Hello and welcome to a special issue of the “Madpost”. This month see’s the first birthday of the “Madness Mailing List”.

Things sure have changed since those early days 12 months ago. It seems only about 2 minutes ago when I was trying to get enough support from Madness fans to help me create a Madness newsgroup on the net.

Although I had a fair amount of support (about 25 people) it wasn’t deemed viable to set up a newsgroup just for Madness fans. So, the options left to me were to stay in the alt.music.ska newsgroup and read the articles in there, with only about 2 Madness articles a week if that. Things did not look good for Madness fans.

A few days passed, and an e-mail arrived from a chap in Canada who had seen me attempt to set up a newsgroup and had watched me get refused, and he said that if I would like, he would be willing to set up a Madness mailing list on his machine but I would be the moderator.

Naturally, I jumped at the chance, and the mailing list you all know of today was formed.

Initially postings were few and far between, and to stimulate chat Richard (song of the week) and myself would post ANYTHING relating to Madness to try and get some sort of threads going. I spent a bit of time contacting the creators of a few Madness pages (they were hard to find then as they were few and far between) and asked if I could advertise the mailing list on their pages. Naturally, as Madness fans they were only too helpful and within no time at all the mailing list was a nice bustling place.

I decided that the mailing list should have some sort of monthly posting from me to fill in any new mailing list members in about the month that has just passed, as well as reminding the rest of the mailing list of the topics and/or important notices of the month. In the early months of the mailing list, the Madpost was more of a general info text file containing various topics from “how the band started”, to “Madness discography and price list”. This became far too big to post so the Madpost became how it is today – short, sharp and to the point.

At the time of writing there are just over 100 people subscribed to the list. I do apologise that I can’t give you any accurate information to how many people are subscribed because the numbers are constantly going up and down with new people subscribing, and others unsubscribing.

Right, I’ll leave you now to read up on what’s been happening this month, and I should warn you that the university students will be re-appearing on the mailing list towards the end of this month, so prepare yourselves for a possible avalanche in postings.

Here’s to another 12 months!!

With rumour upon rumour of the band going into the recording studio to produce some new material for possible releasing, the latest has been sent from Jordan Leigh (david.leigh@pop3.hiway.co.uk) who saw this little snippet on “The Chart Show”: Exclusive! The Nutty Boys are in the studio at the mo putting the finishing touches to their first NEW SONGS for almost a decade.

Suggs told us, When we reunited last time we just didn’t come up with the songs that we thought would stand against our old stuff.

Below is part of an e-mail sent from Mark Bryant (MBRYANT@vbs.bt.co.uk), a few weeks back. For those of you who missed it first time round, here it is again…

Some other news for you, I recently had a side conversation with Rob (who can vouch that this ain’t bullshit) whereby I was telling him about a guy who works in a 2nd hand record shop in Camden and knows Bedders.

Well I gave him my copy of Madstock to see if he could get Bedders to sign it as I’d previously got it signed the day it came out at Tower Records in London by all the band except Bedders and Barso who weren’t there.

Along with my album I wrote down two questions for this guy Bill to ask Bedders and amazingly I got his signature and his written replies to my questions. The questions and answers are as follows:-

If Madness go into the studio to record new material, will you play on it?

Bedders :- …….maybe

If Madness tour to promote the new material, will you play with them?

Bedders :- ………..mais non?

I’ve written his replies exactly as he responded punctuation ‘n all, so take it or leave it…. the lad may be back, he may not. Let’s hope he is… the seven original nutty boys back on disc, now that would be something.

No doubt you won’t have failed to notice the amount of requests I have received regarding my 2 Madness video tapes full of various Madness footage?

I have received requests from the USA, Australia and the UK for copies of these tapes and I’ll be only to happy to arrange something given due time.

At present though, the American subscribers have priority with these tapes as it was them that asked for them in the first place. I am trying to arrange something with Matt Hoerman (silver@cjnetworks.com) whereby I send him the PAL versions of the video’s and then he converts them to NTSC for himself and any other interested parties in the USA.

Matt needs to know what sort of demand there is going to be for these videos, so if you could E-mail him with your details as soon as possible, he’ll know what to prepare himself for.

I’m going to be away from the list from the 6th September until 11th, so I won’t be sending the video’s to the USA till after that date.

Many thanks,

Well, by next month we should have nearly all the old subscribers back who used to receive their mailing list articles from their UK uni accounts, and no doubt, a whole host of new subscribers will be flooding onto the list just as soon as they work out how to use the .net.