REVIEW: Suggs, My Life Story, Bournemouth Pavilion

IF you had to pick someone for company on a desert island, Graham McPherson aka Suggs, frontman from iconic group Madness, would have to be high up the list.

Very few people can command an audience for two hours while making it feel like ten minutes, with storytelling, and a bit of music, all of it utterly top class.

Starting both halves with “So there I am….” and interlacing stories from his 50th birthday, back to school days, (recited to “Baggy Trousers” accompaniment), and everywhere in between, Suggs held the audience’s full attention throughout.

Accompanied by Deano on piano and guitar, we were treated to solo renditions of See You Later Alligator, interspersed with Chelsea football chants and tales of his days at the Shed end, Cecilia – with a very funny anecdote about Chris Eubank struggling to pronounce his and the song’s name on Top of the Pops, and the wonderful “Shut Up”, after a hilarious story about nicking LPs from friends’ houses being the equivalent of modern day music downloading.

It is impossible to sum up just how fun and entertaining this evening was, and what a huge variety of tales we heard, yet it was not all about humour, as the touching story interlacing the evening was about his discovery that his dad was a heroin addict, finding out via Wikipedia that he had died, and his quest after this to find out what had happened to him.

Rounding off the evening with It Must Be Love, Suggs reminded us “what’s important is the people who are around you right now” and how life with his bandmates however “dysfunctional, chaotic and argumentative”, provided an incredible adventure with a loyal and loving surrogate family.

A well deserved standing ovation with the audience laughing and talking on exit about the evening was proof of what a fantastic show Suggs had pulled off. Not bad for a London lad whose Headmaster wrote in his school report “he exudes a lazy attitude and is extremely slow.”

Stephanie Hall