It must be love

 Taken From .telegraph.co.uk 28/09/02

Tim Firth tells Dominic Cavendish why he leapt at the chance of writing a musical based on the hits of Madness

They were known affectionately as "the nutty boys", and between 1979 and 1986, when they officially split up, they charmed the nation with a sound that had its tongue in its cheek, a firm foothold on the streets of north London and an unusual warmth in its heart. Theirs was the unlikeliest of fashions to follow - a look situated somewhere between the circus clown, the dodgy chancer and the NF supporter - and yet follow it people did.

I doubt there was a child in England back then who couldn't muster a Madness mannerism. The manic dances, spasmodic head movements (a speciality of lead singer Suggs) and rictus grins were the stuff of playground and school disco, as were the long locomotive formations of body-pressed-against-body, their seven-in-a-row trademark.

Memories of those days will come flooding back from next week with the arrival in the West End of Our House, the "Madness musical". The songs are being reissued, as it were, in the theatrical format du jour, woven into "a London love story" set in Madness's sometime fashionable stomping ground of Camden.

Fan though I still am, I didn't so much cheer as weep when the news was first announced. Reunion gigs in Finsbury Park are one thing; turning one's oeuvre into a theme-park quite another. For we know what motives this springs from, and what model it follows, don't we?

No band on earth can have failed to notice the phenomenal success of the Abba vehicle Mamma Mia!, which has grossed more than £60 million in the UK since its 1999 premiere, and so far spawned five other productions worldwide. Or, for that matter, the defiant progress of the Queen tribute We Will Rock You, which continues to do a roaring trade despite Ben Elton's book being panned by the critics.

Theatre has plundered pop and rock back-catalogues in the past, but this was usually in the name of biodrama (think Buddy, the Buddy Holly long-runner). With Mamma Mia!, the conventional approach to devising musicals was turned on its head. Instead of composers crafting numbers from scratch, perhaps assisted by an old storyline, it was shown that, if you pick the right group, audiences will flock to hear what they already know; the new task lies instead in concocting a drama that renders the outbursts of song plausible.

You can't blame yesteryear's chart-toppers for wanting to jump on the bandwagon, or producers for trying to cash in on a trend that minimises the risks while raising the prospect of near-limitless rewards. But are Madness the right group for this kind of treatment? Don't devotees care too much, and non-fans care too little about them?

It's a sign of just how bright a spark he is that the man entrusted with the all-important job of writing the book for Our House manages to dispel my misgivings almost entirely. He even persuades me that what he has come up with may prove a better, more subtle proposition than Mamma Mia!, which crowbarred in hits with gleeful irony.

Part of a formidable production team that includes director Matthew Warchus (whose biggest success to date has been Art) and choreographer Peter Darling (Billy Elliot), Tim Firth got a call two years ago; only the name "Madness" was mentioned, but he knew immediately what was on the cards.

"My rule was that if there wasn't a musical in there, I'd walk away. I didn't want to do a cringe-making march-past of songs. I spent three weeks just listening to all the tracks, trying to see if there was something I could do. I decided there was."

He knew straight away that this would have to stand on its own two feet. "Madness were not a supergroup. They were a very British, very London band, remembered with great fondness by British people of a certain age, but they're not in the same league as Queen or Abba. They were just a group who had a very endearing spirit that made people love them."

With no musical-writing credits to his name, and hailing from the genteel Cheshire town of Frodsham, Firth, 37, can't have been the obvious choice to make Our House happen. His eligibility stemmed from his track record in writing funny populist drama.

A protege of Alan Ayckbourn's, he was encouraged to write for the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough while still at Cambridge studying English, where he was a contemporary and friend of Sam Mendes: "We were in a theatre group that was full of people who thought they had a common aim, but it became clear that Sam and I preferred to do things that had a much more populist ambition. The others wanted to write about homelessness and Aids. I chose to write about people playing table football in a northern pub."

One of Ayckbourn's commissions, Neville's Island (1992) - about a group of middle-aged businessmen who get shipwrecked in the Lake District during a team-building exercise - ended up in the West End and on TV, and Firth's career has cut across mediums ever since. Preston Front, a comedy series about Territorial Army cadets, won stacks of awards; a recent satire on the vanity of Cheshire folk, The Safari Party, transfers down to Hampstead Theatre next year. In the pipeline is a one-off BBC drama set on a cruise ship, starring Steve Coogan. A feature film, Calendar Girls, about the Rylstone Women's Institute, who famously posed three years ago for a suggestive charity calendar, is due out next summer, with an all-star cast including Julie Walters and Helen Mirren.

But it was Firth's boyhood enthusiasm for Madness and fascination with musicals rather than his burgeoning writing career that gave him the confidence to tackle the project. "I loved the band. My childhood was largely underscored by their music. I can remember from the earliest times kids doing the dances and I have a terrible feeling that I lost my virginity at a party during the opening chords to Nightboat to Cairo."

He indicates the streets outside the Soho cafe we're sitting in: "I remember coming up here to see Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita and thinking: 'I'd like to do that one day.' " And as a child, he says, he was aware that Madness songs had an "inherent theatricality. I remember listening to the single Our House and thinking, 'That's so out of kilter with everything that's being produced at the moment.' Those proud brass and string arrangements made it feel like it had been pulled off a stage. Lyrically, their songs were driven by narrative and character. Though they were witty, they were coming from the heart, not the head, which is the crux of writing for theatre. In a way, they were all like mini-musicals."

That's not to say they were a musical waiting to happen. Firth knew he couldn't treat his sources with kid gloves. "I initially thought, 'Wouldn't it be nice to hear, say, Driving in My Car as people know it, then flip it and hear it from another point of view, where the car is a Jaguar rather than a battered old Morris Minor?' There's so much duality in the songs - rise and fall, sun and rain, hopes running in parallel."

From this realisation grew the concept of a double-narrative, centred around a lad who commits a crime to impress the girl he loves and is faced with either giving himself up to the police or getting away with it. "The musical splits into two, following the ways his life would have gone if he'd done the right or the wrong thing.

"I wanted the songs to work hard. You hear all of them several times, as they're remembered, then as you've never heard them before: in counterpoint, in ballad form, you name it. My ambition for the show was for people who didn't know any of the songs to think they were all written for a musical."

Those who knew them best - the band - have backed his vision all the way, annd have contributed three new songs at his request to sit alongside such favourites as Baggy Trousers and It Must be Love.

Initially "star-struck", Firth recalls the moment when he found himself setting his heroes homework: "It was hilarious. I'd be getting lyrics from them, and saying, 'That's a strong first draft.' They'd go, 'A what draft?' No one asks a band for a second draft."

The best compliment he was given, he says, was when Suggs told him: "You realise this is a more accurate biography of the band than we've ever had, because that's all our childhood stories up there." If Our House is anything like as good as he's made it sound, Firth can expect to be paid in far more than compliments before the year is out.