“Madness, madness, they call it madness! Well if this is madness, then I know I’m filled with gladness!”
Yep, Mr Esther and I went to see Madness live last night, they performed in a quite intimate venue in Utrecht, which made it extra awesome! They are probably most known for their “Our House… in the middle of our street” song. I really like Madness, Mr Esther loves them, so we went and it was a great night out!
Every time I think of Madness, I am reminded of my wedding when at the party (we had a DJ) Madness was played and Mr Esther and his best friend went all, well, mad! They jumped around like crazy on the dancefloor so that everyone dancing had to make room for them. Last night, sure enough, Mr Esther was jumping up and down again! The man never, ever dances but Madness brings something out in him and he just can’t help himself. I absolutely love that!
I preferred to enjoy the concert instead of documenting it faithfully, so I only made videos of bits of songs here and there that I put together in this one video. Like Mr Esther, I couldn’t stand still either, so the camera is all over the place. The sound is not great either, there’s this recurring static noise that is sadly annoying, but you get the idea. Songs featured in this video are ‘Wings of the Dove’, ‘House of Fun’ (at 1:46 minutes), ‘Baggy Trousers’ (at 2:47 with a brief glimpse of Mr Esther jumping at 2:57 minutes), ‘Our House’ (at 3:42 minutes, the only song I recorded completely) and ‘Night Boat to Cairo’ (at 6:40 minutes). Mr Esther fervently hoped they’d play ‘Cairo’ and they did that as an awesome finale.
They played a lot of their hits like the ones mentioned above and also ‘Madness’, ‘One Step Beyond’ and ‘It Must Be Love’. That last one suddenly reminded me of one of the first fan videos (with screen caps only) that I had made for Silent Witness, using that song for my Harry & Nikki obsession at the time (I’m still not over them never actually getting together on the show).
The band really was great, the singer Suggs (Graham McPherson) sounds really good live, just like you’d hope for him to sound when you know his records, and it was an upbeat, happy evening all round! Suggs interacted nicely with the audience, even accepting a beer from one of them at one point. There was a little boy in the front row (maybe 6 or 7 years old) wearing big headphones and that boy was interacted with several times, which was cute! Suggs thought the venue looked like the bridge of the Starship Enterprise from his point of view, which was worth a few jokes.
