Terry Edwards - Madness's "One Step Beyond" (33 1/3 excerpt) lyrics

"It's more R+B than ska—it's a bit lazy to call this a ska album because not that many tracks are ska tunes." —Chris Foreman A couple of years before punk rock slapped everyone in the face there was a burgeoning rock and roll revival and cinema played a large part in it. That'll Be the Day, starring David Ess**, was the British take on Americana in the early 1960s, but the film that caught the imagination of the soon-to-be members of Madness was American Graffiti. The film holds two key memories for Suggs in particular, firstly that it was the first film he'd seen where the music was as much a star as the cast and plot, “the first film I'd seen where the music was at an appropriate volume, not just background music,” and secondly that he was asked by John Hasler, shortly after seeing it, to become the singer in The Invaders. The first song they tried out when he ‘auditioned' was the Bill Haley and the Comets hit “See You Later, Alligator.” Mark name- checks the film as being important, too, and among the wealth of rock and roll and doo-wop cla**ics that permeate the film is Fats Domino's “Ain't That a Shame,” Domino being one of the pianists that Mike was busy studying at home, his hit “Blueberry Hill” in particular. So, with the first three singles out of the way on side one, and therefore about half of the total tunes that could be described as ‘ska,' the band's roots started to show—and these particular roots were more American than Jamaican. “Believe Me” was one of the earliest Madness originals, written by John Hasler and Mike Barson. Hasler used to write screeds of stuff, just put words on paper. “Poems, songs, the first two pages of a novel” he says, laughing. “I'd give lyrics to Mike for him to write the music, he'd change a couple of words, then claim he'd written the whole song!” Lee acknowledges that John was the first member of the organisation to write an original. “Quite right, let's stop doing all these covers. We started off doing rock & roll covers,” Lee adds. By the time Woody joined the band they were making a fist of it—“This (‘Believe Me') and ‘Sunshine Voice' were the first songs I ever did with the band.” “Sunshine Voice” and “Rich Girls” are two Hasler originals that various members of the band refer to when discussing their early songs. Neither made it as far as the recording studio. Thommo gave me a brief rendition of one line of the former while Suggs described “Rich Girls” as being about “all those wealthy people we saw walking ‘round Hampstead who had fridges the size of which you couldn't imagine!” Given the naïve charm, shall we say, of “Believe Me,” perhaps these two songs didn't really cut it, though Hasler's “Mistakes,” which was the B-side of “One Step Beyond” is a very fine song and probably just missed being on the LP by a whisker. Too melancholic, perhaps, not the perfect foil for “Tarzan's Nuts” . . . Initially I thought that “Believe Me” was a good example of the band's Tamla Motown roots, but Bedders points out that it owes quite a lot to 1950s bands such as The Coasters, what with the occasional vocal harmony and the “No-no-no-no” answering phrases in the last couple of verses. Both Suggs and Woody see the early Madness as copyists of certain styles of music, but with their own take on it—and it's not a knowing affectation, but just trying to emulate, say, doo-wop or rhythm and blues, and coming up with something else through not having the expertise to nail it. “Lots of bands at the time did ‘pub- rock' versions of the same songs or style of music, but ours was a bit more wonky,” comments Suggs. Woody describes his drumming on a lot of this album as being an approximation to a style that, while rarely successful as a believable pastiche, became the springboard for something else and it was usually more interesting. "For instance, ‘Razor Blade Alley'—that was my attempt at jazz drumming; ‘Land of Hope and Glory'—my attempt at military drumming in the introduction. I didn't have the technique, but just made it sound the way I thought it should be." So the resulting track lies somewhere between The Coasters and the Tamla Motown sound. The heavy backbeat on the tambourine is pure Smokey, and the vocal stylings are to be found somewhere in the soundtrack to American Graffiti, but the sound is still Madness despite—probably because of—the fact that it could in no way, shape or form be described as a ska song. The magic ingredient to the nutty sound in “Believe Me” is the odd bar or half-bar. The introduction has the trademark chirpy piano sound, interrupted by the band eagerly coming in on the fourth bar, but only for two beats then landing on the groove. The other trick Monsieur Barson has up his sleeve is that of adding one ‘extra' bar to the end of each double verse. I don't want to labour the point here, but without these brief deviations from traditional musical form you'd end up with a much straighter and probably less catchy song. I'm not an obsessive/compulsive bar- counter, by the way—I hadn't noticed these little quirks for over twenty-five years of listening to this record and it's only through repetitive playbacks for this book that I twigged what was going on. When I asked Mike about the odd half-bar and so on, here-and-there, he just said that they felt natural. Perhaps the metre of Hasler's lyrics dictated the structure. Once more there is no proper chorus here, either. We get a couple of verses, a refrain, a verse and then: SAXOPHONE! ! “I wouldn't say that Davey Payne was an influence on Lee,” says Barson languorously. “What's the word? Yeah, he used to copy him a lot. In various ways.” Yes, Davey Payne was hugely important to Lee both as a player and as an onstage presence. Payne was Ian Dury's right-hand man in both Kilburn & the High Roads and The Blockheads. Let's face it, the saxophone is always a focal point onstage—it looks good, it sounds good (in the right hands, of course) and everyone's fascinated by it. So what do you do when the lead singer is all that and more, as in Dury's case? Well, Davey always dressed to impress, as does Lee in his own inimitable way. Showman Ian Dury told Payne that if he stood stock still during songs when he wasn't playing it would look ‘really heavy.' It sure did. I remember being transfixed by the stationary Davey Payne as a wide-eyed eighteen-year-old at Blockheads gigs. Thommo goes the other route to grab the attention onstage by dressing up. So what inspires Mr Lee ‘Kix' Thompson? It was interesting that Clive Langer's band got the first mention. "We saw Deaf School regularly because they were so theatrical. That's what drew me to a lot of bands— Kilburn & the High Roads, Sha-Na-Na, Rocky Sharpe and the Replays. When Madness used to play The Hope and Anchor (a crucial venue on the London pub-rock scene), I used to frisbee out old ska singles and throw pork pies into the audience. I had a tie which lit up, too (unashamedly nicked from the Kilburns). Do something more than just playing music, make it a bit more visual, save the actual music for the records and concentrate on the visuals, that was an integral part." Lee went on to say that he liked people who painted their faces—The Sensational Alex Harvey Band, Split Enz and Alice Cooper all got name-checked. Lee spent a few months in Australia in 2002 and I stood in for him a couple of times on TV shows—well, knelt in for him, actually, as Chrissy-Boy insisted I impersonate Toulouse Lautrec when substituting for Lee as he's a couple of inches shorter than me. On one occasion we were at the BBC and Alice Cooper had the dressing room next door. Had he been there I'm sure Thommo would have been raiding his make-up bag. Lee's playing style comes from some obvious players, but one or two less obvious ones, too. Rhythm and blues artists of the 1950s were definitely the order of the day, and he listed keyboard players as well as saxophonists as being important to him—“Ben Webster, Gene Ammons, Sonny Stitt, Jimmy McGriff, Ray Charles, Fats Domino. Not Coltrane or Charlie Parker, though, but definitely Ben Webster, that deep and breathy tone.” Fabulous though Ben Webster is, it's hard to equate his sound with the Thompson tone. Maybe he never tried to emulate it though. There's also a lot of unnamed ska tenor players whose solos Lee learnt off by heart—mix them up with some stage greasepaint and there you have it.