‘Being in Madness kept some of them out of jail’: how the baggy-trousered nutty boys made a guerrilla cinema classic — SkimNews
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- Madness each contributed £20,000 alongside manager John "Kelloggs" Kalinowski, with Stiff Records boss Dave Robinson covering the rest, to bankroll the 1981 semi-fictional origin film Take It or Leave It
- Robinson fired the entire union crew on the first day after they arrived "eating bacon sandwiches," then shot the movie guerrilla-style using trolleys, bicycles, and a cameraman hanging off a stepladder for overhead shots
- The film's realism was literal: Mike Barson and friend Si Birdsall had genuinely served three weeks at Wormwood Scrubs for smashing lightbulbs with transport police — a scene depicted in the film as fantasy
- Robinson told the Guardian "being in Madness kept some of these lads out of jail," citing Lee Thompson — whose father had been in prison multiple times — and his own crossroads moment of choosing the band over glue-sniffing at the bus stop
- After flopping at a single Camden cinema in 1981 and a quiet VHS life among fans, the film has now received a 4K restoration primed for rediscovery as "perhaps cinema's most honest depiction of the challenges involved in trying to get a band together"
- The shoot drew inspiration from Kes, Mean Streets and Raging Bull, opening with 20 minutes of black-and-white to evoke "dreary reality" of band formation, with a budget-vetoed gag where streets turned into marshmallow after a wild night out
Why it matters: The 4K restoration reframes Madness's self-financed origin film as a serious artifact of late-'70s London realism — one that captured, in kitchen-sink detail, the criminal-adjacent youth culture the band's success pulled its members out of. For fans and film historians, it's a rare working-class origin story told entirely on the band's own terms, rather than filtered by mainstream distributors who gave it no real release push in 1981.
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