Stepping Beyond

Pathos”, Suggs calls it, when he talks about the bittersweet story of his life. Because behind every clown’s smile is a sad story, and Suggs is no different.

The legendary Madness frontman, renowned for his comic capers, not only has a dark side, but one he’s happy to share with you.

And what a story it is.

So his new show not only divulges the ‘jolly japes’ he got up to with Madness, but gives a poignant and deeply personal insight into the man himself, in particular his childhood.

The turning point is well catalogued: Suggs is sitting in the bath, the morning after his 50th birthday bash, hungover, when his cat crashes off a shelf and dies.

It was his epiphany and at that moment Suggs pledged to find out what happened to his errant father and start delving into his past before it was too late.

The result is Suggs My Life Story, a tour which kicks off at the Oxford Playhouse tomorrow night – but Suggs is keen to impress that it’s not depressing.

“I talk about some serious things but it’s not all doom and gloom,” he grins. “In fact, it’s the opposite really, but I just thought it had to have resonance rather than just being a romp through my showbiz career. That would be boring and anyway there are more important things in life, so now it’s all intertwined.

“And overall life has its ups and downs and I wanted it to be honest above all, hence the title. So it’s funny, but dark in places with music.”

The elephant in the corner is that Suggs’ mum, a jazz singer, brought him up alone after his dad left when Suggs was three. It turns out his dad was a heroin addict who died of his addiction as Madness was taking off. Suggs, then Graham McPherson, also lived with his aunt for several years while his mother sang, so there’s baggage.

And yet here Suggs is, airing the skeletons in his cupboard to all and sundry, something he’s presumably comfortable with?

“Well, I’m not mad on ‘sharing’, so, yes it is hard to talk about serious things. But it was good because it made me talk to my mum about it, and we hadn’t talked about my dad really until then because we were English. And when we did talk we realised we had both just been repressing it and this was our opportunity to talk about it.

“So I was then happy to express publicly what I have said many times over in interviews over the years, for myself. What do the Americans call it? ‘Closure’. And besides, it has made me what I am.”

Suggs did everything early. Madness was up and running when he was 16. By 18 he was on Top Of The Pops and he got married aged 21, to Anne, to whom he’s still married.

“I think the fact that I was brought up by my mum and aunt without a dad meant that I was always attracted to the stability of family life and I grew up early,” he says. “By 16 I’d done things most people did in their 20s. It was like being on forward-wind so by 20 I was ready to get married.

“But even then it was so intense to live like that for five to six years with seven other people in a band all day everyday while my kids were growing up at home without me.”

And then it stopped. Not suddenly, but in the 80s things started petering out.

“When Madness stopped I was 27 and it felt like my career was over because it had all been so meteoric and when it ended I was really lost,” Suggs admits. “And I didn’t have my old man to talk to, so I did have some therapy for that,” he admits, “because it hurt.

“But as for our demise, Madness was just getting less playtime and lost momentum.

“Of course that’s got to do with fashions changing but we also swapped to a big record label who didn’t know what to do with us and we just started to disintegrate.”

Madness is now having a renaissance with their music, lyrics and style being taken seriously rather than put down as a fad.

“I think that’s down to all the festivals,” Suggs says, “because you can play in front of thousands of people who wouldn’t ordinarily come to see you. And because Madness is quite potent and unique it catches on. Music has always been my favourite thing but I have learned you can change the way you do it. Before I had a terror that if I stopped it would all go away. But I soon realised that if I didn’t stop I would go away too, to the loony bin. So now I do it when I want to at the pace I want to. But it still irks me still that there was a feeling we were a novelty because when people try to cover us they realise there was a lot going on in our songs. People now realise that our songs have resonance.”

But that’s the other thing about Suggs. He comes across as a cheerful chappy, but, much like his band, there’s a serious streak running right through the middle. It’s no coincidence that Madness was so successful.

They had their heads screwed on, knew what they wanted and went after it. Not only did they see the gap in the market left by punk, but they also rehearsed five days a week until they had a sound they could call their own.

“I shared a house with some lads who taught themselves to play the keyboard and guitar,” Suggs recalls, “and I was singing as we left the cinema and they said ‘maybe we should try you out as the lead, maybe that would work’ and it went from there.

“I had a certain charisma I suppose and could sing as well. And there were lots of people going around posing with berets and carrying a sax who couldn’t play a note. But we played and got a few gigs and it went from there.”

Just to remind you – ‘from there’ included 214 weeks on the UK singles charts over the course of the decade, holding the record for most weeks spent by a group in the 1980s UK singles charts with songs like Our House, It Must Be Love and House Of Fun.

So while Madness come across as pranksters who threw their music together, they were anything but.

Take the dancing for example, of which there has been nothing like it before or since.

“One of the band’s dad was an Irish dancing champion and the sax player also had a peculiar jig,” Suggs says laughing, “but more than anything we had just come out of punk and while we loved the energy of it, it was a lot of jumping up and down and we tried to make something more flexible on the dance floor, something you could enjoy.”

And yes, that is still how Suggs dances “I can still embarrass my children,” he laughs “A bit like the turkey dance – head back and arms going up and down.”

So have his family seen the show? “Yes, I tested it in a pub in Islington for a few weeks in front of my kids, wife and my mum and it went down well.

“There were tears but also laughter, they liked it. I think they were just amazed I could remember it to be honest,” he laughs. “For me it was terrifying.”

So overall, is he ready for the rest of the UK? “Yes, I’m really enjoying it, and it’s a real challenge because it’s a new thing for me. So although it’s nervewracking, I’m really excited.

“And while I had to get it out of my system, I also want the show to be a bit like a Madness concert, where you feel better when you come out than when you went in.” You see? Pathos to the bittersweet end.

* Suggs My Life Story appears tomorrow night at the Oxford Playhouse. Call the box office on 01865 305305.