Gig review: Madness at The Piece Hall, Halifax

“Ladies and gentleman, boys and girls, and you sunshine!” Graham McPherson – but known to all and sundry as Suggs, coiffeured beneath perpetual sunglasses – cries, a wagged finger jutted out towards a crowd awash in a sea of crimson-hued fezzes.

Having weathered a mid-June downpour the evening before, the Madness frontman is milking this sky-blue palate above for every drop he can. “Now this is more like summer!”

Not many of the Camden Town sextet’s particular vintage can still book biannual jaunts across the nation’s enormo-domes and open-air concourses with such Swiss precision and unwavering devotion.

An utter command of the summer-winter tour circuit for the past twenty-odd years has ensured national treasure status of a sort; the only question that lingers over their two-night stop at The Piece Hall is how the hell they haven’t played Halifax more often through the decades.

Madness’s recipe for skank-happy success on-stage remains without serious deviation, though few would suggest they need to change the habits of a lifetime.

Brassy bursts of two-tone tunes, honking new-wave hooks and the slightest creep of calypso rhythms reliably tumble from hefty speaker-stacks; six generations of punters holler along to Lee Thompson’s saxophone-shriek on One Step Beyond with lung-busting gusto; couples old and young sway forth to the kitchen-sink reggae shuffle of My Girl, its exuberantly deft steps swirled around the clothworker courtyard.

There is a hero’s welcome too for the returning Chris Foreman, the guitarist back in the fold after a battle with myeloma. His unfussy fretwork, flavoursome and fragrant, has long been the secret sauce behind plenty of the band’s top hits, as foundational as the rhythm section is to the limber fairground joys that power House of Fun and the fizzed pogo-bounce of Baggy Trousers.

“News of his demise has been greatly exaggerated!” Suggs shouts, as Madness lock down a home-run straight of chrome-topper classics; Our House, It Must Be Love – complete with a lovely tribute to the late David Hockney – and Night Boat to Cairo.

The nutty boys won’t go quietly.