Music / bristol music
Fire, nudity and a futon shop in Clifton – The madnomad story
“Time is a funny thing. Time is a very peculiar item” – 35 Summers
Few Bristol bands are remembered more vividly than madnomad. Pig masks, burning keyboards, full frontal nudity – their shows were equal parts rock and roll theatre and church for lost souls.
Avoiding simple definition, the band became one of the city’s biggest draws, then split up after one album just as everyone decided they were going to be huge.
is needed now More than ever
That was 22 years ago. And now they’re back, sort of, as their previously CD-only album tamper-evident is finally released on vinyl.
Band leader Rob had previously played bass in an indie band who supported Manic Street Preachers on tour. After that he lived in London for a bit and then found himself in Bristol, where he discovered sampling: “All that time – y’know when you’re a fucking bass player – everyone has ideas and if they’re left to fester for long enough, sometimes they can become too overpowering.
“Once I got a computer, and a hooky program from the bloke at Digital Village…all these ideas just came splurging out.”
Ostensibly working as a bed salesman, Rob’s futon shop in Clifton became madnomad’s unlikely base of operations. It was here that Rob created debut EP Solvent:Insolvent, which included early versions of fan favourites like 35 Summers and Gun of Sod.
Samples came from all over the place: “Poetry, film dialogue, multitudes of sins, snatches of show tunes, subliminal desire, scripture and pornography, rants and confessionals, the arcane and the everyday”.
Original drummer Gabriel was someone who just happened to live above the shop. “I think we got a drummer first,” says Rob, “and then the tap dancer. The tap dancer was someone who came into the shop to buy a futon.”
Early gigs featured a cardboard wielding duo called Kochalka Puppet Theatre: “It somehow turned into this almost freeform collective travelling entertainment revue… We lost the tap dancer somewhere near Sheffield.”
A keyboard solo at an early madnomad gig
The band started to fill out with loanees from Bristol bands. Bassist Stu was the main man in Ivory Springer, while guitarists Ali and Matt played in Actual Size and Shelbyville respectively. Ali remembers Rob as “a realist…very grateful to the rest of us for dedicating our time.
“Live [he] was a different kettle of fish though…totally unhinged, endlessly entertaining and with an almost messianic ability to awe or disgust an audience.”
Having a core membership tightened up the music but performances were anything but predictable.
Stu remembers, “one of the earliest Choke gigs at Le Chateau on Park Street. Hustler, Springer and madnomad. Packed to the rafters, condensation dropping off the ceiling and a naked, pig-masked Rob charging through the crowd covered in chopped tomatoes.”
Ali recalls “a particularly flammable performance in Sheffield. I believe Rob spent the aftershow party with his arms in an ice bucket attempting to mitigate third degree burns.”
The band’s show at Hengrove Park made the front page of the Evening Post’s entertainment supplement
But these were underground shows in small venues, attended mostly by musicians and their friends. The biggest stage for local bands at the time was the Bristol Community Festival, which regularly drew crowds of 100k or more.
In July 2001 it was held for the first and only time at Hengrove Park. Matt remembers this show as “the one we played best…the reaction (and press) felt like we’d made a statement.”
The show ended with an on-stage brawl between six pig-masked men in business suits, who refused to leave the stage until the audience stopped cheering. Suddenly a lot of people who didn’t usually pay attention to local bands knew all about madnomad.
madnomad shared top billing with the Strokes in Venue magazine’s annual awards
The Hengrove show also featured notable performances from guest vocalists, including Chikinki singer Rupert Browne. “I met Rob in the futon shop,” says Ru, perhaps inevitably. “I was walking out to have lunch down this nice little road in Clifton. I don’t think I knew he was madnomad at the time. But we got chatting about music and every lunchtime I’d pop in and have a chat with him. And then he said ‘do you want to sing something onto this track I’ve just written?'”
The resulting collaboration became the album’s wistful title track, while a later co-write, It Is This, was a hard rocking highlight of many live sets.
Another guest at Hengrove was German singer Annette Becker, then of Big Joan, and now Shoun Shoun: “Rob asked me one day if I’d like to The Drunkard’s Song, as the lyrics are by German poet Rainer Maria Rilke.
“Rob would have that ability to push you to the very edge of your performance spectrum. Or maybe it was me wanting to not disappoint and pushing myself like I had never done before.”
Legend has it that Annette achieved the breathy, disorientated vocal by running up and down a flight of stairs until she was exhausted.
Building to a crescendo from Matt’s beautiful guitar riff, it was famously intense live: “I think the first time that we did it,” remembers Rob, “she ended up down on the ground fucking screaming. And I’m like, yeah that’ll do. She makes it her own. And I remember people being like ‘fucking hell’, ‘fucking go on, Annette’.”
The material having come together in such piecemeal fashion, a skilled sound engineer was required to pull it together. Enter Mat Sampson of Bink Bonk Studios. “I had no idea about compression or EQ at the time”, says Rob. “It was just loads of beats on top of one another. But Matt does know his stuff. He said “you’re filling every frequency. There’s no room for anything”. And I’m like “yeah, and you’re saying that like it’s a bad thing?” But ultimately, y’know, it was a bad thing.”
Sometimes things got as silly in the studio as they did on stage, particularly during the recording of Let’s Kill The Pig: “For a start he’d set up this really posh mic and I’d got this CB radio that I’d bought from the car boot for a fiver and I said “can I use this?”.
“He said “alright, well just make yourself comfortable”, so I did. And then he came in to alter the mic and I’m standing there bollock naked. And he just sort of went ‘oh…excuse me.'”
Did that help with the performance? “I guess so. Well, it didn’t hinder it, did it?” Bristol24/7 contacted Mat for comment and received the following short statement: “Mr Sampson is still too traumatised by the experience to comment on the news of the vinyl release.”
Traumatic or not, the album is a remarkable work of art – wilfully eclectic yet thematically cohesive. Rob says it was “conceived with the idea that the listener is hovering over a tower-block, voyeuristically tuning in to random apartments, somehow eavesdropping on the internal monologues of the inhabitants…None of the characters are interconnected…but all are united by the modern malaise.”
When tamper-evident was released in 2003 the band were at the very peak of their powers, and their biggest ever show followed in July.
“The biggest crowd I’ve ever sung to was when we were on before Robert Plant at Ashton Court”, Ru remembers. “That was an enormous crowd.”
The band were in imperious form and Annette in particular gave the performance of her life: “My mind went blank. I was actually terrified and started to panic. I couldn’t remember the starting words to the song.
“The opening chords rang out and suddenly everything fell into place. At the end of the poem I screamed my heart out with all the despair I could muster “MAYBE TONIGHT” and broke down on stage. Some people thought it was for real I later found out, were genuinely worried, and a friend in the audience even had to cry.”
But Rob was already beginning to feel the project had run its course: “All of the eggs were properly in the basket. We put everything into the album and left absolutely nothing on or under the table.”
There was talk of tours, interest from bigger labels, industry strategy and so forth but he wasn’t feeling it at all. “We’d all read The Problem With Music hadn’t we? And I wasn’t that bothered about having a career or whatever.”
madnomad and son, then, and (main image) now.
After what Rob has described as “an out of body experience” at Beautiful Days festival in Devon, he decided to call it a day.
“We’d just played a festival which was a bit grim,” says Matt, “we had a late night campfire chat and he said that was it. I’d have probably tried to change his mind if I hadn’t been so hammered…”
And now tamper-evident is back, remastered and presented on glorious ‘salami / chorizo red’ vinyl, and it looks and sounds better than ever.
“It’s easier to separate the album from the rose-tinted nostalgia now,” says Stu. “It’s still the amazing carnivalesque Rubik’s Cube it ever was. A puzzling kaleidoscope of dreams, jokes and documentary with thumping good tunes to boot.”
“One of the project’s strengths”, says Rob, “is that it never, even briefly, flirted with practicality or common sense. No idea or compulsion was off limits, and everything was fair game and up for grabs.
“And it all happened in a period which preceded our current age’s preoccupation with obsessively and endlessly documenting and filming every blip, food-choice, thought-fart and arbitrary action in the guise of ‘content’.
“Which means that, as a result, there’s a lack of available direct evidence about the project and band that makes you question if any of it actually really happened.”
The vinyl reissue of tamper-evident is released on Sugar Shack Arkive on May 2 and available to pre-order now at sugarshackrecords.bandcamp.com/album/tamper-evident
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