Take It Or Leave It: the making of Madness

Many lifetimes ago, at the peak of their phenomenal chart run as one of Britain’s most beloved pop bands, Madness had the inspired notion to make a docudrama film recreating their rise to fame. Directed by Dave Robinson, the wily Dubliner who also ran the group’s legendary London-based label Stiff Records, Take It Or Leave It was the result. It tells a raw, rough and rowdy origin story – but oh, what fun we had.

Made on a tight budget, with a semi-improvised script and a healthy dash of social realism, Take It Or Leave It is a rare music biopic that avoids overblown melodrama in favour of knockabout humour, working-class camaraderie and artful-dodger swagger. It was not what the band’s youthful audience wanted to see in 1981, but, 45 years later, with a deluxe new 4K print coming to cinemas and DVD, the film stands up today both as a fascinating proto-Britpop document and a nostalgic love letter to a grungy, grimy, shabby north London long erased by gentrification.

Partly financed by the band themselves, from their first big royalty payments, Take It Or Leave It could have been Madness’s A Hard Day’s Night. Instead, the film presents these Camden Town nutty boys more like the Bash Street Kids than the Fab Four. “I wanted to show how a band could get together and take on the world,” Robinson explains. “And that is the same for the Beatles as it is for everybody else.” 

To prepare Madness for their big-screen debut, Robinson interviewed the seven members about their early exploits. He also screened multiple films for inspiration, including Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets. “We hired a little cinema, or Dave did, and talked about what films we loved,” recalls Madness singer Graham “Suggs” McPherson. “There was a film called Bronco Bullfrog, a low-key, black and white, British, social realism thing. And we watched Kes and Mean Streets. That’s where Mike got his hat from.”

Shooting a slender, sketchy script with a non-professional cast, Robinson made the astute decision to take the band back to the real pubs, venues and rehearsal rooms where key events had occurred. None of Madness are trained actors, but this approach wrung some convincing performances from them. The director singles out piano-playing band leader Mike “Barso” Barson and saxophonist Lee “Kix” Thompson for their “Oscar-like” levels of authenticity.

“Lee, especially,” Suggs agrees. “He comes across like Jack Nicholson, doesn’t he? He really could have been an actor. But I remember, even at the time, thinking that Mike did a great job, because he was very determined to play it like he was, which was quite strict.”

To keep production costs low, Robinson adopted the fast-paced, one-take, guerrilla approach that had served him well directing Madness promo videos. “It was all on the hoof,” Suggs recalls. “If you wanted a panning shot or a tracking shot, it was a geezer on a bicycle, holding the camera.” 

Another fact-based scene, in which Suggs is temporarily sacked from Madness for skipping rehearsals to go and see his beloved Chelsea play, was conjured up from nothing. “We couldn’t afford to go and film at Stamford Bridge, so it’s just me in a Chelsea scarf,” the singer laughs. “But that’s the charm of it as well. Same with our videos, when you compare them to Duran Duran or something. We did everything on a shoestring, but it was about imagination and spontaneity.”

This lo-fi method made financial sense but was also pragmatic, given that Robinson says working with Madness involved having to “sheepdog” a chaotic bunch of rowdy, easily distracted young musicians. “They’ve always had an attitude of doing whatever they’re doing and not really taking part in official business, you know?” he grins.

“Dave realised we had a very short attention span,” Suggs confirms. “So we’d just jump out of a van, do a scene, and then jump back in again. And that was the same as the videos. We’d just find a spot, do what we were doing, then fuck off.”

Cutting corners also had its downsides. During one tricky shot, Robinson broke his ankle after falling from a makeshift camera platform. “I spent the night in hospital, getting the leg sorted,” he recalls. “But we were back at work at seven o’clock the following morning.” Robinson directed the rest of the film from a wheelchair, his leg in a cast, which sounds very Sam Peckinpah. “Well, it’s the Stiff way, you know?”

One intriguing aspect of Take It Or Leave It is how it hints at a darker hinterland to Madness not seen in their zany pop videos. According to Suggs, the band were all “on a spectrum of petty criminality”, and grew up in “an environment of violence.” Indeed, some members have suggested music was their escape route from crime. “Lee was in prison for a while, and Mike,” Suggs nods. “A few of us ended up in various establishments of Her Majesty’s…”

Despite this dimension, Take It Or Leave It feels unusually wholesome for a rock biopic. There is no swearing, and scarcely a hint of sex or drugs or bad-boy behaviour. Robinson claims this is because the band are essentially well-mannered boys, more cheeky than rude. “It’s an odd thing that they all came pretty much from one-parent families,” he says. “Their mothers obviously had a big effect on them. I swear a lot more than the band do.”

Suggs confirms Madness elected not to overplay their artful dodger side into something fake for the cameras. “We were the lawless brats from the council flats,” he shrugs, quoting his lyrical hero Ian Dury. “We were really quite wild, and not the nicest people you ever bump into. So we didn’t need to prove that, you know? That was just how we were.”

In addition, by 1981, Madness had amassed a large pre-teen fanbase, so the film could not be too adult. “We thought we were cool, like The Clash or something,” Suggs laughs. “But suddenly we were getting really young kids, especially after the Baggy Trousers thing. I wanted to be cool, but we just had this demographic of kids, so there was a feeling that you didn’t want to be too rude or outrageous. But in general, we weren’t really like that as people. We weren’t out to shock.”

Watching Take It Or Leave It today, part of its bittersweet charm lies in its throwback images of a grubby, gritty, low-rent Camden, before the district became a buzzy tourist hub and indie heartland. “There were squats all around Camden,” Suggs says. “We lived in a squat for about eight months. I remember Lee Thompson, who was the expert, used to get the gas meter to go backwards. They would come around every month and we’d get this enormous rebate.”

Although Suggs misses that Dirty Old Town sometimes, he is wary not to overly romanticise it. “You’ve got to be careful of veering into the grumpy old man thing,” he nods. “My daughters grew up in Camden and they say, ‘Dad, for fuck’s sake, you’re talking about a time when you couldn’t even get a fucking coffee!’ Girls weren’t allowed to go to pubs on their own. I don’t remember even seeing a girl in Camden Town until about 1983…”

The saving grace for Madness, Suggs argues, was Camden’s large number of “properly Irish pubs that had function rooms. So you could go around and knock on the door, and if they didn’t have a band on that night, you could get a gig. That’s exactly what happened to us, at the Dublin Castle.”

Released in cinemas in October 1981, Take It Or Leave It earned some warm reviews but flopped commercially. Which is strange, because Madness were one of Britain’s biggest bands at the time, riding high after a three-year run of Top Five hit singles and platinum-selling albums. 

“Yeah, it’s a mystery to me too,” Suggs nods. “But Stiff Records didn’t have the money that EMI might have had when the Beatles were making their film, in terms of publicising it.” Robinson puts it more bluntly. “The distributor that was going to do it pretty much went broke,” he explains. “So it got a few viewings and that was enough. It went to video very quickly.”

However, the film did earn Madness some off-beat acting offers. Suggs recalls Richard Curtis and Ben Elton casting the band in a short comedy pilot for BBC2. “The idea was that Margaret Thatcher had been found out to be an alien and sent back to Mars; there was a snap election, and we were the Parliament,” the singer laughs.

Made in 1984, the pilot was not picked up. Suggs now feels this was for the best, as it could have pushed the band’s image as a Monkees-style cartoon project to breaking point. A couple of years later, he also landed a role in Julien Temple’s sprawling Soho musical Absolute Beginners, but broke his toe during dance rehearsals. His acting career was over before it even began.

All the same, with 45 years of hindsight, Suggs is delighted that Take It Or Leave It is finally getting a second chance, a “dusty old VHS” now rightly resurrected as a lost classic. “It’s running in something like 150 cinemas all over the country,” the singer beams. “It’s a fantastic thing. And I’m very proud of the stuff we touched on. We tried our best to debunk the whole notion of the pomposity of being a pop star.”

Madness: Take It Or Leave It (4K restoration) is in cinemas from 1 October, on Blu-ray/DVD on 20 October and on BFI Player in December.