Madness – Grand Opening of Channel 24

Theatre of the Absurd presents: Madness – C’Est La Vie

“The lights go down on some dark theatre in London / For the cruellest comedy…”

Read the headlines and it’s hard not to conclude that the world has gone mad. Mad enough, in fact, to give North London’s finest twelve-legged quorum of Nutty Boys a run for their money. According to keyboard-wrangler Mike ‘Barso’ Barson, the title track to Madness’s lucky thirteenth full-length C’Est La Vie is “about these crazy times we’re living in, and how I just want to stay on my boat and not be a part of all this madness. But of course, I’m a member of a group called Madness. Perhaps we should have called ourselves ‘Sanity’…”

If this latest opus is any indication, when the going gets mad, the Mad only get sharper, wilder and more succinct. C’Est La Vie combines the widescreen ambition of masterpieces like The Liberty Of Norton Folgate and The Rise & Fall and the all-killer-no-filler tune factory instincts of classics like Absolutely, 7 and Can’t Touch Us Now. It’s a 14-song suite packed with lunatic hooks and neon choruses, eerie space-ska and sophisticated pop genius – a giddy gambol across a bouncy castle soundscape that finds time for moments of righteous anger, powerful empathy and the kind of plain-spoken wisdom that’s always operated beneath the group’s nutty veneer. Vintage Madness, in other words.

After twelve albums helmed by renowned producers (including Stephen Street, Dennis Bovell, Owen Morris, Liam Watson and, of course, Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley, the duo who helped shape their career-defining hits), C’Est La Vie is the first Madness opus to be produced by the Nutty Boys themselves, with Matt Glasbey (Ed Sheeran, Rag & Bone Man, alt-J) co-producing. The story begins in Cricklewood where, in 2019, the group took residence in a stark industrial space to write and rehearse new material, soundproofing the gaff with Glasbey and setting it up as a recording studio. “We needed a place we could call home, where all our equipment was,” says guitarist Chris ‘Chrissy-Boy’ Foreman. “We’re scattered across the country now, but this was a place where we could all meet up and get new songs together.”

In Cricklewood they fell into an industrious groove, until the coronavirus called time on their progress. The space fell silent, save for a “socially distanced and stripped-back” performance of Madness classics, embryonic new songs and an inspired Bowie cover Barso and frontman Graham ‘Suggs’ MacPherson recorded there with a string quartet in June 2020 as a YouTube gift to their fans. Otherwise, the band spent that weird year like the rest of us: kicking their heels, waiting for lockdown to lift, reeling at the weirdness around them and pining for plans that had been put on pause. At times they found themselves at odds with each other, as we all did. But what united them was always bigger than what divided them. “We all had slightly different ideas about what was wrong with the planet, as you do,” says Suggs. “We were a good microcosm for the general public, because we were all confused and lost and lonely and isolated. But it made for a creative explosion when we finally got together – a tsunami of creativity.”

“Once everyone gets in the room, we do what we do – make music,” says Chrissy-Boy, of Madness’s eventual return to Cricklewood. “We sat in that freezing cold unit and played each other our demos and wrote the titles in sharpie on a whiteboard.” Quickly, the new album took shape. Just as quickly, Madness made the decision to handle production in-house. “The band had all been watching that brilliant Beatles documentary Get Back, where they were writing the Let It Be album in a film studio,” remembers Chris. “I said, ‘We could do that too, we could just write and record the album in the rehearsal space – we just need a good engineer/producer.’ So we hooked up with Matt Glasbey. We did three songs with Matt, to see if it would work out, and it went really well and everybody loved him, so off we went, with Matt as our co-producer.”

This event is all ages.

Presale begins Thursday, February 27th at 10am.
(password = channel24)

The general on sale begins Friday, February 28th at 10am

All doors & show times subject to change.