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The Review - MUSIC - grooves with CHARLOTTE CHAMBERS
Published: 3 July 2008

Dickens of a night out with Suggs

REVIEW: MADNESS
HACKNEY EMPIRE

ARE all gigs like this? Jugglers, dandies, pearly kings and queens? Men with flowers in their pockets and girls with ribbons in their hair?
“They look like something out of Charles Dickens,” said the woman in front of me, nodding at the slipshod chimney sweep and the man in the top hat who were skanking to the ska beats in the box above the stage.
Another box contained a 16th-century courtesan and a slim version of Queen Victoria.
I wondered what the Dickens was going on. Then I realised. London Quirkiness, closely related to Great British Eccentricity, was staring me in the eyes.
It wasn’t of the forced and cutesy kind which is why I hadn’t recognised it; it was a tad cleverer than rhyming Tesco with Al Fresco or singing about Dalston in a mockney accent.
“We’re celebrating London past, present and future,” Suggs declared in that absent tone of his, but he meant it. A roll through material from the band’s new album, The Liberty of Norton Folgate, revealed an obsession with our multicultural city and its history.
This obsession was visible everywhere. The stage was done up like a cobbled street complete with vintage lamp posts. By the time familiar road signs – Kentish Town, Prince of Wales Road, Malden Road – appeared on a screen behind the stage during a song called “NW5” I was enraptured.
Visually, the experience was like a cross between pantomime and period drama – the fantasy, perhaps, of someone who has spent too long buried in some obscure local history pamphlet.
Musically it was just this side of cheesy to begin with, becoming sinister later. Orchestral strings and shades of Kurt Weill in the knee-slapping Clerkenwell Polka were more moving than lairy Baggy Trousers ever was.
I wasn’t expecting to love this, but I did.
JOSH LOEB

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