Music review: Madness | Victoria park | Nutty boys | Nutty girls | Night Boat to Cairo | Suggs | One step beyond

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The Review - MUSIC - grooves with RóISíN GADELRAB
Published: 23 July 2009

Madness proved themselves rewal crowd pleasers at Victoria Park

Madness proved themselves real crowd pleasers at Victoria Park

Fans still go crazy for Madness sound

REVIEW: MADNESS
Victoria Park

YOU could almost guess the set order, and as the opening bars of each song boomed out through the dusk of Victoria Park, Nutty Boys, Nutty Girls (and their Nutty offspring – they are all parents now) leapt with teenage relish into Madness-style complicated jerky elbow-and-knee dances.
At Glastonbury, the band blew the rest out of Somerset. Forget Blur with their drunken lead singer and poseur bassist, forget Tom Jones and his Vegas crooning, and definitely disregard Neil Young, The Camden Town boys rocked the world’s biggest music festival in June, and this was a triumphant
homecoming.
Suggs and his crew are nothing if not crowd pleasers, and while they dropped in numbers from their new album, they knew the punters at Madstock were after one thing: a glorious Friday night jump about to the heavy, heavy monster sound. And that is what they got.
They paid homage to their reggae influences with a super rendition of Max Romeo and the Upsetters’ I Chase The Devil, and then whistled through the hits, finishing on a grand old soppy sing-song to It Must Be Love at the end with an encore of Night Boat to Cairo:
I was struck by the fact every single person there was singing every single word of this band’s tunes. Not only have Madness written some of the catchiest tunes of the late 20th century, they have masterfully chronicled the peculiars of the Thatcher years.
DAN CARRIER

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