Madness were the only all-white band in the Two-Tone family and put the fun factor into the updated ska sound. This was their first top ten hit.

There’s a good case for 1979 being the best year ever for music – the list of landmark albums is as long as your arm. It was also the year Two-Tone happened.

I remember first seeing this lot – “The Nutty Boys” as everyone called them – at the Hope & Anchor during a short period when I lived around the corner and went there almost every night, thanks to the benevolence of landlord John Eichler, a larger-than-life character with generosity to match.

I don’t think I ever paid a penny to see a band in there, and pretty much everyone played there in those days; everyone I wanted to see, anyway.

Another bloke who was there every night was John’s friend Ken Whaley, a local journalist who looked out of place at punk gigs, being a decade older than us, and having unfashionably long hair… and who, I later discovered, had been the bass player in Man, the very first band I ever saw live, several years earlier in York.

The popularity of Madness grew rapidly and exponentially: within a couple of months they were playing sell-out shows with The Specials and The Selecter as Two-Tone exploded.

But while their peers were highly politicised, Madness were always primarily about fun, their gigs more like a big children’s party than a political rally – something that would become problematic for them (and me).

As the only all-white band in the Two-Tone family, they soon started attracting a nasty element to their gigs: a racist mutation of the ska-loving skinheads of the early Seventies, too thick to see the irony of nailing their Union Jack flags and DM boots to the mast of what was an anti-racist movement. The clue is in the name, you dolts.

I’d prefer to remember the exuberance of their early days, especially one night at The Lyceum that same summer of ’79 when Madness, supporting The Pretenders, came onstage wheeling a large cardboard box. Out of it burst Chas Smash, in a piece of low-budget showmanship that sums up the timeless appeal of Madness, and would become a signature of the videos for their string of chart hits… bang on cue for the opening bars of what is still, to this day, their opening tune.

(The intro to this video, by the way, is shot in the stairs down to the venue in the Hope & Anchor on Upper Street, Islington)