. Madness now include an additional Prince Buster song in their set - ‘Girl Why Don’t You’ – alongside the Max Romeo/Lee Perry reggae evergreen ‘Chase The Devil’ and Lord Tanamo’s more obscure ‘Taller Than You Are.’
But it was the set proper’s concluding ‘It Must Be Love’ that resonated most nostalgically for this particular punter: the Labi Siffre cover was one of the soundtrack songs for the first proper romance of my life. (So was Depeche Mode’s ‘Just Can’t Get Enough’ – and eventually, the Human League’s ‘Don’t You Want Me’.)
Madness have never been the world’s most sophisticated live band, but the fact that Geese could run musical rings around them is not the point here. Madness made hits, lots of them; they made people smile; they grew up and they got serious and, indeed, scattered amongst the classics at the Hammerstein were multiple observations about not just British but American politics, the group appearing to celebrate Trump’s guilty verdicts from 5pm that same day on 34 felony charges with more open enthusiasm than those of us who live in the States and worry that it won’t change enough people’s hardened minds about reelecting a now proven criminal.
Madness also continue to make hits, they play with love in their hearts, and though even the youngest of them is still a couple of years older than yours truly, they haven’t changed that much over the years as people, as characters, or as pop icons. Their penchant for entertainment remains such that they hired a bagpipe player to start the encore with a one-off rendition of ‘When The Saints Go Marching In’/’Scotland The Brave’ after which the piper answered the perennial question, “What does a Scotsman wear under his kilt?” by mooning the entire 4000 capacity crowd.
Approximately fifteen minutes later they left the stage for good, to the sounds of Monty Python’s ‘Always Look On the Bright Side of Life,’ which resulted in around 100 festive fans forming a hand-held dancing circle that celebrated community, stupidity, old age, humor, nostalgia and our steadily weakening joints without anyone necessarily thinking any of that in the moment. Pop music. You can’t beat it. Not even with a walking stick.
Support came from Fishbone, a band of significant stature themselves, allowing that they were awarded their own tribute show at the Rock Academy where I work part-time, and which hardly lacked for eager, knowledgeable young participants. Indeed, Fishbone could probably headline a venue this size in their own right if they didn’t tour quite so consistently with others. (Last summer found them out on the road with George Clinton.) And though I put them on at Limelight back in around 1992, I have not seen them since, and it had been my full intent to catch their set: myself and my buddy date for the evening got to the venue for 8pm, the time I knew them to be taking to the stage. We were greeted with a queue – alright, a line! – that literally went around the block and down to the next one! By the time we were inside, upstairs and looking for a seat (I had no interest in watching from the back of the vast dancefloor if I could help it), Fishbone had moved on to their set-concluding repeated rallying cry: “What’s the name of this band?” The eagerness with which the crowd responded indicated that they had gone down a storm.
Next post: The Damned, Lenny Kaye’s Nuggets, The Dictators, Andra Day, Alex Vaughn.
By one of life’s lovely coincidences or perhaps just one of its understandable developments, that drummer, Brett “Buddy” Ascott, is now playing with my band, The Dear Boys.
I prefer draught beer to cans when I am out and about for the obvious reason that it tastes fresher and you can’t “pour” a pint at home. Whatever possessed me to order a can at Tubby’s rather than draft, I don’t know, but boy was I glad of that decision when Dominic charged me so hard I spilled my drink over my clothes anyway.
Ha! Subsequent to typing “raw and real” I went to their website where they describe themselves as “raw and honest.”
I long ago lovingly documented this 48 hours of Madness in the Midlands. It forms the second chapter of my second memoir Teenage Blue, and based on a reading I gave here in Kingston around the turn of the most recent calendar year, it’s guaranteed to raise a smile.
Great read, Tony! I gotta look for that Chords gig! Keep on!
'It Must Be Love' brought a tear to my eye the night before in Boston. What a great night!