The best advice I would give someone in a band is…
“Keep going, you just don’t know what’s around the corner. You just need a bit of luck sometimes, and that bit of luck can be the day after you decide to leave the band. Just keep going. It’s easier said than done. I always said music should be a passion that you do on an evening and at the weekends, but you should have something else that pays the bills. Music rarely pays the bills, that’s for sure.”
The best advice I’ve personally been given is…
“Always go for a piss before you leave a pub. My mum, copyright, 1979. That’s very good advice. Professionally: be yourself.
When we signed, I remember Dave Robinson [Stiff Records founder], said, ‘What I like is what you are, I’m not going to encourage you to be anything else’.”
The key to writing a hit song is…
“Chuck D from Public Enemy said he’ll start with a title, and that’s what I tend to do. I hear a phrase or word and I start thinking about how to expand on that idea, because a phrase or a word will give you the opportunity to write a chorus - you want the chorus to be the title of the song because you want people singing it as they go into a record store. Now I’m sounding really old fashioned!”
The thing I am most proud of in my career is…
“I could say a million trillion things, but the fact that people still dig what we do is probably what I’m most proud of.
People stopping me in the street telling me stories about how much joy they got from Madness never fails to fuel me. That’s a great privilege. ”
The most surreal moment of my life was…
“Playing the roof of Buckingham Palace [for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Concert]. I remember backstage when we arrived and there was Stevie Wonder, Sir Paul McCartney, Sir Elton John and the Queen. I
was standing with our keyboard player Mike Barson who went, ‘What the fuck are we doing here?’ I said,
‘Don’t even go there, this is not a time to start deconstructing the situation!’. Next thing we’re on the roof of Buckingham Palace.”
The last time I was starstuck was…
“I’ve never really been starstuck, the only time was meeting David Bowie. I met David Bowie a few times. The first time we were supporting him at Anaheim stadium, the second time, I was staying with my producer Clive Langer in France, and he said, ‘Oh, Bowie’s invited us to his house’.
We all went up there, the garage doors opened like something from Close Encounters, and there he was, The Starman, The Man Who Fell To Earth, and he’s beckoning us into the garage! As we go in our suitcases got knocked off the roof, and mine exploded all over the driveway, it was all socks and underpants blowing about in the wind and there’s David Bowie crawling about trying to catch my dirty socks.
Not the impression I wanted to make with the coolest man on the planet.”
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