Madness Central Newsletter: Issue 14
Kevin Tizzard
1st - 8th January 2010.
Welcome to the 14th edition of the Madness Central weekly newsletter.
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Contents:
1. Latest News And Information
2. The Liberty of Norton Folgate International Screenings
3. www.retro-madness.co.uk - This week's Special Offer
4. Concert Online: 2009 Gig Recordings Still Available
5. Happy Birthday Suggs and Chas
6. Spanish Concert Announced and 2010 Gig Listings
7. Nutty Boys leave them skastruck: Hogmanay Review
8. The Catherine Tate Show Review – Nan’s Christmas Special
9. Contacting Madness Central
10. Newsletter Subscription Details.
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1. Latest News And Information
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# Chas Smash Goes One Dub Beyond…
Page 22 of this month’s MOJO magazine reports on a new Chas Smash project: Chas Smash’s Hi-Fi Sounds Of The New Boss.Chas says it’s a dubstep album. I want to be able to dance to it, and sometimes the old Madness dance is a bit stiff, you know, and you wanna chill a bit ...
Read the complete blog at:
http://madness-central.com/blog/?p=857
# Ring in the New Year with a Bozzy Trip to Portugal
Calling all bands! If you’ve got a band and you’re going to be in Ireland and you’ve got a love for all things Velvet Ghost (and Morrissey), you’ll need to check this out ...
Read the complete blog at:
http://madness-central.com/blog/?p=855
Note: The above news items have been taken from the Madness Central News and Information blog at: http://madness-central.com/blog
For those with RSS capabilities, you can subscribe to the blog feed, provided by Google Feedburner, at: http://feeds.feedburner.com/madnesscentralblog
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2. The Liberty of Norton Folgate International Screenings
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New Year's Eve saw the Madness film "The Liberty of Norton Folgate" presented on Polish television as the "headliner" of three live music biopics that night. Along with Madness' Hackney film, Bjork in aris and Aimee Anne Duffy in London were aired.
This is the latest in a long string of international screenings of Norton Folgate: Australia, USA, Spain, Argentina, Chile and Poland have all enjoyed screenings in 2009, and coming in 2010 the project will be shown at music film festivals in Brazil and Mexico.
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3. www.retro-madness.co.uk - This week's Special Offer
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This week's offer is for an original Madness 7 poster from 1981 of the famous 'rising sun pose'...28 years old yet still in excellent condition. The ridiculous price we are offering these for this week is £2.99 including UK postage in a solid plastic tube. This price barely covers the cost of the tube, the postage and the paypal fees...Madness!!!
The posters are sized 17" x 24" - perfect for framing or simply sticking on your wall. The posters were produced under licence and originally sold in the UK in the early 80s in places such as Athena, Woolworths and Our Price. They are printed on quite thin paper and
the image is not crystal clear quality, but you get what you pay for! If you are wanting an original official Stiff Records promotional poster for Madness 7, sized approx 20" x 30" and printed on stiffer paper with a crystal clear image...we do have a couple of these for sale as well, still in excellent condition and priced at £13.50 inc UK p&p (you will find them on the 'posters' page)
Click the link below and you will find the £2.99 Madness 7 posters about2/3 of the way down the page. We still have a few mint condition Magic Carpet 12"s with press sheets, left over from last week's deal so we are holding their bargain price of £4.99 for one more week, you will find them about 1/4 of the way down the same page:
Go Direct Gov!
Chris & Emma of Retro-Madness
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4. Concert Online: 2009 Gig Recordings Still Available
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With the closing of 2009 we saw the last of a string of December Madness gigs also come to an end. If you'd like to own any of the live recordings from the tour, Concert Online has the all the gigs through Belfast available as digital download, USB and MP3 player.
http://concert-online.com/en/shop/29368/live-recordings/Madness.html
While some fans have had issues with the USBs they purchased at the gigs, the resounding consensus is the the quality of the recordings is superb.
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5. Happy Birthday Suggs and Chas
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The Co-Co Twins are celebrating their birthdays this coming week. Suggs will be 49 on Wednesday the 13th and Chas will be 51 on Thursday the 14th. Happy Birthday to Suggs and Chas!
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6. Spanish Concert Announced and 2010 Gig Listings
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The official Madness website has announced another European concert for 2010:
1st May 2010
Estrella Levante SOS 4.8, Murcia, Spain
As a recap of what's to come, here are the other confirmed live dates for 2010:
8th May 2010
Milan Palasharp, Italy
11th May 2010
Berlin (Huxley's Neue Welt), Germany
12th May 2010
Dortmund Westfalenhalle, Germany
14th May 2010
Zenith De Paris, France
15th May 2010
Amsterdam, Heineken Music Hall, Netherlands
30th July - 1st August 2010
Camp Bestival, Dorset, UK
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7. Nutty Boys leave them skastruck: Hogmanay Review
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Reviewed by David Pollock
Tuesday, 5 January 2010
Source: The Independant
http://tinyurl.com/yfwwo3r
Whoever came up with the idea of inviting ska-pop survivors Madness to headline Edinburgh's internationally famed Hogmanay celebrations was thinking pretty laterally. To most minds, Suggs and co's music and image cast them as definitive Londoners, so asking the Camden-formed group to play here was the rough cultural equivalent of letting the Proclaimers headline the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury.
Still, there were no obvious contenders for the top spot among those other groups invited to play on either Princes Street Gardens' Ross Bandstand, in the shadow of Edinburgh Castle, or the stage set up at the entrance to Waverley train station. In the absence of a true breakthrough act for 2010 like Glasvegas or Paolo Nutini, this year's Scots representatives were relegated to lower down the bill, including the Last Shadow Puppets-like side project of Jon Lawler from the Fratellis, Codeine Velvet Club, or the intelligent, anthemic indie-rock of Frightened Rabbit and We Were Promised Jetpacks. Both signed to Brighton's Fat Cat label, this latter pair boast huge local support, but are slow-burning their way to wider acclaim in a similar manner to, say, Biffy Clyro.
Otherwise, aggressive Coventry lad-rockers the Enemy and the pleasant but insubstantial Noisettes didn't quite have the populist appeal to carry off an event of this scale. So it's fortunate that Madness manage to dominate it with a cheeriness, professionalism and good humour that entirely dispel memories of Suggs hosting cheap karaoke-based TV shows and the sense of enduring dismay that they're now the kind of group who have inspired a musical based on their songs. For nearly an hour-and-a-half, with a five-minute break for the countdown to midnight and a monumental firework display, the black-suited 10-piece group deliver a cavalry charge of instantly recognisable hits that are perfectly pitched towards the party atmosphere.
Suggs, a white silk handkerchief sprouting from his suit pocket, summons a performance of such droll, expletive-peppered deadpannery that it raises the question, has he been indulging in the party spirit(s) before taking to the stage? If so, it only aids the show, with his cheerful introduction of the band's sound technician LJ ? whose birthday the bells also heralded ? and their manager's pregnant wife building up a charming communal atmosphere.
That the more reflective half-hour that saw out 2009 could find room for such lively tracks as "One Step Beyond", "Embarrassment" and "The Prince" was demonstration that this group have never really made music to sit still to. These were mixed with an a cappella take on the Beatles "Help!" from Suggs, which naturally doesn't remain a solo version once the crowd find their voice, and the group's final live track of 2009, "Forever Young", which is thematically appropriate but probably the set's least entertaining song.
No stop remained unpulled for the second portion of the set, however, with "House of Fun", "Shut Up", "Baggy Trousers" and "Our House" joined by a smooth cover of Max Romeo's reggae classic "I Chase the Devil" and "It Must Be Love", the one point at which balladry is positively demanded from this group. Yet it provided only a short break from the mass skanking, and the band's own title track then the closing "Night Boat to Cairo" finished out a celebratory set that was more successful than even the event's organisers must have hoped for.
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8. The Catherine Tate Show Review – Nan’s Christmas Special
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What’s the first sign of madness? Suggs knocking at your door. If that rather flimsy gag is indeed true, then the bewildering appearance of the Camden ska band at the start of this programme will hopefully bring about the onset of dementia for Catherine Tate’s Nan character. Then her Matt Horne-shaped grandson can put her in a nursing home and we can all forget about her.
To any of you lucky bleeders unfamiliar with the Nan character from The Catherine Tate Show, Horne (with a face made almost entirely of po) plays the straight man to Tate’s ‘Nan’, an ‘hilarious’ two-faced Grandmother with a penchant for colourful language. Tate is clearly a scholar of comedy and one who studies have led her to the Holy Grail of all things funny:
‘ISN’T IT FUNNY WHEN AN OLD PERSON DOES SOMETHING YOU WOULDN’T EXPECT AN OLD PERSON TO DO…?!’
A comedic tool employed by television advertisers ad nauseum, the Nan sketches take this premise and batter you over the head with it, like a rolled-up copy of People’s Friend. Nan’s Christmas Carol stretches the idea to fifty loooong minutes.
Now, you would expect an elderly lady to enjoy having her family over for Christmas and you certainly wouldn’t imagine that she would swear all the time, would you? Well, what Catherine Tate cleverly does is invert this stereotype. Here’s an example: “Christmas? What a load of ol’ shit!”
Ha! You didn’t expect that, did you?
With Dickens’ overly-familiar Christmas Carol as the template – which saves writing your own story, I suppose – time-travelling antics mean that we get to see Nan as a child. Expanding ingeniously on the original idea, we get to see that child swearing. Oh, Catherine! You confounded our expectations yet again! A child? Swearing? Blimey!
The Ghost of Christmas past is played by a lost looking Ben Miller, who can’t seem to work out if he wants to be funny or not (he’s not). Christmas Present’s ghost is the festively omnipresent David Tennant, playing a gay Russell Brand for seemingly no reason whatsoever. If you think you might hate David Tennant more than anything or anyone else in the world (like me), it’s probably best that you don’t track this down on iPlayer and stare at the screen, sobbing and grinding your teeth to dust. Finally, the future spectre is played by Roger Lloyd-Pack. Trigger’ll be spinning in his grave…
The final scene sees James Martin briefly and awkwardly cameo and Madness return to sing Baggy Trousers. What’s the last sign of Madness? Hopefully, turning up on a Catherine Tate Christmas special.
Source:
http://watchwithmothers.net/2009/12/31/the-catherine-tate-show-nans-christmas-special/
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9. Contacting Madness Central
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10. Newsletter Subscription Details
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