Nutty professors
Ska-pop veterans in thoughtful yet robust mood.
Madness ★★★★ Can’t Touch Us Now LUCKY 7/UMC. CD/DL/LP
THE TITLE could be the pay-off line in an invented British crime caper, scribbled on a V-flicking postcard to Scotland Yard by some veteran crims who’ve finally made it to a cushy retirement in Brazil. Thirty-eight-odd years after they debuted at the house parties and pubs of north London, Madness have in some respects pulled off a similar coup. Irrevocably stitched into the national pop fabric, they’re equally secure playing their jukebox-worth of hits to the people as they are appearing on the roof of Buckingham Palace, as they did, surreally, during the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee bash in 2012. Realising, perhaps, that they no longer have much to prove has paid dividends in the recording studio. After the hesitancy of 2012’s multiple producer affair Oui Oui Si Si Ja Ja Da Da – an unfortunate follow-up to 2009’s mighty concept piece The Liberty Of Norton Folgate – Can’t Touch Us Now is Madness to the core, wholly at ease in its London demi-monde of black music-indebted pop, mirth, nostalgia and reflections on the common people’s travails. Cooked up mainly at Liam Watson’s Toe Rag studios with long-standing producer Clive Langer, the group have likened it to 1980’s Absolutely. It is striking how old school and immediate it sounds: emphasising the timeslippage even more, the group is back to its 1979 formation, now that nutty avatar Cathal ‘Chas Smash’ Smyth has gone solo. And just as there was at the beginning, there remains something fractured and doleful in Madness’s world. Coming in on Mike Barson’s one-fingered piano note, the opening soul-ska title track is anxious and guilt-ridden, like The Pardoner’s Tale reimagined for a particularly harrowing episode of Dixon Of Dock Green. Themes of desperation persist: Tamla-Camden frowner Good Times reflects on debt and the downsides of too much living for today, evoking The Kinks’ Dead End Street. But the songs are never simply about lamenting. Pop-eyed Mumbo Jumbo excoriates government hypocrisy and deceit; singer Suggs’s Soho waltz Pam The Hawk, an elegy for the
late panhandler extraordinaire
Pamela Jennings, is tender rather than funereal. Also satisfying for the long-term listener are abundant echoes of songs past, and the way that every element, be it the Bedford/Woodgate rhythm section or Lee Thompson’s Andy Mackay-like sax, is instantly familiar and integrated into the cracked whole. Groups of Madness’s vintage don’t often last this well, while remaining cognisant of time’s threshing machine. But as Suggs reflected earlier this year, “It’s the old Zen Buddhist thing. When you’re a kid and you live next to a mountain, you just see that mountain, you run around on it. As you start to get older you analyse that mountain. And then if you’re lucky, when you’re really old, you just see the fucking mountain again.” Consider the heights scaled.