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Fact #160169

When:

Short story:

Madness begin making a film, Take It Or Leave It, in Islington, London, England, UK, Europe.

Full article:

THE STORY OF TAKE IT OR LEAVE IT – BY JOHNNY BLACK

“We just wanted to make a rock and roll film like it had never been done before,” explained Madness drummer Daniel ‘Woody’ Woodgate, “to show the reality, that it’s not all so wonderful …”

So it must have seemed to them that art was reflecting life when the first three days of shooting for their movie, Take It Or Leave It, came back from the processing house “looking like snow with black and white dots dancing around in it.”

Dave Robinson, supremo of Stiff Records, still sounds a little dismayed as he thinks back on it. “I’ve always been fascinated by the early days of bands, what it is that makes them get together, what makes them tick,” he says, “and that’s what we were trying to get across in the film.”

The movie’s low, low budget of £400,000 had been scraped together by the simple expedient of Stiff putting up one half while the other 50% was contributed by the members of Madness and their management.

Robinson had floated the idea to the band in early 1981 and, meeting with some enthusiasm, he pressed ahead by interviewing them all to see if he could glean amusing tales of their early days which might make for amusing incidents in the film. “With a certain amount of exaggeration for comic effect,” notes guitarist Chris Foreman. “For example, the scene where Lee rips the roof off a truck by driving it under a low bridge, wasn’t anything like as dramatic as that in reality.”

To decide on a mood for the film, the band hired a small cinema and viewed a few seminal movies, including The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner and Mean Streets. “Mike Barson went out and bought a hat like De Niro’s in Mean Streets,” recalls Foreman, “and wore it through our movie.”

With Robinson’s script completed, shooting began in March. “For locations, we went back to the original places we’d played in the beginning,” Foreman says, “like The Dublin Castle in Camden, although we sometimes made little changes, like making the stage bigger.”

To keep costs down, filming was done on the Super 16mm format, then blown up to 35mm for cinema release, by a Swedish lab. Robinson, having previously directed several Madness videos, took on the director’s mantle, and immediately found that shooting on film was dramatically different from shooting video. “First of all, the sound had to be recorded separately from the images,” he says. “So we needed a separate sound crew and, with the way the film industry works, they had to be union men. On a video shoot there was just a handful of us but with the union getting involved in the film we had all these blokes standing around stuffing their faces with bacon sarnies at my expense. Half the time I couldn’t even work out what they were doing on the film.”

“Dave had a lot on his plate,” points out Mike Barson, “so it was pretty much a 'One take! Cut! Wrap!' sort of thing. We weren't actors and there was no time to spend getting it right.”

Despite the continual inability of one particular soundman to get his battery-powered gear up to speed in time for the start of filming, the first three days filming went well. “We were feeling really pleased with ourselves,” remembers Robinson. “We were actually ahead of schedule, and then the film came back from the processing house, totally ruined by some idiot who’d overheated it in the developing bath.”

Anxieties now began to set in, because the band and Robinson all had other commitments lined up immediately after the planned end of filming. “We had to work fast,” recalls Robinson, “because Madness all have short attention spans, and a lot of the humour was in catching them the first time, when they’d done something spontaneously funny. If you missed it, it was never the same trying to re-create it.”

With pressure mounting as the days went by, Robinson took a tumble off a camera dolly and broke his ankle, leaving him on crutches for the next four days of filming.

Even so, the film was brought in more or less on time and within the miniscule budget. But had it captured that grainy reality they’d been striving for? “It was actually more like people’s image of what we were like than what we were really like,” says Foreman. “Some of that is down to problems like having to have actors instead of our real parents, because of the union rules. And the scene where we’re playing in the garden – we were never as good as that in those days. It should have been more violent, more swearing – the bit where we get drunk in Dingwalls and then run through Highbury tube station creating mayhem, that was true to life, because we actually did get drunk that night. That’s the closest to what we were really like.”
(Source : feature by Johnny Black)