'Welcome to the house of fun, da-da-da-de-de." "Our house, in the middle of our street ..." "It must be love, love, love ... " In our long lost youth, some of us -- most of us, even -- sang along to these warm slices of family life, courtesy of North London's high priests of whimsical brilliance, Madness.

Some of us -- that's you and me -- probably even did the actions from their almost-as-famous videos, dancing around in off-kilter ska choreography as white-socked school boys in Baggy Trousers. None of us, to the best of my knowledge, quite got to fly through the air on a wire, playing the saxophone, as Lee Thompson did in the epochal video for Baggy Trousers, with lead singer Suggs telling the listener that: "All the small ones tell tall tales/Walking home and squashing snails."

But beyond the almost Vaudevillian light-heartedness of Madness -- and their cheeky-chappy Cockney demeanour -- was some compelling trenchant analysis of English culture and its mores.

Embarrassment, for instance, was about having a mixed-race kid in a white, working class community and what the relatives thought of such an occurrence. "I don't know if anyone even noticed what it was about," Suggs said recently of the song that was written by Lee Thompson, and concerned the events following the news that his teenage sister was carrying a black man's child. The lyrics were some of the band's -- and Thompson's -- best: Embarrassment begins, famously, with a letter being opened, and the recipient, who is told: "You're not to come and see us no more. Keep away from our door." The letter writer then asks: "What on earth did you do that for?" We then learn that a relative of the woman who had the child is equally unfeeling. She says she doesn't want to know the mother or the child. And more importantly: "What will the neighbours think?"

Another relative meanwhile, says the mother and child are a disgrace to the human race. "How can you show your face?" sings Suggs poignantly, "when you're a disgrace to the human race?"

Graham McPherson (aka Suggs) had his own torments in childhood to deal with. His early years were spent with Eddy, his mother, (a pub singer of sorts) as they lived a lonely existence in various bedsits or rooms in other people's houses in London. Eddy worked as a barmaid in famous Soho boozers like the French House and The Colony Room, where she and her young son got to meet bohemian legends such as Francis Bacon, George Melly and Jeffrey Bernard. Suggs remembers having brandy fumes breathed into his face in the afternoons while not yet 10.

He also recalls Eddy sending him off on what he thought was a holiday to his Auntie Diana's in Wales. He stayed there for three years. When he was 11, he went back to his mum and the bedsit in London. On his first day in Quintin Kynaston school on the Finchley Road, one of the rougher lads pushed his dinner over Suggs' head (it was something to do with his newly acquired Welsh accent).

He later immortalised the experience in the first song he ever wrote, Baggy Trousers, about those times in school. (Many years later the song was used in the film version of Alan Bennett's History Boys.)

"Naughty boys in nasty schools," Suggs sang.

Far more painful than any of the beatings he received in the Finchley Road school was that his father left him when he was three.

Once, he heard he was in Birmingham or somewhere like that. He was curious when he was younger but he stopped being curious after so many years. He only recently discovered that his name was William and that he was a heroin addict. When asked in 1997 by the London Indy's redoubtable Deborah Ross if he was ever tempted to track his father down, Suggs shrugged: "It should be up to him to find me, shouldn't it?" he said. Pressed by Ross, if he did, would Suggs see him, he replied: "Yeah. I expect so. Although you never know. It happened to John Lennon, didn't it, and he told his father to piss off."

So Suggs knew a thing or two about a thing or two when, in late 1977, he joined The North London Invaders, who then became Madness. Their self-described 'nutty sound' on songs like One Step Beyond and Night Boat To Cairo was an infectious fusion of Jamaican influences with white London rock like The Kinks, Ian Dury and the Small Faces. For the next three decades, through various ups and downs and break-ups and reunions, Madness gave us some of the best singles of all time -- they were chroniclers of London like Dickens. Or at least a certain part of the English capital. As the good old Daily Telegraph once noted, Madness's "music is about the community experience of living in Camden Town, North London". And as with all human life, that music has changed with age.

"We used to write songs about burgeoning relationships; now we write about them disintegrating," Suggs said recently of Madness's new album The Liberty Of Norton Folgate.

Madness play the 02 Arena, Dublin, on December 28. Tickets from €44.20 on sale now from Ticketmaster nationwide. Madness also play the Odyssey Arena in Belfast on December 29

Sunday Independent