This is another show that’s been great fun to play, and actually not that complicated, particularly if, like me, you grew up in the 80s with all these classic Madness songs soaking into your psyche! I’m playing it in Maidenhead, UK, with Slough, Windsor & Maidenhead Theatre Company (SWMTC), and we’ve got the two final shows of the run starting in a couple of hours time…
Guitar-wise, it’s mostly pretty simple, with 80% of the show on a reggae/ska clean sound (maybe slightly breaking up). I’ve ended up using the Les Paul Junior model on my Variax (or sometimes the Tele, for a bit more bite) with a bit of tremolo or slap-back delay from time to time. The rest is steel-string acoustic arpeggios…
I really should write a full post about this show, but that will have to wait for another day. But, the main thing to note is that there is a huge mistake in the guitar pad for #17b (“NW5 reprise”) where the first page has been copied from the previous “NW5” in Db, whereas the rest of the band plays the reprise down a semitone in C. Once you get into the next section (over the page) the pad is back in the same key as the rest of the band… It took me one or two runs to work out what was wrong…
So, two more performances tonight, finishing with a wonderfully high-energy dance routine to Baggy Trousers: how they manage that at the end of a 2 hour performance always amazes me – well done guys!