Not much of a role model, I grant you….

….but when I was a kid, this is who I wanted to be. And I wasn’t the only one. In his autobiography, Suggs cites wanting to be Johnny Reggae as his motivation for starting Madness. Good-looking, hard, great footballer and proud owner of a pair of fringe & buckle stompers and two-tone tonic strides – what boy wouldn’t want to be Johnny Reggae? Especially with all those council estate Kims and Kerrys falling at his tassel loafers. This was a massive hit, equally popular with boys and girls. Now of course, it’s dismissed as a silly novelty song. But I think it’s an unintentional work of genius because it paints one of the truest and most evocative pictures of how life really was in certain parts of London in the early 70s.