Theatre of the Absurd presents: Madness – C’Est La Vie

“The lights go down on some dark theatre in London / For the cruellest comedy…”

Read the headlines and it’s hard not to conclude that the world has gone mad. Mad enough, in fact, to give North London’s finest twelve-legged quorum of Nutty Boys a run for their money. According to keyboard-wrangler Mike ‘Barso’ Barson, the title track to Madness’s lucky thirteenth full-length C’Est La Vie is “about these crazy times we’re living in, and how I just want to stay on my boat and not be a part of all this madness. But of course, I’m a member of a group called Madness. Perhaps we should have called ourselves ‘Sanity’…”

If this latest opus is any indication, when the going gets mad, the Mad only get sharper, wilder and more succinct. C’Est La Vie combines the widescreen ambition of masterpieces like The Liberty Of Norton Folgate and The Rise & Fall and the all-killer-no-filler tune factory instincts of classics like Absolutely, 7 and Can’t Touch Us Now. It’s a 14-song suite packed with lunatic hooks and neon choruses, eerie space-ska and sophisticated pop genius – a giddy gambol across a bouncy castle soundscape that finds time for moments of righteous anger, powerful empathy and the kind of plain-spoken wisdom that’s always operated beneath the group’s nutty veneer. Vintage Madness, in other words.

After twelve albums helmed by renowned producers (including Stephen Street, Dennis Bovell, Owen Morris, Liam Watson and, of course, Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley, the duo who helped shape their career-defining hits), C’Est La Vie is the first Madness opus to be produced by the Nutty Boys themselves, with Matt Glasbey (Ed Sheeran, Rag & Bone Man, alt-J) co-producing. The story begins in Cricklewood[1] where, in 2019, the group took residence in a stark industrial space to write and rehearse new material, soundproofing the gaff with Glasbey and setting it up as a recording studio. “We needed a place we could call home, where all our equipment was,” says guitarist Chris ‘Chrissy-Boy’ Foreman. “We’re scattered across the country now, but this was a place where we could all meet up and get new songs together.”

In Cricklewood they fell into an industrious groove, until the coronavirus called time on their progress. The space fell silent, save for a “socially distanced and stripped-back” performance of Madness classics, embryonic new songs and an inspired Bowie cover Barso and frontman Graham ‘Suggs’ MacPherson recorded there with a string quartet in June 2020 as a YouTube gift to their fans. Otherwise, the band spent that weird year like the rest of us: kicking their heels, waiting for lockdown to lift, reeling at the weirdness around them and pining for plans that had been put on pause. At times they found themselves at odds with each other, as we all did. But what united them was always bigger than what divided them. “We all had slightly different ideas about what was wrong with the planet, as you do,” says Suggs. “We were a good microcosm for the general public, because we were all confused and lost and lonely and isolated. But it made for a creative explosion when we finally got together – a tsunami of creativity.”

“Once everyone gets in the room, we do what we do – make music,” says Chrissy-Boy, of Madness’s eventual return to Cricklewood. “We sat in that freezing cold unit and played each other our demos and wrote the titles in sharpie on a whiteboard.” Quickly, the new album took shape. Just as quickly, Madness made the decision to handle production in-house. “The band had all been watching that brilliant Beatles documentary Get Back, where they were writing the Let It Be album in a film studio,” remembers Chris. “I said, ‘We could do that too, we could just write and record the album in the rehearsal space – we just need a good engineer/producer.’ So we hooked up with Matt Glasbey. We did three songs with Matt, to see if it would work out, and it went really well and everybody loved him, so off we went, with Matt as our co-producer.”

“The last couple of albums, we’ve taped our rehearsals and then hired a producer for the final recordings,” says Barso. “But this time we decided to produce it ourselves, with Matt making it sound as good as it can be. So what you’re hearing this time is the band’s ideas, pure, not filtered through some producer. This is what we want you to hear. And if it doesn’t work out, well… We didn’t have a bad run, did we?” “Not to slag anybody who’s produced our records, because they’ve always been good,” adds Suggs,” but it does tend to be more fun when we’re being ourselves.” And so work began on the new album, threatened only briefly by the World Cup; so the band didn’t end up huddled round a laptop watching a match instead of playing music, tour-manager Steve Martin blagged a projector so the band could watch the games on the walls of the rehearsal space while they recorded.

The governing principle behind C’Est La Vie, then, is: “let Madness be Madness”. The result is an album of typically timeless brilliance that also reflects the wonky years of its creation, these 14 songs representing the cream of the bumper crop of tunes the group cooked up, whittled down this punchy, focused set[2]. There are moments of ineffably catchy pop excellence, like Chrissy-Boy’s anarchic anthem to perhaps-justified paranoia, ‘Run For Your Life’ or his equally riotous ‘Lock Down And Frack Off’ (which is, he says, “about how everything got a bit ‘Mad Max’, except we weren’t fighting over petrol, it was toilet rolls”). And there’s drummer Woody Woodgate’s beguiling, bittersweet carousel ‘Round We Go’, which Woody says tells the story of “a mother’s endless love for her narcissistic, cocky little shit of a son, and her knowledge that he’ll have to learn from his mistakes – as painful as they are going to be, life will teach him.” The track features the first appearance of Woody’s wife Grace on a Madness record, singing backing vocals. “She helped me record the demo.” says Woody, “A truly inspirational and talented musician. The track wouldn’t be the same without her amazing vocals.

There are also potent moments of darkness on the album. The majestic gloom of Theatre Of The Absurd opens on the haunting image of lockdown-era theatreland: lights dimmed, nothing going on, this town coming like a ghost town. From there, Suggs paints a disturbing picture of injustice running riot, the “cruellest cabaret”, conjuring bleak scenes of “actors stumbling on with masks but no real plot / There are no exit signs and all the doors are locked”. “I’d read about these French artists who wrote plays in gobbledegook, because they thought no-one was actually communicating with each other anymore,” says Suggs, of the original Theatre Of The Absurd. “That was something that we all felt – that we’d been through a very absurd period. It all seems so surreal now, but we made a record of that absurdity. We’re not sort of band who want to go on about it and make you feel worse. But at the same time, it definitely informed a lot of this record.”

Elsewhere, Lee ‘Kix’ Thompson’s macabre ‘The Law According To Dr Kippah’ recreates the saxman’s memories of the broiling summer of 1976: Kiki Dee on the radio, running battles with neighbouring gangs and the murder of Enrico Sidoli in Hampstead lido. “It’s about loss, grief and unsolved crimes,” Lee says. “It’s about kids growing up,” adds Barso, “like on the plains of Africa, when you see bulls locking horns, that growing-up process.” ‘Baby Burglar’ finds Barso back at the vintage Yamaha organ he bought decades earlier, inspired by Jerry Dammers’ experiments with muzak, using its bossa nova beat to enliven Lee’s true-life tale of being burgled while his family slept. “Nobody was hurt – but if I’d seen them I’d have been straight at ‘em with a baseball bat!” Lee says, though his song’s take on the home invaders is more sympathetic, recognising his own youthful straying from the straight and narrow on the chorus as Suggs sings, “I once trod in your creeping footsteps”.

Barso’s ‘Beginner’s 101’ is another tale of crime, a heist movie playing out across a four-minute pop song, and ending with “the criminals arguing over the cash and trying to stitch each other up,” Barso says, echoing Bogart classic The Treasure Of Sierra Madre. The closing ‘In My Street’, meanwhile, is the group’s 1982 global smash ‘Our House’ run through a funhouse mirror, its smouldering black comedy sweetened by its vaudevillian swing. “I was moving house and I wanted to commemorate this street I’d lived on, the people I knew. You’ve always got this sentimental connection to the place that you grew up and people that you grew up around. It was very much influenced by Ray Davies’ ‘Dead End Street’. And I was kind of pleased that I’ve moved out, because I slagged a few people off in this song.”

“It’s a ghostly album, with hints of hope on it,” says Lee. You can hear that hope in Suggs’ wonderful ‘If I Go Mad’, echoing the fears and longing of the Covid era (“I know we all need the money / And I know we all miss the show”) but, in the end, another classic Madness love song – one of their very best, in fact. “It was primarily written as a love song to my wife,” says Suggs, “but over lockdown I realised I’d go mad without everybody else as well, not seeing anybody for a year. My wife said I was starting to get ‘Performer’s Tourettes’ – I was singing at people at the bus stop, old grannies running away, muttering, ‘Not ‘im again!’

For Lee, C’Est La Vie was “our best recording session since One Step Beyond – everyone’s there, properly in the zone.” Barso agrees. “It was just us, in our space, playing together,” he explains. “And Madness is whatever happens when I sit at the piano, Lee picks up his saxophone, Chrissy-Boy plays the guitar, Woody and Bedders lay down the rhythm section and Suggs begins to sing. It’s a subtle thing – about the personalities of the band-members, who you are and all the things you’ve gone through and all the music you’ve ever loved. That’s what makes it what it is.” And for the four sides of C’Est La Vie’s theatrical adventure, what a wonderful, profound and uplifting sound they make.

[1] Mike Barson is quick to clarify the location as “near Staples Corner, which is actually pretty far from Cricklewood”

[2] Indeed, the remaindered songs are of high enough quality that the group are already discussing a second LP of new material in the near future. “We’ve laid down a triple album’s worth of tunes – enough to release another album a few months later!” promises Lee Thompson.