CityLife

Madness

TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE: Madness

A FESTIVE audience with the ultimate singles band should be a recipe for success, but Madness's show at Manchester Central was a bit of a Christmas turkey.

It's hard to knock a band for wanting to play new material, but the Londoners' insistence on plugging forthcoming album The Liberty Of Norton Folgate left a heavily inebriated crowd feeling colder than a Suggs-endorsed fish finger.

It started well. Like the majority of Madness shows, the first voice was Chas Smash's uttering the traditional "Hey you, don't watch that, watch this!" intro to the hypnotic ska whirl of One Step Beyond.

Embarrassment followed with all the lyrical bite it ever had, but the band seemed limp somehow.

Last time Madness played in this venue, saxophonist Lee Thompson flew over the audience on a wire, painted blue.

Woolies

This time, the band were wearing dour suits and singer Suggs filled the gaps between songs by mumbling about the credit crunch and the demise of Woolies, while Smash's lewd words for the ladies in the crowd made him more smutty than 'nutty'.

As the band began introducing that new material, the crowd's enthusiasm waned.

The Liberty Of Norton Folgate is no doubt going to be a great album, and a love letter to the band's beloved hometown, but this was not the place to showcase its more involved moments.

Balkans

As its sprawling title track rambled from ska to the Balkans and Bollywood, you could actually see fans removing fezzes in disappointment.

Later on, Thompson finally declared it was "showtime," which meant an unbroken run of big hitters. Wings Of A Dove, in particular, was brilliantly uplifting and Our House had the whole crowd singing in unison.

But it was all over too quickly. Having tread water for the first 90 minutes, the hit-packed ending was too little too late.

A full Norton Folgate show would no doubt be wonderful viewing, but not at this time and not for this crowd.

Suggs's man of the people act scored him a lucrative contract on those Birds Eye ads this year.

So how could he judge the mood of these people so wrongly?

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