Sign up for our What's On newsletter as we start going out again What's On Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Invalid Email

Jade Wright talks to Suggs as Madness gear up for next week’s Haydock show

SKA legends Madness are back – louder, stronger and nuttier than ever – and they can’t wait to come back to Merseyside as special guests.

“I always had a great time in Liverpool,” says Graham ‘Suggs’ MacPherson. “I lived there for a while as a kid. My mum used to sing in the clubs in Liverpool, in the Blue Angel. And my wife (Bette Bright) was in a band in Liverpool – Deaf School.

“The great ports are fascinating places. London, Glasgow, Liverpool – people have a view beyond their own parochialness in towns like those. I love it.

“And I love the pub Ye Cracke. What a boozer! And the Hope Street hotel round the corner is brilliant and the Philharmonic is a fantastic place of Victorian joy. You go in Ye Cracke on a Tuesday afternoon and it’s joy upon joys. Liverpool’s just tremendous all round as far as I’m concerned. I love London, obviously, but there’s that pleasure of being able to walk everywhere in Liverpool, whereas you can’t so much in London.

“It’s the Irish element that makes it. As Edna O’Brien said, the difference is that the Irish don’t appreciate a good listener. They’re talking all the time.”

Have you stayed friends with the rest of the band over the years, or do you all have separate dressing rooms and not speak these days?

“We were friends at school and we’re still friends,” he says. “The priority always was friendship, and then creativity and then business. The other main tenet of our philosophy was always to be humble and we are still humble. Our friendship is the most important thing and the rest of it is just a by-product. We never had any desire to be famous. We just really get on well and when we play together it’s like magic.”

Madness spent more weeks in the UK singles chart than anyone else in the 1980s, with hits Baggy Trousers, It Must Be Love and House Of Fun becoming the soundtrack for a generation, something they realised when an earth tremor registering 4.5 on the Richter scale was reported at their original reformation, Madstock in 1992. Is there any danger of that being repeated at Haydock?

“It was the result of 35,000 slightly overweight blokes jumping up and down at the same time,” laughs Suggs. “A woman in a block of flats opposite Finsbury Park rang the police to say her picture was moving along the wall.

“What the seismologists reckon is that there’s an underground lake under Finsbury Park and as people were jumping up and down it started rocking underneath and then created an earthquake. Possibly the greatest achievement of my life – creating an earthquake.

“Something to tell your grandchildren, isn’t it?”