Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Pop idol who fronted Madness, scoring hits like 'House of Fun' and 'Baggy Trousers', later a solo singer and television presenter.
On the island
Eight records
The Village Green Preservation Society
the sentiments I was expressing earlier about um being able to write about very small things.
probably the biggest influence on the band Madness, and certainly me as a singer and songwriter... and in fact, it's not the Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll in this song I'm so interested in. It's the first bridge which says, Keep your silly ways or throw them out the window.
reminds me of that period a great deal. And it was a very exciting time. I was living above a carpet shop called Maples in Tottenham Court Road, and literally in walking distance was this club called The Roxy, and and it was right at the beginning of Punk Rock.
Prince Buster, and that's who we wrote the song, The Prince About, our first hit. And this is a song called Al Capone, which is a very humorous song, and I think has a lot of why we were influenced by him.
reminded me of meeting Anne, my my wife, and um that was when we were in our courting days. And she played me an album by John Bechamin called Banana Blush... It's a very, very dark track... But it's about the death of his dad.
Is That All There Is?Favourite
a record I think will be very useful on a desert island... It's a very stoical song and it is about accepting things as they are
I've chosen this because I bought a house in Italy last summer, and the door's wide open, and you know, a bit of pasta on the go, bowl of tomatoes out on the table, and my family is happy as I've ever seen them.
when we bought our first house, which was a little house in Camden Mews, it only had one piece of furniture. Anne very kindly bought me a dupe box, and on this dupe box I only had one record... and the record was Crimea River.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:30Where does [the name Suggs] come from? Why did you dump Graham McPherson?
I just felt like I needed a pseudonym of some sort and an anonymous one and there was an encyclopedia at Jazz Musicians at my friend's house and I literally stuck a pin in one of the pages and there was a guy called Peter Suggs something or other and I just took the pseudonym Suggs
Presenter asks
2:21Was [the song] Baggy Trousers about that school?
Yes, it was, yes. And Baggy Trouser was probably one of the first finished works of a song that I did. Um, and I wrote the lyrics to that.
Presenter asks
8:21Where did [your father] go?
My dad had just disappeared when I was about three... Legged it almost immediately, and I don't really have any memory of him at all.
Presenter asks
9:18When you were seven or eight, your mother sent you to Wales to live with your aunt. What was that like?
The keepsakes
That was difficult also because my aunt was having a difficult time as well... But a completely different environment... I really did [enjoy it]. Yeah, it was a very beautiful place, yeah, in uh Pembrokeshire. I went to a very nice school, a very small school
Presenter asks
13:31What marked out Madness as being different? What in the end made you successful?
I think that resonance of the fact that we were kind of real, whatever real means, in terms of what we were trying to portray, which was some kind of coming from the street thing, writing about everyday life. But with some kind of theatrical imagination... I think also because we were funny and because we were quite good looking and because we were lively and we had a very nice naivety
Presenter asks
21:16Why did Madness run out of life?
There was a combination of factors, but the main one really was that we were really tired. You know, that that uh energy I was talking about earlier eventually burns itself out. And after five, six, seven years... we kind of made a rod for our own back because in all that enthusiasm and fun we'd had, people were expecting that enthusiasm and fun everywhere we went.
“Pop music, he says, is one of the great arts. Three minutes of noise holds your whole life.”
“it was this idea that you didn't have to be a brilliant musician or singer to be able to get up on stage and have a go.”
“the great advantage we had was that we were friends before the band started and I think that really um was the s the strength that carried us through some darker moments.”
“Not having any kind of father figure makes you a lopsided person. But you say I've tried to prop up the lopsided leg with a folded beer mat.”