London

My earliest memory of Ray Davies is The Kinks performing ‘Waterloo Sunset’ on ‘Top of the Pops’ in ruffled shirts. They were from Muswell Hill, where we used to rehearse and got our earliest gigs, and as culturally exciting as London is, there aren’t many times when a band comes from the exact area in which you’re hanging around. It means a lot.

I first saw them live at the Brighton Pavilion when I was 16 and they played ‘Lola’. We covered ‘Lola’ very early on, but it was the reggae version of it by John H, which amused us because it misses out the bit about the transvestite – it’s just a beautiful love song about a chick he’d met in a disco. But on ‘The Dangermen Sessions’ we finally thought we’d do it justice and record it in its entirety.
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It was for me as well. My mum was a singer and she lived and worked around Soho, sang in a lot of those clubs, and I spent a lot of time around there when I was young. So ‘Lola’ was the perfect kind of description of a time in my life, those funny old drinking clubs which had licences for actors and ‘people who worked in the theatre’ in the days when the pubs shut between three and five in the afternoon. I’d go down and there would be girls in feather boas, or fellas and lords with top hats, and club owners with big cigars and electric candlelight.

There was one fantastic Soho club called The Kismet. Although the only allusion to the east was the shape of a crescent moon and stars cut out of cardboard, it had an extraordinary bar, very wide at one end and then it got narrower and narrower. A rather fierce woman ran the bar at the other end, my mum worked at the more popular end. I see that club when I hear ‘Lola’. I loved the way Davies told stories – also Ian Dury, who in some ways was in a direct line from Ray, and I’d like to think Madness were at the other end of that line.

‘Waterloo Sunset’ is a very simple song about people meeting at an underground station, and yet it has something very fantastical about it; that idea that magic inhabits the bit of ground on which you stand. When it comes to nationalism, I’m not interested in that – but when it’s the magic of the street you were brought up in, or the idea that the same stuff blowing around the winos sitting on the bench in Clerkenwell was around in Dickens’s time then I am interested.

Peter Ackroyd talks about the tradition of ‘street music’ that’s always existed in London – writing about where you live with a vaguely black humour about the trials and tribulations of everyday life. It’s been there since the days of music hall. And I think the public identified with that aspect of Madness rather than perceived us as chirpy. After all, we had songs like ‘Embarrassment’, which is about Lee Thompson’s sister having a mixed-race child, then ‘Grey Day’ and later ‘Yesterday’s Men’. Actually, I think some of what The Kinks did was chirpy, although I’m sure Ray Davies would hate to have it described as that.

I saw a great old film they did for ‘Dead End Street’. You think of modern pop videos starting with Queen or us in the late ’70s, but this was just like a Madness video. They were walking down the street dressed as undertakers with a coffin on their shoulders. They knock on a door and Dave Davies comes out dressed as an old woman. Bizarrely, and totally by accident, we replicated that in the video for ‘It Must Be Love’. ‘I never thought I’d miss you half as much as I do’ is obviously a bit of a corny love line, but when you are singing it into the mouth of an open grave it becomes something different – so we share some sense of that black humour.

Even though he went to art college, Davies talks, in his sort-of autobiography ‘X-Ray’, about never feeling completely part of the swinging ’60s– that whole John Lennon-thing of avant garde being French for shit – although he bungled through it for a bit. I completely identify with that. Madness weren’t fashionable, but we weren’t really unfashionable either. In the ’80s, new romanticism was a big party going on on one side of the road and Madness were on the other side with a popped balloon on a piece of string, like Eeyore and Winnie the Pooh – quite happy in our own corner of the world.

One complaint about Ray was that he was very reactionary about change and modern life, but as I’ve become an old curmudgeon myself I notice how much has vanished in my lifetime and how right he was about a lot of it.

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