One Better Day – Madness
Further down, a photo booth, a million plastic bags
And an old woman filling out a million baggage tags
But when she gets thrown out, three bags at a time
She spies the old chap in the road to share her bags with
She has bags of time
Surrounded by his past, on a short white line
He sits while cars pass either side, takes his time
Trying to remember one better day
A while ago when people stopped to hear him say
Walking round you sometimes hear the sunshine
Beating down in time with the rhythm of your shoes
Was there ever a more disappointing year for pop music than 1984? Looking back at the album releases and the top singles I am staggered by the unifying theme – great artists releasing substandard material, and very few inspirational youngsters filling the huge gap. Exception and the big album of the year was Purple Rain by Prince, while Frankie Goes To Hollywood dominated the UK radio and singles charts but I bought very little current music in 1984. I was filling gaps, discovering genres, crate-digging, conducting archeological excavations and sometimes realising that people I’d scorned as a teenager were actually pretty good. The albums I did buy from 1984, in 1984 :
Goodbye Cruel World – Elvis Costello & The Attractions
The Pearl – Harold Budd & Brian Eno
Mister Heartbreak – Laurie Anderson
Diamond Life – Sade
Best of ‘The Poet’ Trilogy – Bobby Womack
Keep Moving – Madness
Not as many as usual. Later I would buy Prince, The Bangles, Luther Vandross, Dr John, Franco & TPOK Jazz, Van Dyke Parks, Gilberto Gil, The Judds, Prefab Sprout, Youssou N’Dour, The Style Council, Steve Reich, Run DMC and Pat Metheny, but even with those additions I think you can see how thin on the ground 1984 was musically. Springsteen made Born In The USA the title track of which became a republican anthem (he didn’t sing it live this year 2016). Perhaps the date was casting shade. 1984. Throughout my life we’d all lived under the spectre of George Orwell‘s chilling and prescient novel. That collection of numbers, that date had loomed like the monolith in 2001 A Space Odyssey – the other magical sentient date..in The Future. It always presaged doom, totalitarianism, a jackboot stamping on a human face into infinity. Now we were here and…well, life went on, like it does. Like it did in 2001. And like it will next year.
The big singles were Relax, Two Tribes, The Power Of Love, When Doves Cry, Purple Rain, the others were What’s Love Got To Do With It, I Feel For You, Ghostbusters, Any Love, It’s A Miracle, Careless Whisper, Smalltown Boy, Solid, Like A Virgin, I Just Called To Say I Love You, Hello, Take A Look At Me Now, Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, Do They Know It’s Christmas.
I liked very little of it. Disappointing : Bowie with Blue Jean, Stevie Wonder (sigh), Elvis Costello’s worst LP to date, ditto McCartney, ditto Paul Weller.
And then Haircut 100 split up. ( Joke. )
And then Jerry Dammers and Special AKA released Free Nelson Mandela. (Not Joke)
Flying the flag for musical growth, and one step beyond their previous work The Rise and Fall (1982) was the Madness LP Keep Moving, in particular the song One Better Day, which haunts me even now and can move me to tears. I’d loved the band since their first single The Prince, multi-cultural British ska birthed in Camden Town via Jamaica. In those early days their skinhead fans and their whiteness made me feel a little uncomfortable at some of the gigs, although the majority of fans were not skins. Then, aware of this stain on their pop life, the Madness videos started to include black people and the band rose above it all – for example Embarrassment is about a girl who’s going to have a baby with her black boyfriend. The other groups who’d come up on the ska-revival Two-Tone wave The Specials, The Beat and The Selecter were all multi-racial anyway, but by 1984 they’d all split up. Madness were on Stiff Records and this was their last LP with the maverick punk label. It was their finest record to date – I’d bought them all, and they’d just got better and better. So had The Undertones, but they’d stopped, so had The Jam and they’d split, so had Elvis Costello and he’d gone a bit over-produced, his songs weren’t to his impossibly high standard. I’d also bought the collected videos of Madness which we watched endlessly, because they were so full of joy and nuttiness. I’m not sure there are a better collection of videos in pop history. They made me want to be in the band. Playing the saxophone. Doing slightly robotic dancing. Having a laugh with a gang. 
I’ve always wanted to be in a gang, but never really surrendered to it. I don’t surrender very easily. I’ve been in some gangs, but always felt like an outsider in there. Either a council-estate kid in a middle class environment as a teenager, or an educated kid in a working-class environment. Or an actor in a football team. Or an actor in a band. Or just a weirdo who doesn’t fit in enough. Must be a choice. I resist surrender. Because I do not seek oblivion I will never be an alcoholic or a junkie. I’m scared of oblivion, of disappearing. Most of the music I like is controlled. It’s not messy, it’s not people losing control. It’s beautiful, melodic, harmonic, sweet. But I wanted to be in Madness so much. They influenced the band I was in, Birds Of Tin, but not enough. See My Pop Life #149.
Mike Barson was the musical genius on the piano, but his influence infused every musician, from bass player Mark Bedford (who later guested on Robert Wyatt’s cover of Costello’s Shipbuilding) to gimmick side monkey Chas Smash who went from rude boy dancer to trumpet player, from Chris Foreman on guitar and songwriting to Lee Thompson on saxophone (who I wished I was), from Woody on the kit to Suggs on the lead vocals. They were tight, musical, lyrically interesting and wonderfully arranged pop songs, vignettes of British life from Baggy Trousers to Embarrassment, My Girl to House Of Fun. They were probably my favourite band in the early 80s – them and Costello and Talking Heads.
Sloane Square, Chelsea
But if 1984 was a meagre year musically for me, theatrically it was promising. Armed with a law degree 😉 – I’d been to Edinburgh three times, got my Equity Card, played the Donmar in Steven Berkoff’s WEST. Then in early 84 I’d worked at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs with Danny Boyle (directing an incredible play called Panic! by Alan Brown). It was an extraordinary piece of work which ran for all of two and half weeks as I recall. Worthy of a post of its own. Then in the late summer the 3rd director in the building a brilliant young Simon Curtis invited me to be part of his first production which was to be a play for Joint Stock Theatre Company called Deadlines. I was thrilled, and it turned out to be one of my most satisfying and rewarding theatrical adventures. Simon was extremely encouraging, open, intelligent and funny. I ended up playing six parts and getting a new agent out of it : Michael Foster. Also cast : Kathryn Pogson, Paul Jesson, Shirin Taylor, Tricia Kelly, Paul Mooney. Writer : Stephen Wakelam. Play : unwritten.
A young Simon Curtis in 1985, one year after Deadlines
Joint Stock was a unique theatre company. Formed by Max Stafford-Clark and others in the early 1970s, it had become a collective in 1974 while they produced David Hare’s play about China ‘Fanshen‘, co-directed by Max and Bill Gaskell. This meant that every member who had ever worked for the company could attend company meetings and AGMs and vote. In practice people deferred to Max and Caryl Churchill, both of whom were enthusiastic enough to actually attend meetings. There was an administrator, but no Artistic Director – each big decision eg – what play shall we do next ? directed by who ? written by who ? was decided on a collective vote. Some were already plays, but more often the show would be devised by the company.
This is now a forgotten way of life. All of those Arts Council-funded theatre companies have gone : 7:84, Shared Experience, Joint Stock, Paines Plough. Slashed by Thatcher’s reduction of the State. 1984 was the year of the miner’s strike, Coal Not Dole stickers, and the rise of cardboard city in Waterloo as new regulations on signing on created a new wave of homelessness, particularly of those between 16 and 20. Suddenly there were people sleeping in shop doorways in London on The Strand. Then there was an IRA bomb at the Tory Party conference in Brighton at The Grand Hotel.
*
one of the greatest band shots of all time: the cover of ‘7’ the 3rd Madness LP
Keep Moving was Mike Barson’s last album with Madness, and he left the band once they recorded a couple of videos – Michael Caine and One Better Day, which was their last for Stiff Records, and funded by the band themselves including Barson, seen playing the vibraphone, who flew in from Amsterdam for the shoot.
Arlington house, address: no fixed abode
An old man in a three-piece suit sits in the road
He stares across the water, he sees right through the lock
But on and up like outstretched hands
His mumbled words, his fumbled words, mock
Arlington House is behind Camden High Street. It housed – and still houses among it’s more commercial premises – homeless men, and has since 1905. It was the last of the Victorian workhouses, built by politician and philanthropist Lord Rowton in the 1890s to house London’s working poor.
Camden Lock
I used to shop for music shoes and clothes in Camden Town, whether in Dingwalls (‘The Lock’ in the lyrics) or the Record and Tape Exchange on the High St, or one of the many independent stores in that square mile of post-punk grubbiness. Over the years I’ve been to many gigs in Camden Palace (Culture Club), The Electric Ballroom (The Vibrators) or Dingwalls (X-Ray Spex). The Dublin Castle. More recently at the re-opened Roundhouse or the Jazz Cafe.
When I started acting in Moving Parts Theatre Company in 1981 two of the company’s founders – Ruth MacKenzie and Rachel Feldberg – lived in Oval Road just behind Arlington House with the young director Roger Michell who would later go on to direct The Buddha Of Suburbia, Notting Hill and many other successful films. I would see him years and years later at Michael Foster’s 50th birthday party and he hailed me “Haven’t you done well !” I looked behind me. No, he meant me. I smiled. “Me? What about you !!” I realised that seen from the outside, my journey looks good and fine, but what about the invisible thrashing through the undergrowth with a blunt machete to reach a small ledge of safety that no one ever sees ? Eh ?!? WHAT ABOUT THAT?
Gentrified many times Camden still retains its scruffy down-at-heel ambience, partly due to scruffy down-at-heel junkies, and partly due to people who want to look scruffy and down-at-heel. But there have always been homeless people there – see Waterloo, see Soho, see Bayswater. And having been homeless myself for a period of time as a teenager (see My Pop Life #84 All Along The Watchtower) I always felt moved by this song, describing a couple walking the streets of NW1. Street people. Nowhere to store their stuff, carrying it all around. Nowhere to wash apart from the hostel, who close their doors at 8am. I would be interviewing some of these people for my first play Sanctuary in 2 years’ time, using The Joint Stock Method. And later, some of them would be invited to The Drill Hall to see the play.
The woman in the video is Betty Bright – Sugg’s wife. Graham McPherson – Suggs – who wrote the song with Mark ‘Bedders’ Bedford – looks impossibly young in the video, but wears the kind of clothes that I used to try and find, and still do to be fair. Checks. Tartans. Doc Martens. There’s a DM shop on Kentish Town Road next to Camden tube which makes an appearance in The Sun & The Rain video. I had a pair of red patent leather DMs. In fact I still have them. I owe some of my so-called style to Madness Suggs chic, (some to Bryan Ferry chic, some to rock’n’roll and some to Laurel & Hardy).
The chorus is unbearably sweet, given the subject :
She’s trying to remember one better day
A while ago when people stopped to hear her say
‘Walking round you sometimes hear the sunshine
Beating down in time with the rhythm of your shoes
The feeling of arriving when you’ve nothing left to lose…’
Magicmenagerie's Blog 