Succumbing gracefully to a strange kind of Madness

There I was last Friday, on a rainy night in Galway, jumping up and down quite excitedly and looking around me at many older men leppin’ about in a similar fashion. All this in a big tent on the edge of the Corrib . . . and the thought struck me, that every once in a while, it’s just great to ‘have no sense at all’ for an hour or two. The occasion was the visit of North London band Madness to the Big Top Arts Festival tent at Fisheries Field on the University campus, and for those two hours, it just felt like yesterday that I remember being in a cousin’s house where we watched this group of strange-looking men on Top of the Pops belting out their first hit called The Prince. Before I got a chance to rather furtively gaze back into the memory bank, lead singer with the band, ‘Suggs’ [real name, Graham McPherson] revealed that this Top of the Pops debut was back in 1979, a rather frightening 39-years ago. At the time, they were a young, spotty-faced group of musicians but to their followers they were just weird and wonderful. One little consolation about the passing of years is, that here and there, you do get the chance to see a band that you might have never had the opportunity to see in their prime of your youth, but these guys have never lost it. The sight of middle aged to modestly elderly humans, bopping up and down, quite spontaneously, and with absolutely no sign of energy loss or fatigue, was quite invigorating. At one point, I remarked to my daughter who had accompanied me on this musical excursion that: “Jaysus, them ould lads have no sense at all,” as they lost sweat almost at the same rate as the hot rain from the West belted down on top of the tarpaulin. Around the same time, a few young ones (the band did attract quite a youthful cohort, too), looked over at me (no not like that!) in semi-amazement at a bespectacled man with a tweed cap jumping up and down. Then the penny dropped and I thought: “God, sure amn’t I one of those ould lads myself.” At that very moment, Our House began and we were all young lads again back in the early 1980s having little sense, feck all money, and with a longing to go a bit daft at times. Maybe, not much has changed.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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