Suggs - Suggs: that close

First published in Great Britain in 2013 by
Quercus Editions Ltd
55 Baker Street
Seventh Floor, South Block
London
W1U 8EW

Copyright 2013 Graham McPherson

The moral right of Graham McPherson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders of material reproduced in this book. If any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publishers will be pleased to make restitution at the earliest opportunity.

All images taken from authors private collection except for the following.

Endpapers: front centre right David Corio/Redferns, back top left David Corio/Redferns (HB only)

Text: p156 REX/EUGENE ADEBARI, p189 REX/Andre Csillag

Plate section: pvi Chalkie Davies/Getty Images, pvii top Virginia Turbett/Redferns, bottom Clare Muller, pviii Chalkie Davies/Getty Images, px bottom Clare Muller pxiv top REX/Andy Rosen, pxv top Rex Features pxvi top Rex Features centre Rex Features

Baggy Trousers Words and Music by Graham McPherson and Christopher Foreman 1980, Reproduced by permission of EMI Music Publishing Ltd, London W1F 9LD

One Better Day Words and Music by Graham McPherson and Mark Bedford 1984, Reproduced by permission of EMI Music Publishing Ltd, London W1F 9LD

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

HB ISBN 978 0 85738 953 4
TPB ISBN 978 1 78087 688 7
EBOOK ISBN 978 0 85738 954 1

You can find this and many other great books at:
www.quercusbooks.co.uk

Anne, Scarlett and Viva

Once upon a time. A long long time ago.

When time wasnt of the essence.

When time waited for no man.

When time wasnt money.

Time just flew.

Time took a cigarette.

Time was an irrelevance.

Time, gentlemen, please.

Time flies like an arrow.

Fruit flies like a banana.

Ive been asked a few times over the years if I fancied writing my autobiography. But I never felt the time was quite right. A few years ago, a very nice publishing house offered me a more than fair amount of dough for the rights to my life story. They offered it on the proviso I worked with a ghostwriter. A meeting was duly set and I met this rather charming ghostwriter woman at the Bar Italia, in Soho, one sunny morning to see if we could get on.

The publisher told me she was the best-selling ghostwriter around. Over coffee we had a nice chat and she was taking notes, but as the conversation drew on, I noticed her pen hovering motionless between the less juicy bits. I could tell, unsurprisingly, she was searching for the more sensational end of my market. It turned out the reason she was cited as Britains most successful ghostwriter was that shed penned the hugely best-selling David Beckham biography. Well, no disrespect to the great man, or the writer herself, at that time a monkey could have written a best-selling book about old Golden Balls.

*

Well, for me, what tipped me over the edge into thinking now is the right time was a set of converging circumstances.

On the eve of my fiftieth birthday I was standing on the balcony of an old music hall in Wapping called Wiltons, one of the last of those great palaces of working-class entertainment, surveying a room full of friends and foes whod come from all over the world to join me on this auspicious occasion. I was having the party the night before my actual birthday as the venue had already been booked on the night by Marc Almond.

Wiltons is an amazing place. Just over a century ago the writer and theatre critic Henry Chance Newton said that without its Palaces of Variety and its Music-Halls, living London would only be half alive. All of which makes it rather surprising that today just a handful of these places survive. So here I am surveying the scene on the eve of my fiftieth birthday, having a toast to Mr Wilton and his magical music hall, and its beautiful just looking round the room. Even my cheapest friends have dressed the part. Its a room full of Victorian dandies, all top hats and mutton chops and girls of every shape and size bursting out of bodices left, right and indeed centre. And you dont get many of them to the pound, missus!

The crazed, the lunatics and the thieving toerags had all turned up, and even people who arent in Madness. Boom boom. It was brilliant.

Anne (Bette Bright), my lovely wife, much to my surprise, had organised a whole music-hall show. There were sand dancers dressed as Egyptians dancing in hieroglyphic fashion. A burlesque singer, dressed, albeit briefly, as Vera Lynn. A pearly king making a ladder out of a rolled-up newspaper, whilst singing:

Oh it really is a wery pretty garden,

And Chingford to the eastward could be seen,

Wiv a ladder and some glasses, you could see to Ackney Marshes,

If it wasnt for the ouses in between.

Lee Thompson, Madness sax player extraordinaire, did a tremendous Max Wall routine. He actually came on the Tube in the full outfit. Clive Langer, Madness producer, and his son Johnny, performed a stirring version of My Old Mans A Dustman. My two lovely daughters, Scarlett and Viva, in giant nylon bee-hives, came on singing Sisters.

At the end of this fantastic night a giant birthday cake, I mean huge, was wheeled into the middle of the stage, and bang, out of it leapt this gorgeous woman as a finale to the show. I thought, Phwoah! Im taking her home tonight. Ooh missus. It was my fiftieth birthday after all. It was my wife, Anne. It was a truly unforgettable night.

So there I was the following morning, on my actual birthday, lying in the bath, amongst the bubbles and ducks, mulling it all over. Feeling somewhat worse for wear but deeply content. Thinking about all them faces I saw at the party. People I grew up with on the council estate. People I went to school with, my family, my two lovely daughters all grown up and moved on, but only to within walking distance of our fridge.

*

Like a movie of faces floating past. People Ive known since they were kids, whose lives splintered and fractured in a million different directions. Poets, painters, criminals, fruit and veg wholesalers, record company executives, dealers, dustmen, butchers, gardeners, lawyers, accountants, cocktail waiters, social workers and of course the band. The band Madness.

Mike (Barzo) Barson (Mr B)

Lee (Thommo) Thompson (Kix)

Chris Foreman (Chrissy Boy)

Cathal Smyth (Chas Smash)

Daniel Woodgate (Woody)

Mark Bedford (Bedders)

So many memories attached to each and every one of those faces Ive known, on and off, down half a century.