Full House Madness

[Tadeo Lentz]

Our House" is a song by the English ska and pop band Madness and was written by second lead vocalist Chas Smash and guitarist Chris Foreman. It was released as the lead single from their fourth studio album, The Rise & Fall, on 12 November 1982. The song charted within the top ten in several countries, and it was the band's biggest hit on the Billboard Hot 100. It won the category Best Pop Song at the May 1983 Ivor Novello Awards.[3]

Released in November 1982, it peaked at No. 5 on the UK Singles Chart.[4] "Our House" was their biggest hit in the US, reaching No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1983.[5] On the US rock chart, the song peaked at No. 9, and it reached No. 21 on the US dance chart.[6] It received heavy airplay by radio stations.

The band portrays a working-class family in the video, including one with a stubbly face, dressed in an apron and bonnet, playing the mother. The band members perform with their instruments in the living room, as they prepare for work and school. The family play squash and relax in a hot tub. The video includes exterior shots of other houses, such as the Playboy Mansion, Stocks House in Hertfordshire,[8] and Buckingham Palace. The domestic property featured in the video is a terrace house on Stephenson Street in north-west London, near Willesden Junction station.[9]

A musical called Our House, featuring Madness songs, ran in London's West End between October 2002 and August 2003.[11] A recording of the show was broadcast on BBC Three and was released as a DVD.[12]

Occult disruptions in the vicinity of Nevada House are making detection of the Mandatus difficult. Energy readings indicate that Demoniac Cultists are attempting to usher godlike entities into this world, which, in addition to corrupting our Enmeshment algorithms, is pretty annoying.

The enemies of this stage are the Demoniacs, including the Cultists, Husks, Specters, Poltergeists, Apparitions, Wild Landers and Demonstrators. Slayers can also be summoned by the Cultists if they reach the Main Hall and are not interrupted before they finish summoning.

The Escape Power Play Road to Nexus City Warehouse Raid The Boom Factory The Station Fortress Inner City Beat the Streets The Scenic Route Seeking Asylum Sleeper Labs Deep Storage Flood Control Chasms The Last Leg Base Jumping Shakedown Climb The Rush

I now have a few games of Mansions of Madness under my belt, all of them with three players - a Keeper and 2 Investigators. And I've noticed that there doesn't seem to be time for them (the Investigators) to get even the majority of the house explored or make much progress once the objective is revealed.

In a 5-player game (a Keeper and 4 Investigators), the Investigators will have 4 actions per turn. So an Event card that takes 3 turns to flip expects 12 actions to occur before it's activated. With 2 Investigators, only 6 actions have been taken in the same span. Since the Event card timings do not scale with the number of Investigators, it is no wonder that it seems the players are running out of time.

I have decided that the "2 movements and one action" structure of the Investigator turn is too integral to mess with. So I am thinking of doubling the number of "clock ticks" between events for my next game - I'll almost always have 2 Investigators playing.

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Alan Winstanley, meanwhile, was in the midst of doing several projects for Stiff Records, engineering Wreckless Eric, Lene Lovich and Rachel Sweet, having previously started out at TW, a tiny basement studio in Fulham, south-west London, working with the Stranglers, the Buzzcocks, Joe Jackson and Generation X. So, when Madness' Top 20 UK success with 'The Prince' led to a record contract with Stiff, the stars were evidently in alignment. The band wanted Clive Langer to stay on board as producer; Langer, in turn, requested the technical cooperation of Winstanley, who had previously engineered some Deaf School demos and produced Langer's solo work. The fact that Stiff co-founder Dave Robinson was familiar with Winstanley basically sealed the deal.

For all concerned, it was the start of a beautiful friendship, not least between Langer and Winstanley, who would become one of the most acclaimed production teams of the post-punk 'new wave' era. As well as 13 top 10 British singles with Madness, they had hits with Elvis Costello, Dexy's Midnight Runners, the Teardrop Explodes, Lloyd Cole & the Commotions and China Crisis, not to mention David Bowie and Mick Jagger's recording of 'Dancing In The Street' and Bowie's Absolute Beginners movie soundtrack.

Given all of the judgement calls that have to be made, is it always possible to be on the same wavelength? "We've had our arguments," is Winstanley's laughing reply. "Early on we'd both argue our point, but as you grow older and a bit longer in the tooth you tend to think 'Oh, bollocks. Whatever.' In the early days, if either of us really felt strongly about something we would stick up for it, and sometimes we might even try something both ways. Neither of us was too proud to say 'OK, yeah, your idea is better.' So, it always worked out in the end."

"At the time of doing Madness we were kind of flying along together," adds Langer. "Alan's very precise and very particular, and I'm more slapdash and in a hurry and probably tend to like rougher-sounding records. That's a generalisation, because in the end we do like the same records, but sometimes the whole process with Alan can be laborious for me. He normally does the vocal comps whereas I'll do a lot more work in the rehearsal room on the arrangements, deciding what instruments should play what where, how long the chorus should be and things like that. Still, we've got on fine considering how long we've worked together."

"Even though I think many of the album tracks were really good, you'd have to be a fan to get into them, but then we'd get a big single and we'd be off again, flying along. In fact, at one point they went to see Trevor Horn when Stiff thought it was maybe time for a change, but that's when 'Our House' popped out and so we maintained our relationship. I mean, we always had a great relationship with the band, but our professional relationship was maintained by their choice of songs or their songwriting and then us arranging the numbers and going through the studio process."

The layout of AIR's live room for the initial drum tracking sessions on 'Our House'."Many of the songs on The Rise And Fall essentially weren't up to it," adds Langer, "and that was maybe due to them being on the road and Mike [Barson] beginning to get a bit pissed off with the whole situation, but I still enjoyed making that album. Even though the songs weren't all that commercial, they were colourful and we could go down a certain road with each of them, whether we were adding a brass band or getting a bit of bhangra in there. So, it wasn't boring."

"That meant we had to record it," says Alan Winstanley. "However, we didn't want to re-record the whole song, so I copied the entire multitrack from that bridge and just used the drums, and then we overdubbed all of the chorus instruments and vocals onto that before I had to re-edit it into the multitrack. In this day and age, with crossfades and Pro Tools, it would be a piece of piss, but back then it was a nightmare. When Suggs sang 'Welcome' it was just before the downbeat of the bar, so when I edited it in it went 'elcome to the house of fun,' completely missing out the 'W'. The only solution was for him to go back in and dub in all the 'welcomes'. That was quite a challenge, and all because the song's focus moved away from the chemist shop."

Clive Langer (right) and Alan Winstanley working with Madness around the time of 'Our House'."Even though we had a solid song, we could really push it to its limits and get David Bedford to write an exciting string arrangement. I think that really lifted it, the Western film-type strings in the background."

Recorded at AIR, these comprised four first violins and four second violins, broken down into pairs that were each miked with a Neumann U87, as well as four violas that were each miked with an 87 and two 'cellos that were miked with FET 47s.

"Then there was Carl's really fast vocal in the last verse, almost pre-empting rap," Langer continues."It was just so much fun and absorbing to work on that song, because you knew you were creating this very clever thing, without trying to be too clever."

"Carl had come a long way in a short time," adds Winstanley. "On the first album he wasn't even in the band. Only the other six guys appeared on the sleeve, even though he was the one shouting 'Hey, you!' on 'One Step Beyond'. That's all he was at that point; the kid who got up on stage and did the introduction as well as the nutty dancing. Then they let him into the band for the second album, and he was great, because he really wanted to contribute. He learned to play the trumpet, and even though he wasn't the greatest trumpet player in the world, he played it on 'Our House'. It took him a long time to actually nail it, but he wanted to do it and we didn't say 'Nah, bollocks, let's just get a session guy in.'

"On some of the tracks, including 'Our House', we actually did have a brass section, but Lee and Carl played as a part of that section, and on other songs Carl played the trumpet on his own. So, he really evolved from being the kid who just did the nutty dancing to someone who played the trumpet, learned to play the guitar and also wrote songs, including one of their biggest hits; certainly their biggest hit in America."

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