Rumors were buzzing about that Madness was going to call it quits.
Yes, there are moments of brilliance (see “Burning the Boats,” “Coldest Day,” “Michael Ellis,” “The Most Awful Family in Britain”), but the overall endeavor is a giant hemorrhaging wound with one indispensable creative contributor gone missing. More precisely, Mad Not Mad is analogous to the final season of Monty Python’s Flying Circus without John Cleese. I forced myself to play it with much dutiful enthusiasm, much like Homer Simpson’s hungry rationalizations over his runaway BBQ piglet: “It’s just a little synthesizery. But to me it was and still remains the low point of the Madness discography. I know a lot of fans love that album, and I respect that. I’ve never written a blog post dedicated to 1985’s Mad Not Mad because I just don’t have much to say about it. The writing was on the wall after the departure of Mike Barson. In my personal case, the breakup years coincided with a transitional growth period in my life that fortunately made the loss easier to cope with.Ĭertainly, no one who followed the band could say the breakup came as a shock. It’s going to be a challenge to write an essay on the years without Madness without being completely boring, but hey, being boring hasn’t stopped me so far. For us it felt as permanent as the end of The Beatles or Led Zeppelin or The Jam. Of course 1986 wasn’t really the end, but we had no way of knowing that. A bleak, dispiriting time that all of us longtime fans had to suffer through in our own way.
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