
Madness have announced details of a London show next month, where fans will get the chance to pay the same price as 40 years ago.

The Camden Town legends will play the Electric Ballroom on November 17 – 40 years to the day since they launched the legendary Two Tone Tour at the very same venue.

Tickets are £2.50 (plus booking fees) and fans can buy them here from 10am on Friday November 1. They’re limited to two per customer and fans must present the card used to purchase the tickets at the venue.


The intimate show forms part of the band’s 40th anniversary celebrations and comes before they head back to Camden Town in December, for two sold-out festive shows at the Roundhouse.

The Ska icons have also released their memoir Before We Was We, which sees them discussing how David Bowie‘s attempt to copy the drums from their song ‘My Girl’ left them with an “inflated ego” but also “pissed off”.

On 17th Nov 1979, just before the Legendary Two Tone tour, we played at Camden’s Electric Ballroom.

On exactly the same day 40 years later we’ll return to the Ballroom!

Tickets priced at £2.50, as they were 40 years ago!

On sale Fri 1st Nov at 10am here: https://t.co/mYqrridUjz pic.twitter.com/E0p87HRuMa — Madness (@MadnessNews) October 28, 2019

“Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley produced ‘Absolute Beginners’ for David Bowie, and Clive told me a story that Bowie had told him about ‘Ashes to Ashes’, which came out only a few months after ‘My Girl’,” wrote drummer Dan ‘Woody’ Woodgate. “Bowie had said that he’d been looking for a drummer to do the ‘My Girl’ beats on ‘Ashes to Ashes’ and he couldn’t find one that had the same feeling as me. He’d said, ‘There’s something about the feel that’s really great, and none of the American drummers could do it’. Clive went to me, ‘Woody, you do realise that if you put ‘Ashes to Ashes’ up against ‘My Girl’, it’s exactly the same?” Woodgate continued: “Anyway, it kind of inflated my ego and pissed me off at the same time. I thought, ‘David Bowie could have fucking asked me!’”