Sleevenotes
Madness, The Rise & Fall (2021 reissue)
“Madness didn’t start out as overtly ‘political’, but we’d tour the country and see gangs of disparate Herberts in the rain with nothing. And there’s Thatcher saying, ‘There’s no such thing as “society”’. You start to feel like, ‘Well, actually, there is’. I got a distinct feel for democratic socialism. I could see the demise of a lot of urban culture, and I started to feel something. I didn’t know how to express it yet, but ‘Rise And Fall’ was about that. ”
— Suggs
Madness, 7 (2021 reissue)
“We were always looking for different sounds, we didn’t want to keep playing the same kind of music. But did being in Nassau influence the sound of the album? Well, one night we went into the nearby town, and we could hear all the locals singing at the church, and that was nice. But we were still just a bunch of hoodlums from Kentish Town playing their instruments.”
— Mike Barson
The Mars Volta, La Realidad De Los Sueños
“We followed our intuition, and our hearts. There was a sense of, ‘Shit, we might be about to throw away something really important.’ But instead of it feeling scary, it was exciting. You should be so lucky to have a best friend with whom you can take on the world like that. That’s what Omar was to me. Any game-plan he was going to propose would have been a no-brainer.”
— Cedric Bixler-Zavala
Madness, Absolutely (2020 reissue)
“The doors got busted open and all these punters come running in and immediately they were engulfed by smoke: the police had fired smoke bombs at them. There seemed to be arms and legs and batons and fists coming out of the smoke, like a Tom & Jerry cartoon. And when the dust cleared, it was the police smashing themselves up, because the fans had run off.”
— Lee “Kix” Thompson