Suggs opens up about his life, family and career

THE frontman of hit band Madness will take to the stage in Newark in a one-man tour de force about his life, family and career.

In Suggs: My Life Story he talks about how the death of his cat on his 50th birthday triggered a personal quest to discover what happened to the father he never knew.

Suggs, who will appear at the Palace Theatre, Newark, a week today at 7.30pm, was lying in the bath nursing a hangover from celebrations the night before when there was a crash.

He said: “I jumped out of the water and there, lying amid shards of broken glass, was our four-year-old cat, a British blue called Mamba.

“I’d put up the glass shelf myself and it must have given way. I knew he was dead from the strange angle of his body. I couldn’t believe it. I loved that cat.

“I was 50. My kids had recently left home and now the cat was dead. I was upset. It triggered a deluge of emotion, an event that somehow tipped me over the edge. I began to consider my own mortality and, out of that, the idea for exploring my own past somehow crystallised.”

Suggs will take the audience back to his childhood on the tough streets of 1970s Soho and his first appearance on Top Of The Pops aged 18.

He was born in Hastings and christened Graham McPherson. His mother, Edith, was a jazz singer and his father, William, known as Mac, worked for a photographic developers.

In the show, Suggs talks about his father who left home when he was three, with drugs being the ultimate cause of the end of his parents’ marriage.

He earned his nickname after looking through a book of jazz musicians and sticking a pin in the page. It landed on a guy called Peter, whose middle name was Suggs.