One Step Behind

A Phenomenological Reckoning for Madness

With our current force fed diet of moral panic about white nationalists and anti-facists stuck in the collective craw by a bunch of propagandizing corporate cathode ray dickheads (with precious little on-the-ground reality), let me tell you kiddies, in late 70s London it was not a pair of abstract dueling ideologies that experts lectured you at arm’s length about—it was blood in the streets, run for your life reality and you need to understand the difference. Averse to going the first person singular route, but I was there, and at the twisted, vermillion center of this ugly socio-political clash lies the subject at hand.

When I was working on the Melanie Vammen substack piece awhile back, the fabulous former Pandoras-Muffs-Coolies rock goddess was a guest on Laguna’s KXFM radio to debut the Coolies latest song, and I naturally tuned in. The single was great, but the three nattering squares hosting the show spun dozens of appalling discs, chief among them this dreadful 1983 Madness pop bomb, which led to one of them oozing on about “our friend, Suggs.”

Our friend Suggs.

While Madness is universally seen as a family friendly, jolly good posse of cockney payasos, it’s high time to address another side of the Madness phenomena, one for which they have far too long enjoyed “a layer of protection”—the ugly reality of the group’s skinhead origins, a stain from which they have successfully skated past for decades.

In order to understand the street level circumstances which produced Madness, one must grasp the historic context of the skinhead movement. ​A mutant sub-culture that emerged in the late 1960s from the fast evaporating Mod  scene, the skins were a rowdy, easily identifiable crew who sported a distinct uniform and adopted contemporary Jamaican ska and rocksteady as their preferred soundtrack, anointing the genre’s top singer Prince Buster as their musical hero.

Psychedelic Carnaby streeters they definitely were not, and the sect burgeoned to the point that outsiders quickly realized it was a highly exploitable marketplace. In Kingston, they were churning out skin-specific 45s like Symarip’s ”Skinhead Moonstomp,” with it’s opening recitation of  “I want all you skinheads to get up on your feet/Put your braces together and your boots on your feet/ And give me some of that old moonstomping . . .”

Pulp press the New English Library celebrated the skins with a wildly popular series of trash paperbacks that glorified the cult’s venal, brutish aggression. The books heartily stoked early 1970s Britain’s poisonous atmosphere of random violence (see Stanley Kubrick’s voluntary withdrawal of A Clockwork Orange from UK cinemas) and established the skinhead as a contemporary working class archetype. Concurrently, the bastard offspring of Oswald Mosely and Enoch Powell eagerly welcomed the skins into their neo-fascist National Front and British Movement parties, creating a viral alliance that buoyed these rogue political factions and elevated the skins reputation from dangerous football hooligans to a far more menacing and organized political threat.

As resident of marvelous 2 story, 4 bedroom squat on the East End of London’s Balls Pond Road from early 1978 to late 1979, I was intimately familiar with that aforementioned poisonous atmosphere—which only steadily intensified.

Most Fridays, we’d trek to the century old Hope & Anchor pub in Islington (its tiny basement stage hosted shows by everyone from the Damned and Lurkers to Wayne Kramer, Joe Ely with the Clash), and, on the way, we’d pass by Dave Vanian and Bay City Roller Les McKeown’s residences. It was glorious.

Enter Graham McPherson, AKA Suggs, who, with his crew, was a prominent weekend fixture at the jukebox adjacent far end of the Hope’s bar. Between his reliable mixture of laughter with lads and chatting up birds to his not infrequent flights of mad-dogging stink-eye glower, everyone in the place was acutely aware of Suggs’ presence.

Although still just 17, Suggsy’s dark reputation emphatically preceded him. His intimidating signature graffiti SUGGS SUPER SKIN could be seen from Kings Cross to Camden Town, Holloway Road to Hackney.

“Everybody from the estate I grew up on went to the football, and you ran around shouting at people and booting people up the arse,” Suggs said in 2016. “We were all prone to behaving badly.”

Among the squatter set, his reputation was even worse, with many claiming Suggs enjoyed arbitrarily “doing” squats (i.e. smashing them up) along with whispered claims of not only threats, but violence, bottles and bicycle chains. It was widely rumored that he had stabbed at least one squatter with a screwdriver, but this was never proven.

For punk rockers, usually perceived as relatively defenseless targets in London’s tribal jungle (stay clear of those Teddy boys!), the skins quickly became a rightfully perceived danger. Attending a 1978 UK Subs show in the dark heart of the East End, an odd one-off gig in a fluorescent-lit basement level youth club, we witnessed a gang of skins mopping the floor with a fallen kids’ head as they repeatedly booted him back and forth along the blood streaked linoleum—we got the hell out just as another bloody brawl exploded on the pavement; watching, from the upper deck of a passing city bus, as a bottle was smashed into some poor bugger’s face.

Once they caught the scent, it didn’t matter if one was black, white, Asian or Martian, you were fair game.

Tension escalated all over the city. We were big Sham 69 fans, but by mid-78, attending their shows was downright hazardous; they increasingly degenerated into chaos and violence, forcing singer Jimmy Pursey to repeatedly halt the proceedings and tearfully plead with the offending aggro-centric skins. At Sham’s notorious, final mid-79 Rainbow Theater show—a virtual NF op—we got lucky when a sympathetic skin warned us “watch out—they’re gonna smash up all the punks when it’s over.” When Pursey brought up Jam bassist Bruce Foxton for an encore version of “Johnny B. Goode,” we dashed for the nearby underground stop. Just before the train arrived, the sound of a chanting horde of approaching skins was echoing through the tube station—truly bloodcurdling. The skins had destroyed Sham 69, who wouldn’t perform again until 1987.

Enter the Specials, a brilliant mixed-race group from Coventry boasting the great Jamaican ska originator Rico Rodriguez. They had nothing to do with neo-fascist skinheads but, with their close-cropped hair and penchant for recording old Prince Buster hits, had everything to do with providing a context that, albeit inadvertently, further legitimized the skins and would allow the yet nascent Madness to, in short order, completely eclipse the Specials in British pop culture.

Formed as the Invaders in 1976, the band gained absolutely no traction until Suggs came along three years later and, as Madness, shrewdly exploited the Two Tone cult’s significant momentum. Signed to Stiff Records, their grasp on the Special’s mohair coat tails accelerated the band’s ascent to pop stardom, even as their shows routinely drew the exact mob who crushed Sham and Pursey.

It was the high-profile dawn of the Rock Against Racism / Linton Kwesi Johnson era, and where the Specials were overtly anti-racist, Madness remained torturously mute on the topic. After an October 27, 1979 Specials, Madness, Selecter show at Hatfield Polytechnic when anti-fascists chasing neo-Nazis stormed the venue, causing £1,000 worth of damage and sending 10 fans to the local Emergency Room—some with razor wounds—NME journalist Deanne Pearson forced the issue in an interview published Nov. 24.

“But National Front and British Movement supporters are frequently seen at Madness gigs, particularly in London, and I ask the band why,” Pearson wrote. “They are wary, immediately on the defensive, first denying that they had not noticed large numbers of NF/BM members at their gigs, then stating they do not wish to discuss politics. Chas [Smash] is the first to break rank. ‘It’s got nothing to do with us,’ he snaps impatiently. ‘We don’t care if people are in the NF, or BM or whatever, as long as they’re behaving themselves and having a good time and not fighting. What does it matter, who cares what their political views are?’” As Pearson continued to press, Smash told her “Well, I’ll tell you something, you print a word of this and I’ll deal with you personally!”

Indeed. In London, the political climate was so supercharged that punk rockers knew to never go into a pub with any type of Union Jack displayed, lest one enter an NF den and likely suffer the size 12 consequences. After Hatfield Poly and Pearson’s grilling, Madness locked down further comment and continued playing to the same charming crowd. Their debut LP One Step Beyond went to number two and spent 78 weeks on the UK charts. Madness’ star continued to rise in the early 80s, and became a fixture on British airwaves, routinely charting Top Ten hits and releasing album after album—increasingly soppy pop dreck like “Our House” (which went to #3 in the US). But in early 1986, as Madness was attempting to finally deep six their past unsavory reputation by joining up with the pro-Labour, anti-Thatcher roadshow collective Red Wedge, the chickens came home to roost.

On March 6, Fleet Street tabloid the Sun published a photo of Suggsy with the then-imprisoned lead singer of infamous white power band Skrewdriver under the hed ROCK STAR’S NAZI PAL, along with a story claiming that Suggs had roadied for that band in 1977. It was a very unexpected shock, one contemporaneously corroborated by the members of Skrewdriver. On September 1, Madness officially announced they were splitting up and, and after fulfilling contractual obligations, disappeared for the next six years.

Suggs and “Nazi Pal”

To be fair, Suggs vehemently denied this Skrewdriver rumor, later telling Mojo magazine:

"I was never a roadie for Skrewdriver. I don't know where that came from, someone put it in a biography of Madness. I knew (singer) Ian Stuart (Donaldson) a bit and the rest of the band, who were like a punk band at the time... so I saw them around. Then what's-his-name (Donaldson) became an obergruppenfuhrer (Nazi) and I never spoke to him again."

When the inevitable reunion came in August 1992, the huge two-day Madstock festival in Finsbury Park, the entire thing seemed jinxed. Suggsy’s new best friend Morrissey had agreed to open for Madness on both shows and gave a pre-Madstock interview to the NME where he casually mentioned that he “doesn’t think that black and white people will ever really get on.” Plenty of the almost 30,000 attendees were less than thrilled as Moz, with a projected backdrop of a young skin bird, wrapped himself in a Union Jack at one point during the show and also crooned his “National Front Disco” provoking more than a few jeers—prompting to the singer to cancel the next day’s appearance. Along the way, some £35,000 in cash and £450,000 in cheques were stolen from an employee of promoters Mean Fiddler Group, so the entire affair assumed a bizarre karmic aspect.

Suggs nonetheless went onto become a cultural fixture, churning out horrible albums and as an inescapable presence on British TV and radio. I don’t know what it is about the Brits—lack of institutional memory, fetishism—but plenty of their rock stars have evinced a weird admiration for Nazis, fascism and white nationalism. From Moz to Bowie to Lemmy, Sid’s swastika, it’s a never ending parade of misplaced . . . what?

The “I was on drugs” and “my thinking evolved” stuff doesn’t cut it. Closer to home, for me, it’s insane that Woody Guthrie, who regularly performed his rich catalog of original “nigger songs” (his descriptor, not mine) live from Pasadena radio station KVFD and was such a staunch supporter of genocidal madman Josef Stalin that his biographers are all horrified to discover (and attempt to minimize his zeal), is celebrated as anything but a spineless, contemptible worm.

Nowadays, they call it privilege. I call it rank, unconscionable hypocrisy

But that’s just, like, my opinion, man. And something to bear in mind the next time a blush of nutty ska revival nostalgia sweeps over you.