RETURN OF THE NUTTY BOY

Twenty-five years on and Madness are still reinventing themselves, this time as an alter-ego group playing reggae-flavoured covers. Frontman Suggs reveals the method in the madness to Brian Boyd

WHERE else would you talk to Suggs but in Camden Town, the spiritual home of UK ska? His mind, though, is in Amsterdam and a chance encounter a while back.

"I was in the hotel bar having a drink and I saw this guy I used to know years back but couldn't quite place. Got talking to him and he told me he used to work in the Boy clothes shop on the King's Road. This would have been at the height of punk and he was reminding me of how I used to go into the shop and get them to play a song called Madness by Prince Buster. He'd go: 'We can't play this, we're a punk shop. There's trumpets on that - it sounds like fuckin' Glen Miller.'

"And that's what it was like when we first formed. The only reggae or ska you would hear is when you went down The Roxy and the DJ there, Don Letts, would run out of punk singles to play because they're weren't enough of them. So he'd put on reggae music. It took us, a bunch of white guys, a long time to convince people that if punk was rebel music from the UK, then reggae/ska was rebel music from Jamaica."

Suggs, as fantastically wonderful as you'd expect, is explaining the thinking behind the new Dangermen (aka Madness) album. This is a collection of classic ska covers, the songs Suggs was listening to when all around him were on a "destroy" and "anarchy" punk mission.

"The common enemy we had was the whole dinosaur rock thing - Pink Floyd and all of that, all that proggy 20-minute drum solo stuff. But what I found in ska is the same thing I found in Motown and punk: that two-and-half-minute single, that verse, chorus, verse. And here's the thing about Madness: we were sometimes called a 'music hall' band, because of the videos and stuff, but our lyrical content was always protest music."

Listen back now to such classic Madness tracks as Embarrassment and you'll find a tale therein of a young man shunned by his girlfriend's family for coming from a lower social order. On Grey Day, which was released before The Specials' Ghost Town, Madness talked about Britain's violent, desolate, inner cities. On Yesterday's Men they provided a damning indictment of the Thatcher years, as in the refrain, "It must get better than this".

"Elvis Costello said once that the greatest British pop has been made by white kids trying to play black music but not quite getting it right," Suggs says. "And that's how we sounded - an approximation of real ska music. We were a British pop band, we had the singles and we worked the same way that the artists in Studio One [the legendary Kingston recording studio] or in the Hitsville Motown studio worked, with that assembly line production idea."

It's now 25 years since the production line rolled off the first Madness single, The Prince (named after Prince Buster, who gave the band their name). "It seemed as good a time as any to do this," he says. "We had always wanted to put out an album of songs that influenced our songwriting, so we just used the working name of The Dangermen to put this one out".

Named after the 1960s television series starring Patrick McGoohan (just before he did The Prisoner), The Dangermen cover well-known songs such as Israelites, alongside the less well known Shame & Scandal (originally done by Lord Tanamo) and You'll Lose a Good Thing, a Barbara Lynn song.

Also in there is The Supremes' You Keep Me Hanging On and The Kinks' Lola. Neither should work but they do. As unlikely as you think Lola might sound put through a ska blender, Suggs explains that they're actually covering the 1974 version by Jamaican singer Nicky Thomas.

"Obviously we weren't just influenced by ska music, so that's why we have The Supremes and The Kinks on there too. We've always been drawn to good, unpretentious music, the sort of stuff Ian Dury did. When we first started we used to do songs by Carole King and Kilburn and The High Roads. We always worked on the principle that you had to have music that you could dance to."

Recorded but left off the finished album are Carole King's Too Late Baby, John Lennon's Oh My Love, and Bittersweet by The Undertones. But you can't leave an Undertones song off an album, Suggs. "I know, it's terrible isn't it? I love the song. It's not one of their best-known ones. Unfortunately it got sacrificed at the very end. Maybe the next Dangermen album will be us just doing Undertones songs."

Put that in writing for us please.

Dangermen live shows, which have been packing out The Scala in King's Cross all hot summer long, are remarkable for the amount of fortysomething shaven-headed males in attendance. Even without playing any Madness songs, the band still provide one of the best live shows you'll see all year. Towards the end of their set, they do relent and throw in One Step Beyond and Night Boat to Cairo.

"But it's the Dangermen playing Madness songs, that's the difference," he says. "Doing the album and going back to all the early ska stuff influenced how we now treat Madness songs, so we've changed the arrangements on those two songs, made them more like Dangermen songs, if you know what I mean."

Madness officially broke up in the mid-1980s but were virtually willed back into a reunion by their legions of fans. "There's been so many stops and starts, so many manifestations of the band over the years," Suggs says. "We're not supposed to be back together again but at the moment, besides The Dangermen, we're doing a tour of forests in the UK."

Forests? "Yeah, forests. It's just one of those things we find ourselves doing. We all do different things, all have side projects, but we're still around as Madness. But what has really helped invigorate us is doing this Dangermen album, and we're now talking about doing a Madness album - an album of expansive pop music."

Apart from music, Suggs seems to spend a large part of his time turning down all the reality TV shows that come calling. "I don't know what it is about me, but they ring me first. The jungle thing, celebrity this and that, they're always trying to get me on those things. There's no way, though. I mean, some of those people are 'famous' for shagging someone.They're awful things, really awful."

Further down the line, Suggs would like to see Dangermen/Madness evolve into a sort of Camden version of the Buena Vista Social Club.

"I can see us playing on the street corner, I can see us playing in stadiums. Makes no difference to me as long as it's great pop music."