Kunstrasen Bonn – 9 July 2026
The ‘Nutty Boys’ have now grown up it’s true (Suggs is now 65 after all) but Sax player Lee Thompson still finds time to fly paper planes into the crowd and Suggs himself rejoices in the politics of novelty UK Candidate Count Binface. There is a brief attempt to play the experienced advocate of good sense when Suggs warns young audience members to “get an education” and “Don’t become troublemakers like him!” at which point he waggles an accusing finger at Thompson, who has just retrieved his tambourine from the photopit after a failed attempt to throw it over a mike stand several feet away. They may not be nutty boys anymore, but Madness still know how to have fun, and the 3,700 strong audience at Bonn Kunstrasen are with them all the way – many wearing red fezzes in anticipation of ‘Nightboat to Cairo’.
It would not be innacurate to describe Madness as Rock royalty. They were a key part of the 1980’s Ska revival movement and three decades later, in 2012, played on the roof of Buckingham Palace for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. Rumour has it that the Queen herself was amused by their show. At the height of their fame there was a Madness Musical in theatres, and the writers of Rowan Atkinson’s ‘Blackadder’, Ben Elton and Alan Curtis, discussed a tv series. I can only imagine they saw a mixture of ‘The Monkees’ meets ‘The Banana Splits’ America television successes from a slightly earlier time.
This is something of a seminal evening for me too as it happens. My very first photopit assignment was covering Madness at Museumsplatz some almost twenty years ago to the day for the now defunct Bonn-English-Network website. The music still remained fresh then I remember, and so it still does in 2026. It’s been a long time since I heard so many marvelous pop melodies that stuck in my head.
Whilst there is a three-piece wind section to help out, the band still has a hearteningly strong contingent of original members as shown by the opener ‘One Step Beyond’. “If you’ve come in off the street and are beginning to feel the heat… listen to the heavy, heavy, monster sound…!” That sounded about right for this hot and sunny afternoon, and even if the band stepping onto the stage are a little older, it is still wonderful to momentarily step back in time before being tipped raucously into the present. Really, I had forgotten just how many great tracks Madness had put out over the years.
‘My Girl’, ‘Wings of a dove’, ‘Grey Day’, ‘House of Fun’, Baggy Trousers’, ‘Our House’… Even ‘Bed & Breakfast Man’ that was “from our first album, made before the War…” (Suggs) still seem fresh after all these years. Lovely too to see the original video of ‘Shut Up’ with the young band dressed as ’70’s policemen in Keystone Cops mode. A reminder of the World that Madness in their commercial prime locked into.
“It’s a privilege to still be here after all this time” mused Suggs before launching into ‘Our House’ for which he needn’t have sung a word – the audience was so loud joining in they almost drowned him out. The band even reinvented Labi Siffre’s hit ‘It must be love’ which saw Suggs enriching the original lyric with an additional “Bless the bees and the birds – especially the birds!”. All those fez wearers finally got to shake their fez tassles and move their bodies energetically to the closing ‘Nightboat to Cairo’. End of show and a fitting song comes over the loudspeakers as we leave – ‘Always look on the bright side of life’. Yes indeed. And Madness, bless them, even 50 years on from their first music, are still making the World a brighter place.
