So Friday I was down the Dome – my goodness what a G-dforsaken place that is. It must be built on an old plague burial pit or something, it just feels so dead there, even the air is dead. Cold and soulless.
Inside the Dome, it feels like any other identikit plastic retail and leisure destination environment experience, save that you have to go through airport style bag and body scanners, before being confronted by masked ranks of merchandise stalls trying to sell you fez’s. At first I thought it was a bizarre tie in for the King Tut exhibition, but it soon became apparent that Madness were playing that night, and attendees were obliged to buy either a fez or a cheap felt imitation Blues Brother’s style hat in black. It must have been obligatory because everyone we saw gathering in the malls before the gig had purchased one. But more of those sad fuckers shortly.
I love Múm. I love my mum. But I don’t care much for mummies. For this reason I was somewhat reluctant to go the Tut exhibition, or Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs to give it its full title. But Big Dave was in town and wanted to go, and in that spirit of saying yes to everything I had agreed to come, even agreed to get the audioguide thingy. The words “My name is Omar Shariff” were whispered softly in my ear, in the way that only an old man with a moustache can, and I promptly fell off the escalators. Apart from Omar, there were no mummies, not even the famous death mask. Thankfully.
I enjoyed it, then got a bit bored. As with the First Emperor, the objects were amazing, the effort, the hubris, the Ozymandias effect, all powerful, that same ambiguity that these things were done because of a belief in a living god set to rule the afterlife, and had succeeded, ironically, in creating some kind of immortality, had willed immortality into existence.
Then back out to face the behatted hordes of Madness fans. I’ve commented before about the curse of my generation, namely that at every house party I will now ever go to, there will always be a bloke, probably with no hair, loudly getting drunk on cider, waiting for his moment, his moment being the playing of a Madness song. He will then spring into life, claim his rightful place on the dancefloor (ie area of carpet cleared of furniture) and do the Nutty Boys Dance. This is the only exercise he will ever get. Each year it gets more difficult for him to raise his legs to the requisite height. Each year his heart and lungs hurt more. Each year he aches more and worse on the morning after. But he can never let us down by not doing the dance. Never. He is destined to die doing it. Quite literally.
And here they all were, like cybermen out of Doctor Who when they gather for the final battle, the hordes of the Nutty Boys, in their silly hats. I’ve nothing against Madness per se, they entertained me in my youth when I didn’t know any better and some of their songs were actually all right. But it is their moronic fan base that I object to. These can only be people who hate music. It’s a Pavlov’s dogs thing - hear music - dance badly - behave like twat.
Compare all this with the Adelaide Pub in lovely North London the previous evening and the live debut of Grudgemonkey. It was through the Grudgemonkey myspace page that I finally go back in touch with Ollie P. Probably the highlights of my university days were listening to records with Ollie P. 17 odd years later and Grudgemonkey were channelling all this stuff into one of the most powerful and passionate sets of the year. I could taste electric period Miles Davis, “Is It In” period Eddie Harris, Mizzell Brothers, various Hammond Organ grinders in this very tasty soup. No Acid Jazz light was this, but heavy and funky, honest and authentic, even aggressive and muscular. I can see big things for them in 2008.
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