Suggs

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 19 May 2002

⏱️ 34 minutes

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Summary

Suggs made his name as front man of 80s pop phenomenon Madness and impressed a whole generation with his unique style of singing, silly dancing and fondness for making the mundane the subject of his songs, such as Baggy Trousers, inspired by memories of school. Although his cockney accent is part of his singing style, he was actually born in Hastings and moved to London as a child. His singer mother was perhaps a subconscious inspiration, but Suggs didn't have any particular ambitions in his teens. He dropped out of school and did what a lot of teenage boys do - formed a band with his friends. Madness, a seven-piece gang of friends, became a huge success. Their first single 'The Prince' went to number 16 in 1979 and three years later they had a number one with House of Fun. In seven years they had 20 singles in the top twenty UK chart and travelled the world playing to large audiences. Now Madness occasionally meet up and play their hits list, and Suggs has launched a successful solo career and is also working in TV, hosting Night Fever on Channel 5 and captaining a team on BBC1's A Question of Pop. [Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs] Favourite track: Is That All There Is? by Peggy Lee Book: A concise book of Italian verbs Luxury: A nucleus of bees

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Kirstie Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive for rights reasons
0:06.0	We've had to shorten the music. The program was originally broadcast in
0:10.6	2002 and the presenter was Sue Lolley
0:13.2	My cast away this week is a pop idol born just over 40 years ago. He was brought up in fairly desperate
0:35.0	circumstances by his mother, a jazz singer, turned barmaid. He spent some years of his childhood in the
0:40.9	open spaces of Wales looked after by an aunt. Back in North London at the end of the 70s he formed a
0:46.4	band with six other like-minded lads. They called themselves Madness and became one of the most
0:51.7	successful groups of their time with a string of hits including House of Fun, Baggy Traarsers and
0:56.6	our house among them. With his pork pie hat, mod suit and dock marting boots he looked like someone
1:02.7	having a lot of fun which he was and has continued to have since the group disbanded as a solo singer
1:08.4	and a television presenter. Pop music he says is one of the great arts. Three minutes of noise holds
1:14.4	your whole life. The first person you met, the first girlfriend you had, the first garden shed,
1:19.7	you blew up. He was born Graham McPherson but we know him as Sugs. Did you blow up any garden shed?
1:27.9	No but I, no man who did. Tell me about Sugs first of all, where does this name come from?
1:33.4	Why did you dump Graham McPherson? There are a lot of people at my school who were writing
1:38.0	their names on the walls of the toilet and similar surfaces, not that I ever did. But people are
1:43.9	shooting... Of course not of course not. And I just felt like I needed a pseudonym of some sort
1:51.3	and an anonymous one and there was an encyclopedia at jazz musicians at my friends house and I literally
1:56.3	stuck a pin in one of the pages and there was a guy called Peter Sugs something or other and I just
2:01.6	took the pseudonym Sugs and it's about the strange process. I can't remember exactly now. This is
2:05.3	not about 14 but how I managed to get other people to stop calling me Graham and calling me Sugs
2:11.4	was a feat. But anyway, it looked good as a signature in pink on the lavatory wall.
	...

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