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Pop Rock Nation

Tag: Madness

  • Leaky roof…

    Leaky roof…

    Thanks to a storm last night, we have a leaky roof… It’s like a metaphor for life!

    It’s no secret that I’m not very fond of the house we’ve been renting here in Texas. We kind of got stuck here because we moved from North Carolina and didn’t have much time to find suitable digs. Our first choice house fell through and this one was next on the list. In retrospect, we were very stupid not to invest in a couple more days in a motel and find a home in better condition. In the last week, we’ve had to deal with a cracked pipe in the pool, smoke alarms going off in the middle of the night, and now, thanks to a big rain storm with wind, a leaky roof.


    Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young are not singing about the house I live in right now…

    Our situation is probably better described in a classic song by The Talking Heads…


    Especially the part about the “nasty weather”…

    I am hoping that sometime in the next few months we can determine where we’re going to settle and buy a house of our own. Renting is kind of convenient when you have to move as often as we have over the past seven years. I long for roots, though… and a place of my own where I don’t have to worry as much when mishaps occur. Not long ago, my husband Bill nodded off while holding a glass of red wine. You can imagine, that was a mess that took me a couple of days to clean up. Thank God for Wine Away to get the wine out of the yucky carpet and a mixture of dishwasher detergent and hydrogen peroxide to get the stains off the walls…


    I’ve always liked this song by Eric Burdon and War, but I sure wasn’t singing it the night Bill made his mess after spilling the wine…


    I’m impressed that Bruce Springsteen covered “Spill The Wine”…

    Unfortunately, Bill’s still searching for the right job and that may mean we’ll be changing cities again. I don’t mind San Antonio that much. It’s a big city and I’m more of a rural kind of girl, but the people here are basically nice and we can get pretty much all we need here. We also have friends in the city, which is more than we can say about some of the other places we’ve lived. So maybe Glenn Frey got it right…


    Should we embrace a more urban lifestyle in a house that doesn’t have a leaky roof?

    Embarking on a life beyond the U.S. Army has a bit of a St. Elmo’s Fire feel to it. Bill is a “man in motion”, as John Parr suggests in this 80s classic.


    Something about this song makes me think of beer commercials.

    I’m actually really glad “Our House” is not in the middle of the street…


    But if we have another windy night, the roof might be…

    …though again, this song does not describe our situation at all. Because the people in Madness look at their house with fondness. It probably doesn’t have a leaky roof like “our house” does.

    So if you have any spare good vibes, please send some our way. We just want to go home… a home without a leaky roof or property managers.


    This song is about a miserable time on a boat, but given all the rain we got last night and the way I feel about this house, perhaps it’s fitting.

  • Commercial-isms: Volkswagen Passat vs. Madness “It Must Be Love”

    Commercial-isms: Volkswagen Passat vs. Madness “It Must Be Love”

    It Must Be Love

    Always much more popular in their native Britain, the seven-man new wave ska band Madness are mainly (and somewhat erroneously) known here as a one hit wonder. That hit, “Our House” which hit the Billboard Top 10 in the summer of ’83, remains a staple of 80s party playlists. It’s a great song, but it’s tended to overshadow the rest of the band’s copious singles catalog from their classic 1979 45 “One Step Beyond” (The best instrumental single of the 70s? Oh yes, probably.) to quirky numbers like “Baggy Trousers” and the so-adorable-so-heartbreaking “My Girl”: “Why can’t she see, she’s lovely to me, but I like to stay in and watch TV on my own every now and then.”

    Madness “My Girl” (1979)

    “My Girl” was the second of more than a dozen top ten singles the band had in the U.K. But it took four years for the band to get any airplay here. After “Our House” finally broke the band to a big American audience, instead of releasing a new song as the follow-up, they reached back into their catalog for one of their most beloved previous hits, “It Must Be Love”, a cover of a 1972 song by folk-pop singer-songwriter Labi Siffre which went to #4 in the UK in 1981. (This selection only made sense in that the group’s self-titled U.S. debut album was essentially a greatest hits compilation – Labi Siffre was even more unknown to U.S. audiences than Madness was. He still is.) “It Must Be Love” wasn’t a total flop – it still managed to break into the American Top 40, but it never made it into the second hour of Casey Kasem’s weekly broadcast. Nevertheless, it remains the band’s second-biggest American hit, and until Volkswagen started airing commercials for the new Passat, it was mostly forgotten, even by the 80s kids.

    Madness “It Must Be Love” (1981)

    Madness’s cover of “It Must Be Love” was and remains Labi Siffre’s biggest American hit. Most of his albums weren’t even released in the U.S. until the last couple of years (and even then, only by digital download. You want a hard copy, it’s gonna be an import.) That said, Siffre does share a writing credit on Eminem’s 1999 single “My Name Is…” due to the fact that it samples Siffre’s 1975 song “I Got The…”, a very sexy song with one hell of an awesome breakdown. At that time, Eminem was getting a lot of flak for his apparent homophobia. Ironically, it was the openly gay Siffre’s bassline and electric piano hook from that sexy, sexy mid-song breakdown that anchored Em’s first really big hit. Check it out:

    Labi Siffre “I Got The” (1975)

  • The Infatueighties Countdown: #90: “Our House”

    The cover of Madness's "Our House" 45.

    “Our…house…is a veryveryvery fine house!” Don’t you love that song?!!

    PSYCH!! I’m not talking about the crappy TV show with Wilford “Diabeetus” Brimley, Chad Allen and Shannen Doherty (pre-Brenda) either.

    Today’s entry comes from the ska/pop giants from the U.K. called Madness. Admittedly, until very recently (like in the past year recently), I didn’t know much about these fellas except for their association with the two-tone moment (I guess that explains the checkerboard design of a lot of their records…wait, that was The Specials. My bad.) and the fact that their lead singer is named Suggs. Yes, Suggs. Granted, that’s not his real name, but still. Seriously. Who names themselves “Suggs”? What exactly is a “suggs”?

    Anyhow, a year and a copy of Madness’s “Ultimate Collection” later, I’m fond of more than one song by this band and if you’re an Eighties’ music fan, you should probably be too. At the very least, you should be madly in love(like me) with this song, which is absolutely fantastic. From the peppy horns (and tasteful strings) to Suggs’ baritone croak to the awesome opening 45 seconds or so before the vocals kick in (easily one of the decade’s ten best song intros), this is good shit, mister. It’s also a bit atypical of much of Madness’s previous work, with a more pronounced pop/rock sensibility.

    And the chorus! Simple and catchy, folks. You’ve gotta love it! Enjoy!