I'm sure that many OTFers are aware that 'One Step Beyond' - the first Madness album - has been re-released and remastered to mark its 30th anniversary. It's hard to believe that it was three decades ago when the lives of blokes who would normally never dance at parties were altered forever!
The CD comes in a digipack which reproduces the original artwork and the booklet has a specially written piece by Irvine Welsh, who recalls the emergence of Madness back in 1979 amidst a very politicised era. As he says, Madness were a band who
"realized that humour always works best when offset with the shadow of pathos and menace."
And that's one of the interesting things about the album. Everybody knows the hit singles of the record, but some of the songs are a lot darker than is often remembered. 'In The Middle of the Night' is a typically jaunty Madness number, but is actually about a man who steals womens' underwear from washing lines and relieves himself in them; and 'Mummy's Boy' makes reference to paedophilia ('she was twelve and he was thirty').
Others on here would be better qualified than me to comment on how the remastering has altered the sound coming through the speakers, but one thing I noticed was how the piano playing sounded so resonant and vibrant, particularly on the 'daft but great' track 'Tarzan's Nuts' (which takes one of the old Tarzan theme tunes as imagined by the boys.)
The extras are interesting too. Disc 1 contains all five of the Promo Videos (including 'Bed and Breakfast Man', strangely never released as a single) which never fail to raise a smile; Disc 2 has four tracks from a Peel session, and an assortment of bonus tracks. Some of these are a bit unnecessary - e.g. Italian and Spanish versions of the single 'One Step Beyond' - but the 'Work, Rest and Play' E.P. is there and that's definitely worth having.
So if you have a spare £8-99 floating around this weekend you could do worse than invest in a significant piece of British musical history.
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