By Keith Walsh
Don’t watch that, watch this. 1979 was the year that unusual music came into fashion. Madness, from Britain, released a debut LP packed with uninhibited fun and skilled musicianship. That year other British bands caught my attention as well – XTC, The Specials, The Beat, Elvis Costello and The Attractions, The Clash, Peter Gabriel — But Madness in particular, from the first few sax notes of “One Step Beyond,” stood out as a powerful blow in favor of playful creativity.
I was a junior in high school, spending the year in Canada. Down south in California, where I was from, punk rock was catching on. With their ska pop sound, in your face provocation and song story lyrics, Madness appealed to my senses, developed by the love of musical theater instilled by a lucky childhood when my parents brought us many times to The Pantages or The Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Their two-tone colleagues The Specials released a punkier debut that year. It was the first vinyl I bought after my mom gifted me a budget turntable, receiver and speakers.
That year I bought purple high tops downtown, I bought bright red pants with bright blue tubing and an elastic waist (pulled to below my underwear by a mischievous school athlete at my first dance there. I sported plain white at that stage of my life). I wore striped shirts, I had short hair and wraparound sunglasses. Madness, XTC, and The Specials transformed our teenage awkwardness by throwing it back at our critics with humor and talent. The experimentation and hearts on sleeves amplified and validated all the joy and weirdness I repressed and couldn’t express. Music like this affirmed our inner selves and made it ok to be who we were in a world that didn’t understand us yet and that we didn’t understand either.
I was a keyboard player since age 7, thanks to piano lessons, and that these bands had amazing keyboards was an inspiration. The piano of Madness featured greatly skilled pyrotechnics and I knew I needed to up my game. The Farfisa of The Specials, very cool. (I briefly owned a Farfisa just after high school grad in 1981, bought from a garage in Anaheim. It was fully functional, from the 60s. I bought a Wurlitzer electric piano in a similar situation. Both were rejected by the synthpop band I joined at the age of 18 in favor of my Moog. I foolishly sold both before 1983).
With that Wurlitzer, just before joining the synthpop band that imitated Depeche Mode and OMD, my pals since grade school, including in theatre productions, invited me to join a ska band, summer of 1981. The Wurli fit in my VW, legs screwed off. The Moynahans, five brothers, three of them played cornet, sax, and trombone. We got pretty good playing in their living room. They called the band The Munsters. I quit when synthpop mania called. Going to Hollywood to play clubs for a couple years was tumultuous to say the least.
In 2017 the Moynahans and a few others got together after three decades being apart, to form a ska band, finally. We did a couple videos and one show. I’m 61 and exhausted right now, but don’t count me out just yet.
The power of musical theater to channel the enthusiastic London energies of Madness while saving them from economic drudgery is wonderful. After the debut of One Step Beyond, came Absolutely. In my senior year of high school, back in California and too involved with the punk rockers, I showed up at another school dance in a thick black woolen trench coat. I got glares from the Moynahans. Mike later asked accusingly “why did you show up at that dance dressed like a punk rocker?” My reply: “Madness are all wearing trenchcoats on the cover of Absolutely.”
That second album was even more fun. As the 80s progressed and they hit it big with “Our House,” Wings Of A Dove,” and “Michael Caine,” I cheered for my boys even as music in general got too slick and my decade became darker. It wasn’t lost on me however, that “Wings Of A Dove” in particular had a beautiful optimistic tone that captured the heart of even my bitter, gorgeous, contentious girlfriend at the time, a few months before she dumped me.
2023’s ‘Theatre Of The Absurd C’est La Vie’ finds these guys vitally creative, survivors after decades of what must have been a challenging sequence of tours, studio work and downtime. The classic melodic sense is sharper than ever, tin pan alley, comedy, pop classicism and sweet innocence. A friend from grade school recommended the disc and it was an instant yes for me. I saw the band at YouTube Theatre last year, it was something very special, good seats and all.
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