Usually, if you are going to a gig, you will be excited about it. And going to see Madness with Squeeze as support at the O2 should be a reason to be cheerful.
However, the O2 had been sucking any joy out of the build up (obviously helped by the other shit storm of the Government and their lackadaisical handling of all things Covid). First there was the e-mail ten days before the concert saying you had to have a Covid passport on the NHS app to get in. By now my utter distain for being forced to download apps should be well known. But having paid for tickets it was a necessary evil I suppose.
But it turns out it wasn’t as evil as what O2 were going to pull next. Four days before the gig there is another e-mail, this time saying tickets were available. But only on the O2 Arena app. No printed tickets, no pdf to download. App only. I was spitting feathers by this point. With much swearing I downloaded their app, only to then have to register, a process completed by clicking on a link by e-mail. Twelve times I clicked on the link before finding their e-mails were going straight to junk mail. Once registered I then had to link to my tickets, which was another registration process.
When I bought the tickets, many months ago, there was no mention of any of this rubbish. If there had have been I wouldn’t have bought the damn tickets, and it is a guarantee I will never buy tickets for the O2 ever again, and nor will I buy tickets for any other fucking venue that will force me into downloaded an app to be able to get into the gig. They can all go fuck themselves.
We had booked a hotel in Stratford (a third of the price of nearer ones) bearing in mind it was three stops on the tube. Only to get another e-mail from the O2, this one informing us of a tube strike on the day of the gig.
Fast forwarding to the day of the gig, we got to Stratford, and Helen had tried booking a few places for food without much success, so we got the bus to the O2 (as it turns out, a bit slower, but more convenient being almost door to door, than the tube would have been), and winged it. Ending up at Café Rouge, where there was no wait for a table outside under umbrellas and heaters.
Getting into the gig wasn’t anywhere near as bad as I thought it might be, even with all my ranting above. The queues were massive at entrances A & B but being up in the clouds meant we were at the furthest point away at entrance H, where there was no queue, and both the NHS and O2 app worked, and we were on our way up in less than a minute.
It has been a while since I’d been to the O2, and I’d forgotten just how small the seats were in the gods. I’ve lost a fair bit of weight since the last time there, but they are still too narrow for my fat ass, and the legroom would only work if I were a foot shorter. Even Helen was finding the seat narrow. But whatever the confines of the seat were, there would be no way I would be standing up. Fuck it is steep up there. My head is spinning if I look down whilst stood up, and only just calms down when seated.
Looking around, there were a lot of people wearing fez’s, Madness ones. Which was good, as it showed exactly where the obnoxious moron sections were in the crowd.
If I though my seat was tight, I wasn’t having half the issues a woman two rows in front of us was. She really couldn’t get into her seat at all, trying half a dozen ways. Her other half (wearing tatty shorts) tried bending the arms of the seat out of the way – to no avail. She took herself off, not sure where she was going, or hoping to sort out, but her other half didn’t go anywhere. (She came back four songs into the Squeeze set, sat on the steps for a couple of songs, before cramming herself into an unused seat on the end of a row – whilst shorts bloke was fast asleep before the end of the Madness set.)
And then it was show time, Squeeze ambled out onto the stage and launched into an incredibly good set. The tickets for the show weren’t cheap, and I might not have gone for it if it was just Madness, but the chance to see Squeeze tipped the balance for me, and they didn’t disappoint. They rattled through twelve songs, with all the favourites there, and only the one I didn’t recognise in the middle – F-Hole, which sounded like it could have come off Nirvana’s Nevermind.
The full set list was, “Take Me I’m Yours”, “Up The Junction”, “Hourglass”, “Slap and Tickle”, Cradle To The Grave”, “F-Hole”, “Labelled With Love”, “Muscles From A Shell”, “Annie Get Your Gun”, “Tempted”, “Cool For Cats”, and “Coffee In Bed”, during which they went around and spotlighted the different band members and they all did solos.
To our amusement, the couple sat behind us weren’t Squeeze fans. They were seated before we got there and had given us filthy looks when we sat down as they had to stop dangling their legs over onto our seats. Getting there that early, you would have thought they were up for seeing Squeeze, but at no point did they applaud, sing, or move during the Squeeze set, just sitting there with faces slapped by a wet fish, and arms folded. They were strictly Madness mutherfuckers.
After an interval full of eighties and nineties singalong anthems, it was time for Madness. A phone rang in the red call box on stage and Suggs appeared there and answered it before appearing from the call box onto the stage to let the audience shout the intro to One Step Beyond before curtains dropped to reveal the rest of the band. As the roadies tried desperately to pull the curtains off stage, they were hindered by Suggs blithely wandering around on top of them.
Nearly forty years on from playing “Complete Madness” to death, they played most of that and much more beyond, although no longer with Chas Smith. It was a storming set, featuring two songs I didn’t recognise – “Baby Burglar” and “If I Go Mad” – both good, and there was a good reason I didn’t recognise them, as they haven’t been released yet and they are being introduced on this tour. There were some good visuals on the screens behind the band during the set, the highlights being them playing Gene Kelly doing the well-known “Singing In The Rain” clip from the film whilst the band did “The Sun And The Rain;” and various clips from “The Ladykillers” as would be expected with the tour being called that.
Towards the end of the set, they played four songs that I would have thought prime candidates for any encore, so when they said they were finishing with “It Must Be Love,” I wasn’t expecting an encore. Nor was I expecting the woman sat on the row in front of me to get up and be swaying and waving her arms from side to side. For crying out loud you silly bint, this is Madness, not fucking Paul McCartney doing “Hey Jude.” When it was finished, they piled off stage, and quite a lot of people left. Only for a bagpiper to come on playing “When The Saints Goes Marching In,” before going into “Scotland The Brave,” during which all the band came back onto the stage from the telephone box and did a two-song encore.
It was amazing, but then it was over, and they left the stage for real this time, and it was time for us to head back out into the night. Two great bands in a single night, and a top way to start an extended holiday break.
The full Madness set was “One Step Beyond”, “Embarrassment”, “The Prince”, “NW5”, “My Girl”, “Take It Or Leave It”, “The Sun And The Rain”, “Baby Burglar”, “Wings Of A Dove”, “One Better Day”, “Lovestruck”, “If I Go Mad”, “Shut Up”, “Calm Down Mr Apples”, “Bed And Breakfast Man / Woolly Bully (medley)”, “House of Fun”, “Baggy Trousers”, “Our House”, “It Must Be Love”, and then for the encore “Madness” and “Night Boat To Cairo”.