Madness
Halifax Piece Hall
⭑⭑⭑⭑☆

HOLLIE COOK is the product of the fusion of English punk culture with Jamaican musical heritage, and not just metaphorically: her father is Sex Pistols’s drummer Paul Cook, and her mother, Culture Club backing singer Jeni Cook. Hollie makes light work of this heavyweight inheritance, as her sweet soulful voice drapes itself over her band’s heavy dub reggae riddims like rum sauce drizzled on a Jamaica ginger cake.

It’s a winning formula, as her sixth studio album, Shy Girl, attests, and her irresistible sound is matched by impressive songwriting, combining a well-honed pop sensibility with interesting and unexpected melodic phrasing.

Madness, of course, have long known that any half-decent pop song can be rendered electrifying when sung over a tight reggae underlay. Their current tour, celebrating 50 years since the band’s formation, is titled The Hit Parade, and it opens exactly as it says on the tin: no chit-chat, no long intros, just Suggs warning us, on a heavily flanged mic: “Don’t watch that, watch this!” by way of announcement to the band’s 1979 hit One Step Beyond.

It continues in the same vein, and we are reminded of just how many superb songs the band wrote, making them one of the two bands (the other being another English reggae band, UB40) who spent the most time in the UK singles charts in the 1980s, despite having split up halfway through the decade.

It’s a strange thing to be watching Madness in a town that just elected a Reform UK council in a landslide. Halifax’s voters delivered 34 seats to the party, more than quadruple their nearest rival. Yet the town will still pack out one of the biggest venues in Yorkshire, for two nights in a row, to see a band which, perhaps more than any other, represents the multicultural bounty produced by immigration to this island.

So it’s slightly disappointing to see no comment on any of this during the set. Madness are raking it in from the music brought here by Jamaicans; would it hurt to acknowledge that? It’s not about “cultural appropriation”; we are supposed to learn from each other, that’s not a problem. It’s about what the hip hop heads used to call “paying your dues”; granting respect and recognition to the shoulders on which you stand.

To be fair, Madness have always honoured their hero Prince Buster, described by Jerry Dammers, as the “all round coolest guy in Kingston, and therefore Jamaica, and therefore the world,” and who converted to Islam after meeting Muhammad Ali. Buster wrote the song after whom Madness were named, and was the subject of their first single The Prince, their performance of which tonight is accompanied by a montage of images of the man.

But would it kill the band to give a shout out to Jamaica, still devastated from Hurricane Melissa, perhaps even raise some funds for the reconstruction?

Seeing them tonight I am reminded of the 12th-14th-century English stonemasons who, as Diana Darke has explained, first learnt the techniques of their Arab colleagues (who effectively invented what we falsely call Romanesque, as well as Gothic, architecture) before cutting them out of the trade altogether.

The virtually all-white audience tonight love the music, and rightly so — these are great songs, and it is a great performance. But in the context, the whole thing feels kinda disturbing.

On tour in the UK until August 23. For tickets and venues see: madness.co.uk