“We didn’t think it was going to last more than a week, never mind 50 flipping years.” Madness frontman Graham “Suggs” McPherson tells me. “We were a gang, we were friends, and then we started to realise that we could be a group. But seeing yourself at that age is always a bit of a shocker, isn’t it?”
Suggs is remembering Madness’s early days as captured in the band’s autobiographical film Take It Or Leave It, first released in 1981 and now being reissued by the BFI in a newly restored 4K print.
Shot partly in black and white as well as colour, the film follows the early days of the group as they go from dead-end jobs to chart success. By the time of the film’s release, Madness had already notched up nine hits and would later dominate the singles charts of the 80s with their winning mix of ska, pop tunes you could whistle at the bus stop, and cheeky-chappie brio on hits like “One Step Beyond”, “Baggy Trousers” and “Embarrassment”.
Although their often surreal videos were hugely successful, providing a welcome foil to the slick, glossy pop promos of the early MTV era, with Take It or Leave It, the group and director Dave Robinson – the owner of Madness’s record label Stiff Records – aimed to take an almost documentary-style approach.
They had seen the 1980 film Breaking Glass, a now understandably forgotten vehicle for singer Hazel O’Connor, and were keen to avoid its clichés. “It was just so unrealistic,” says Suggs, “playing in the back of a lorry, miming to your own records. We wanted this to be the antithesis of that and to show what it’s really like to start a band. Being on the dole and having shit jobs.”
With this in mind, Robinson interviewed each member of the group and whittled their stories down to 30 episodes. Rather than scripting scenes, they agreed that the band would improvise their own dialogue based on how events had happened.
“It did feel weird at first when you had the camera on you,” says the band’s bass player Mark “Bedders” Bedford, “but we were left to use our own words, which was great because we didn’t feel like we were acting.”
Early on, we see Suggs auditioning for the band after they play a gig with a truly abysmal singer. “I can sing twice as well as him,” he tells them, and shortly afterwards we see him light up the screen singing the rock and roll number “See You Later Alligator”.
“I wasn’t a great singer,” says Suggs, “but Ian Dury was a great influence on me because he was singing in his own vernacular. The Kinks were the other ones.”
Suggs may not have been the greatest singer but the sharp-suited charisma and almost vaudevillian persona that he brought to the band would become integral to their success. The English music hall tradition was something he had absorbed “by osmosis”, he explains.
Although on one level you can see the film as a gritty snapshot of Britain in the late 70s, where roads were dimly lit, buildings were still blackened with decades of soot and smog and skinhead violence was rife, the film never feels bleak. The reality of London’s streets, pubs and clubs is interspersed with laugh-out-loud visual gags straight out of a 70s sitcom – and that was something else, Bedford tells me, that was part of the plan.
“We all shared a sense of humour,” he says, “and there’s things like [Mike Leigh’s television plays] Nuts in May and Abigail’s Party, Monty Python and Spike Milligan that we all liked at the time and still talk about today that played into the film and the videos as well.”
The fact that, as Suggs remembers, laughing, “there were certain members of the band who were into psychedelics” also informed their surreal sense of comedy, absorbing influences from Samuel Beckett to Tommy Cooper and Max Wall.
The band, however, were keen for the film to be real as well as surreal. Founder and keyboard player Mike Barson was the driving force behind their success and doesn’t always come across in the best light in the film, but this, says Suggs, was also part of the plan.
Mike’s attitude to that film was that he didn’t want everyone trying to be charming and all that and he wasn’t. You needed a few people who had some focus and discipline because we knew hundreds of people who were starting a band – middle-class bands with berets and Jack Kerouac books, but they didn’t put in the time for rehearsals.”
Suggs learnt this lesson himself after he was sacked from the band for having skived off to see Chelsea FC play on a Saturday afternoon.
After Suggs’s sacking, the band “played a gig at William Ellis school in Camden”, he remembers, “and I saw all the girls at the front screaming and shouting and I thought, ‘Oh bollocks! Fuck! I should be at the front, not down here,’ you know?” Fortunately for him, the singer that they had hired to replace him quit the band, “and I was the only one who knew all the words, and I realised if I concentrated a bit and did what Mike was saying, we might make it. And we did.”
With Suggs back in the band, they were soon evolving from simply covering the ska and bluebeat records they loved to writing their own songs. “The drummer John Hasler wrote a song,” Suggs explains, “and I thought, ‘If that bastard can write a song, I flippin’ well can.’ I remember lying on the floor in Lee Thompson’s council flat in the Caledonian Road in a sleeping bag and I suddenly had this idea to write a song about being at school: ‘Baggy Trousers’. And that was very much Ian Dury influenced, ’cause Ian had this great capacity to write lists, like ‘Reasons to be Cheerful’. So I just thought I’d write a list of all the things I didn’t like about going to school.”
The final parts of the film are dominated by the group playing live, and as much as the humour, it’s the infectiousness of the music that has you leaving the cinema with a smile. For Bedford, this is the band’s key legacy: “Creating something that people enjoy and makes them feel great.”
Although the band may never have imagined how long their success would last, they had always, says Suggs, “tried to be positive. Not in a trite way but trying to be uplifting, I suppose. We all came from such disparate backgrounds, but to have come from absolutely nothing to something means you know what nothing is, and you’ll never forget that.”
‘Madness: Take It Or Leave It’ is out on BFI Blu-ray and DVD on Monday