Fuck Art, Let's Dance
On Madness, The Blockheads, and the brother who never got old
Eight months after my brother Pete died, aged 17, he turned up on Top of the Pops. People who’ve lost someone are used to this sort of sighting. Someone familiar on the street and your heart skips: it’s them! They’re not dead after all! And then they turn a little more towards you, and your grief has another long cold slide through your body, the loss landing with a thud. No, not them.
But this was different. Pete wasn’t just a glimpsed face in the audience. Pete was on stage. Lead singer in a band. Dancing the old familiar moves he’d executed one time on crutches at a club — sardonically, to show them how it was done — and accidentally won a place in the next round. Same quirks and twinkles. Same voice, same irreverent attitude. Pete had been getting a band together when he died.1 It was amazing to see that just eight months after dying of a rare bone cancer, the brilliant bugger had made it!
The band was Madness. The singer was Suggs. And from that point on, Suggs was my stand-in brother. The resemblance was never less than complete for me, in those earliest days. I saw Suggs, I saw Pete. I loved that he was still having fun. And if I look at Suggs now, I still think ‘That’s what Pete would look like, had he lived.’
So of course, I had to go to Madrophenia, the huge Madness gig on Brighton Beach last week. My brother, coming to my home town? Does it get any better than that?
Why yes, it did. Because supporting Madness were The Blockheads. Ian Dury and The Blockheads at the Ipswich Gaumont in July of the year my brother died was one of the things that kept me afloat. Plus Ian Dury holds a special place in my heart for being instrumental in my early writing career. He chose four of my poems for a Faber anthology of new poets and at its launch at Riverside Studios, crossed the room to ‘bum a fag off me’ as we used to say at the time, in slang that will no doubt suggest gay sex to some Americans. (My Ian Dury story is here, in a very early post briefly unlocked for your amusement.) The Blockheads without Ian (who died 26 years ago) surely couldn’t be worth seeing? Wrong. Because they’ve found a front man, Mike Bennett, who completely channels Ian Dury. He even looks (on the big screen at least) like I imagine Dury would look if he’d made it this far; and he’s certainly got the voice and the attitude.
The minute the bassline of ‘What a Waste’ kicked in, I was compelled towards the stage… though only as far as fear for my injured shoulder (which needed protecting from drunk men wearing pork pie hats and fezzes) would allow. Big screen, that’ll do me. Major awakening moment (stuff I didn’t know when the first Stiff Tour, via my brother, brought New Boots and Panties!! into our house): ‘Billericay Dickie’ is 100% old-time British Music Hall. (I am also ‘from Essex, in case you couldn’t tell.’)
And yes, Ian Dury’s songs have fantastic basslines, are lyrically on point, crude and hilarious, and even cute (the way he says ‘my body’ in ‘Wake up and Make Love With Me’), but it’s worth saying, also — he also doesn’t take himself too seriously. At 17 I thought he was incredibly cool (not least because of the swearing; it was rare then). Now I recognise he was also delightfully silly.
But the pinnacle of this — silliness — is Madness. The last time I saw Madness live (at UEA in Norwich), I was 17. Terrifyingly, most of the band are now closer to 70. At that gig long ago I bought a ‘Fuck Art Let’s Dance’ T-shirt that I’ve managed to cling to despite numerous house moves (including the few-hours flit of my abusive marriage, where I left many precious things behind). And there it was, on the merch stall.
Suggs sang their hits to the backdrop of those early 80s videos … and I don’t know how I’d forgotten how being silly, goofing around, was at the core of what makes them such national treasures: so dear to so many, so quintessentially British. Silliness, said a piece I read this week (but now can’t locate!) is the essential British export. Monty Python (the greatest purveyors of silliness this isle has ever spawned) are the reason you have a spam folder and John Cleese’s Ministry of Silly Walks skit is internationally reenacted every year on January 7th (see this one from the Czech Republic). The best of British is silly.
There’s nothing deep here. We all need joy. Lightening up is, I would say, were I religious, the Lord’s work. We weren’t all old buggers in the audience either — directly in front of me, three people all born in the 21st century danced their socks off and shouted along with the rest of us to ‘Our House.’
I can’t believe I nearly didn’t go. (You know. Money.) Joy is priceless. I can suck up another £50 of debt; not only that, but the lift in my mood probably helped me earn five times that last week, as the open flow of lighter energy brought new mentees into my inbox. Yes, that’s how I read it. It doesn’t hurt to believe in the fundamentally energetic nature of the universe. I wouldn’t be a good daughter of physicists if I didn’t.
Which is one way of saying I don’t think my brother’s gone anywhere. He looked great up on that stage last week. Suggs still has the moves, but Pete has full flexibility. He can be wherever I am, any time I lighten up. A wiggle, a bop, a bit of hokey cokey.
So until next week, my friends, fuck art, let’s dance.
♥️ For every like, I’ll put my left leg in. Restack and I’ll shake it all about. ♥️
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Over to you:
Silly questions are good questions
Silliest question gets a digitally signed poem e-card
Musical reminiscences from Gen Xers also extremely welcome
He’d learned guitar and was writing songs, including a ska number whose chorus included the line ‘Babylon gets up my back passage.’
A lovely read. My husband (who looked just like Robin Gibb if the Bee Gees) died 4 days ago. Reading this helped me work out how to think about him. Early days but unavoidable. Thanks 🙏
Lovely Ros, just Lovely!