Sound check: Busking with Suggs

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Capital concept: "I think there’s something special going on in London right now," Suggs says

Busking isn't necessarily the first idea that springs to mind when it comes to making serious cash but Cancer Research UK reckons it can raise £100,000 through street strummers in the coming week. Tomorrow evening Madness will be laying out their caps aboard HMS Belfast, moored near London Bridge, to encourage seven days of charity busking across the country from amateurs and professionals alike.

This Busking Cancer week, now in its third year, has encouraged so many enthusiastic performers that a second one has just been announced, from 5-12 September. Other stars getting involved this time include Skye Edwards from Morcheeba, Beverley Knight, The Feeling and former Sugababe Mutya Buena. But Suggs and his Nutty Boys are probably the best practised at this special art.

In April they spent the duration of the Camden Crawl festival driving up and down the High Street in their own bus, stopping to play impromptu acoustic sets outside various pubs. “I've never had to busk through necessity but I've sung outside plenty of pubs through my own volition,” Suggs tells me.

He's all too aware of the high standard of buskers in this city. In the Eighties, Madness members spotted novelty music group Pookiesnackenburger busking in Covent Garden and were responsible for getting them signed to Stiff Records. Their leader, Luke Cresswell, went on to create the hit musical Stomp and perform at Suggs's wedding.

Next month Madness will be performing on a different scale, however, when their Madstock festival is revived in Hackney. The first one drew 70,000 people to Finsbury Park over two days in 1992,  when the band pre-empted the vogue for hatchet-burying reunions that has recently seen their ska rivals The Specials join them on the comeback trail.

This latest gig comes on the back of the success of The Liberty of Norton Folgate, Madness's first album in a decade and a fine return at that. It earned their highest chart position for a new album since 1981 and many of their best reviews. “I feel like we're in our prime at the moment,” says 48-year-old Suggs.

It's a concept album about London that celebrates many of the great things about the capital. It includes the songs We Are London, NW5, Clerkenwell Polka and the extraordinary 10-minute title track, which has brought comparisons to London biographers Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair instead of the usual ska idols.

“I think we've always been writing about London,” says Suggs. “When you listen to our music you would never think we were from anywhere else but it was a conscious decision to make an album about the place this time.”

Suggs's connection with his long-term home city (he was born in Hastings) is so strong that he has also presented the television shows Suggs in the City and Disappearing London, for which he won a Royal Television Society award. A book is on the way in August, too: Suggs and the City — My Journeys Through Disappearing London. “I think there is something special going on in London right now that isn't happening in any other city. There's an experiment of mass assimilation that the world has never seen before, and it's really exciting.”

If that kind of enthusiasm doesn't make you love Suggs, going to watch him busk with the lads on a floating London landmark tomorrow, singing songs steeped in the city, will probably do the trick. Throw all the money you have at them.
www.buskingcancer.co.uk. Madstock is on 17 July at Victoria Park, E3 (0870 534 4444, www.madness.co.uk)

 

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