Suggs: ‘All the acting and music jobs now go to the f—ing middle classes’

“You forget what a privilege it is to be in this business, man,” says Suggs. The lead singer of Madness is standing outside a pub on Great Portland Street, drinking Guinness in the afternoon sun, which he says is “slipping down a treat” and curling the first of what will be a continuous stream of rollies. Wearing sunglasses, a leather jacket, jeans and oxblood loafers, at 62, Suggs seems much as he has always been, which is to say loud, charismatic and here for a good time.

“It’s even great doing this, you know,” he laughs, wagging his finger at the space between us. “There’s times when you’re doing press and it starts to get boring. I’m so excited, even to talk to you! This is how bad it’s got. I’ll talk to anybody!”

It has been a while. Madness have a new record, their 13th, and first in seven years: Theatre of the Absurd Presents C’est La Vie. As the title suggests, it is a concept album, forged in the ennui and dread of the pandemic, like a kind of Sgt Pepper with social distancing. It’s their most mature record: the chaotic energy of youth has given way to a more reflective tone. Suggs’ voice is a little gruffer, but remarkably unchanged.

The album’s gestation was fraught. As the album notes state: “After a disparate couple of years which saw the band at their most polarised and fragmented, Madness reunited in an industrial estate in Cricklewood at the beginning of the year, where Suggs, Mrk, Chrissy Boy, Mike, Lee and Woody realised that what united them was always bigger than what divided them.”

It sounds less It Must be Love and more Appetite for Destruction. What happened?

“My band was like a microcosm of society,” Suggs says. “Everything got so polarised. We were disagreeing on everything – on vaccination, on lockdown – to the point where I wondered if we would actually get back together. When you can’t speak face to face, everything is exaggerated. There were bits where I was infuriated by the rest of them. Arguing over email is exhausting.

“I didn’t want Brexit, I was pro-vaccination and I followed all the rules of the lockdown, then Boris came and pulled the rug from under my feet. I totally disagreed with some of the band’s opinions, but everyone wrote about their own feelings at that particular time. Ultimately we’re not political as an outlet, we’re a pop band, but we’ve always had a hidden and darker meaning. Unconsciously, we’ve always had a kind of moral compass.”

The differences evaporated as soon as they got back in the studio. The idea of a theatre for the absurd, from the existentialist plays of the mid-20th century – like Beckett’s Waiting for Godot – in which communication breaks down, became an organising principle for the album, given its obvious parallels with covid.

“Once we got back in the room, doing something as a collective created this tsunami of creativity,” he says. “It was great to realise that we didn’t have to hate each other. The great privilege of music is that it can override any argument.”

We are briefly interrupted by the whistles of police outriders and the rumble of a motorcade. Suggs sprints to the curb. “If that’s Boris Johnson I’m going to f—ing have him,” he shouts. The VIP is invisible, but one of the security detail recognises Suggs from inside a car and gives him a little wave. Soon after a Scottish man approaches to shake his hand and say how much he loves the music. “Yeah, f— off!” Suggs says, gleefully.

Lockdown was hardly the first time Madness flirted with packing it in. They first broke up in 1986, worn down by the relentless cycle of recording and touring, especially as a band known for bringing the party. They formed in the late 1970s when Suggs – born Graham MacPherson – was at Quintin Kynaston, a large comprehensive in North London. His mother, a jazz singer, had raised him alone after his father walked out when Suggs was three. The family lived a peripatetic life, moving from city to city.

“I came from nothing,” Suggs says. “I feel it less as I’ve got older because I’ve reconciled myself. A lot of my contemporaries were struck with the begrudgement of feeling unjustified. I’m lucky. As a kid, I had f— all. A flat with no washing facilities. I had to go to live with my aunt in Wales because it was so dysfunctional they were going to take me away. I could have felt annoyed at being abandoned, but I’ve reconciled myself that that was the best my mum could do at the time.”

Although he was a “ferociously intelligent” child, once back in London he fell in with the wrong crowd and eventually dropped out in his teens. “It was a miracle meeting the band,” he says. “We were all from the same sort of background, and it was a cliche that to get out of that situation there were few ways: black cab driver, boxer, footballer or gangster. I didn’t have the perspicacity to do any of them.

“The band became a kind of bizarre surrogate family. We were all from single parents. And it was like therapy. You’re in very close proximity so you’re talking all the time, and we talked about our feelings, which was very important, certainly for me.”

Only many years later did Suggs realise that being in a band might have had a therapeutic effect, after he saw a professional therapist.

“It was about drugs,” he says. “I was taking a lot of ecstasy. I lost my mind. I didn’t get hooked, but my dealer said he could only sell the ones I wanted in portions of 250. So I had 250 E’s in my pocket at a time when it felt like there was nothing wrong with this stuff. I burnt out my serotonin and realised I was getting depressed. I went to see this psychiatrist – it was fantastic, proper old-fashioned Freudian stuff with a sofa. The first time he said ‘Stop taking Ecstasy’. The second time I had stopped and I was feeling better. Third time I asked when can I go, and he said ‘When you say that.’”

He knew addiction ran in the family. When he was an adult, he found out that his father had been a heroin addict. It played on his mind when he was starting a family himself. He and his wife Anne, a musician who goes by Bette Bright, have two grown-up daughters, Viva and Scarlett.

“I was very aware that I’d come from a very disparate background,” he said. “I thought if I’m going to have kids I’m going to make sure they’re not going to go through what I went through. You don’t know what’s going to happen. You can’t decide you’re going to have a happy family, but I was certainly aware that I was hoping – well, primarily, not to abandon them. To look after them. And that’s what I’ve tried to do. The pop star business is such a ridiculous carry on, so it has been great to temper it with normality. Charlie Higson says the problem with being a pop star is you are perpetually 18. They want to keep you like an idiot so they can manipulate you. But you can get used to it.”

Suggs has become a grandfather since the last Madness record: Viva has had five-year-old twins, a boy and a girl.  “It’s fascinating watching them develop,” he says. “I know we’re in a world where you can’t say anything about gender, but to watch a girl and a boy, she is so far ahead of him. Bringing up your own kids is a huge responsibility. The grandchildren you just spoil them and give ’em back on Monday.”

There is something melancholic about meeting Suggs, who so embodies a vision of London as somewhere a gang of cheeky working-class boys could sing songs about school and home and fitting in and find a huge audience. Camden Town, with which Suggs is inextricably linked, epitomises the change. They recently played a gig at KOKO, in Mornington Crescent, a venue Suggs remembers as somewhere he and his mates would break in through a hole in the roof, but which now has a multi-million-pound private members’ club attached.

“Camden’s changed out of all proportion,” he says. “I can’t recognise it. But it’s a grumpy old man thing. My daughters love it. There’s cocktail bars, you can get coffee. You couldn’t do any of that before.” Could Madness emerge from this world of flat whites?

“It’s palpable, the change – there were eight pubs where a band like ours could get gigs. You could just knock on the door. That’s how we learned our craft. You learn how to entertain. You’d find it very hard to get going now. It’s all online.”

It’s part of the reason he says the jobs as “actors and musicians and journalists” are going to the “f—ing middle classes.” The cost of the capital doesn’t help. “I’ve moved out to Leyton and the kids have moved out there too because they couldn’t afford to live where they were brought up. I think that’s a universal thing for working-class people. I worry about the centre of London. When you think about everything that was going on when I was young – there were clubs, railway arches, raves, squats. There was room to manoeuvre. Now there ain’t. It’s all about money. Where does that lead? I’ve got friends who work at St Martin’s Fashion College and there’s hardly any English people there. They can’t afford it. Unless your mum and dad can pay for you, you can’t afford to do anything.”

He remembers Chrissie Hynde, from the Pretenders, coming from Chicago and being surprised by the level of freedom young musicians enjoyed in London. “She couldn’t believe that you could go on the dole, live in a squat and public transport was f— all, and you could rehearse in a railway arch. Now, I don’t know. There are always outlets. I watched a documentary about grime – they’re recording tunes on the stairwell of a block of flats with their mobile phones. But groups are getting harder and harder.”

Meanwhile, Madness rumbles on: in the new album, in the live shows, online. Even on Spotify, whose founder wasn’t born when Madness were at their peak, Our House has a quarter of a billion listens. It Must Be Love has become a wedding staple.

“You forget how important music is. We did a few gigs this summer and my mate said ‘It’s unbridled joy, Suggs’.

“I enjoy performing more than I did. When I was a kid, the adrenaline… and the [amphetamine] sulphate… meant it was a blur of sweat and arms and legs and hats going in the air. You’re not completely aware of what’s happening. Now I look and see the audience really digging what we do. That’s an amazing thing. We’ve had 20 top 10 hits. It’s such an ephemeral thing, pop music, just three minutes, but those songs are your first snog, your first fight, your first fag.

“The other thing about music is you have to stand back afterwards to take a look at it”, he says. “When we finished the album I wasn’t sure if it was any good. But then you listen to a song and think ‘that’s alright’. It all boils down to the effort you put in. That’s what we’ve always done.”

And what does he think when he stands back to look at the whole Madness project? He grins.

“Well, as my mate said: ‘I think you are one of the top three bands in the world. I just can’t think what the other two are.’”

Theatre of the Absurd Presents C’est La Vie is released on November 17