Seasons of the Ukulele

A weekly song challenge for ukulele players - all welcome. Find out more here

Season 756 - Complete Madness

CanadaJim

Thanks for being our host this season Del.

WE WERE KINDA CRAZY THEN - Sussana Clark

CanadaJim

The Dutchman - Michael Smith

This song reminds me of my friend Dave, who passed last year. We have played this song together until he could no longer play or recall lyrics.
It also reminds me of stories that Del has told me about him and his father. This one's for you Del.

johnpoole

Thanks Big Del. Loved your photo of the Bro Gang. And thanks for doing the Seasons Hosting organising. Much appreciated. I like Madness but I'm doing the second option here. Leonard Cohen's " Tower of Song". A gentle humoured epitaph to himself. "Crazy" is the qualifier.

potmo

"Our House"

I see that @dr_mitch beat me to the punch. Thank you @DelGriff What a great topic! Not only are there zillions of crazy songs, but what an awesome band! I remember so vividly the first time I hear them on the radio singing "One Step Beyond". I was a big ska fan, but have not really been exposed to too many of their songs. What a fantastic band.
Madness got a fair amount of air play on my college radio station, but I only know of early stuff like house of fun, one step beyond and a few others. Ska was and is one of my favoirte genres. Madness transcends the genre anyway with their geniusly crafted songs and an energy unsurpassed, at least back in the day and we have all learned that there is no such thing as "Too old to rock and roll".

Threebird

Thanks for hosting and for the theme, I need a little more Madness in my life these days!

Here is a cover of a local artist from Lethbridge, Alberta - the song is 'Mirror' and the original artist is Bailey Kate. This song has the word "insane" in the bridge.

DelGriff

This may be my fave Madness song ever, though there are a good few vying for that particular honour.

I had a lot of fun putting this one together - which is, after all, wholly appropriate for a Madness song. The subject of the song actually pops up from time to time in my video. You would be forgiven for thinking that it’s the man himself, but stay tuned for the big reveal at the end, when all will become clear! 😆

Baritone uke with synth bass and other additions, homemade drum track, and vocal harmonies too. And, of course, several helpings of legendary film star, fresh from his early career in the 1960s. 😆

Michael Caine - Madness cover (SOTU 756)

xommen

I've written a Dutch song called the Waanzin van de Dag (The Madness of the Day).

English translation of the lyrics are on Youtube in the video description.

Nearsighted-Lemon-McKay

Here is one that I've been wanting to do for a while that has "insane" lyrics. Black Sabbath's Paranoid

dr_mitch

Not a Madness song this time, but a ditty written by Willie Nelson and performed by Patsy Cline… Crazy.

potmo

Threebird During the late seventies and early eighties, my college radio station played a lot of the modern ska songs frequently. My Specials album was one of my most played. The only Ska band I ever got to see was The Selector. I was such a hep cat that I knew of 5 or 6 madness songs including "our House" but had no idea that this was their only US hit since I was way to cool to listen to commercial radio.

uke4ia

This is "Tomorrow's Just Another Day" by Madness. Half the references to the song have a parentheses in the title, half don't. I went with the title on the band's web site.

uke4ia

This is my Blast from the Past, from Season 78: "House of Fun", played on an armadillo-shell concert ukulele. Thumbnails from that long ago don't seem to show up here, but the link should still work.

Fun Fact: Going even further back, Season 43 had a Mash-up theme. Wendy and I somehow BOTH independently decided to mash up "Our House" by Madness with "Our House" by Crosby, Stills & Nash. Our two versions sounded totally different.

CanadaJim

Magnolia - J.J. Cale

In 1969/70, I lived in a small apartment in Bowmanville, Ontario. I bought J.J. Cale's NATURALLY LP because I loved the song CRAZY MAMA. I bought a wawa pedal that same week so I could play that song. I never got too good at slide/wawa playing or I'd have used that song here, but I did really like MAGNOLIA, which had the line, "You're driving me mad," in it and doesn't require a wawa pedal or a slide.

UkeCan1

uke4ia Fun Fact: Going even further back, Season 43 had a Mash-up theme. Wendy and I somehow BOTH independently decided to mash up "Our House" by Madness with "Our House" by Crosby, Stills & Nash. Our two versions sound totally different.

This was the first thing I thought of for my Blast from the Past (and possibly yours, but I didn't want to preempt you. Now that you've brought it up first, here are both mashups - my BFTP and a bonus of Jim's ultra-cool and totally different mashup.

One small correction - I didn't play ukulele until 2013, and started the Seasons a few weeks later at Season 84. My mash is from Season 142, songs that get you up dancing. I had done the CSNY "Our House" for 141, as the only happy Neil Young song I could find (because Graham Nash wrote it 🤷‍♀️). That put me in mind of the Madness song, which I did for 142, and then I was inspired to mash them up the next day.

I usually give my mashups clever mashed-up names, but I called this one "Our House", because then I had done three songs with the same name in a week and a half.

Here's Jim's "Our Houses" (which is a much cleverer title)

(You have to click the link not the thumbnail to play Jim's video. For videos over a certain age, the thumbnails no longer work outside of YouTube, as Jim mentioned re his other video above. So I generally will post a screenshot of the thumbnail from YT plus a clickable link to the actual video. Nov 8, 2014 appears to be past that threshold, so for my videos this is only a problem for about the first year of them.)

jon

some Ramones for the season
"i wanna be sedated"

UkeCan1

So of course then I had to search to see if anyone else had done such a mashup. I couldn't find one, but then my searches aren't turning up Jim's either, probably because he hasn't put the word "mashup" nor the two band names in his title. I only found it earlier because I already knew about it and searched for something like "Our Houses uke4ia". So it's possible there are others and I'm just not finding them. But it's also possible we are the only two!

Anyway, as an a cappella fan, I also enjoyed this ukulele-free version, and thought you might too:

Edwin

Hello! So I had a couple of Madness songs in mind, but since they've been done I thought I'd try something else (not that I think repeats are bad, just that I thought it'd be fun to do this one…)

There's a mention of madness in the lyrics, which I believe makes it fit! It probably deserved more preparation, but, well, you've got to get out while you're young and tramps like us, baby we were born to run.

CanadaJim

Crazy Mary From Londonderry - Michael Smith

I had a terrible time trying to figure out the chords that Michael used for this song and I'm sure that I got them wrong, but the ones I used sorta worked. I love this song and almost everything that Michael wrote.
This is my replay this season.

uke4ia

This is "Shut Up". By Madness.

I thought this one would sound good with electronics. It didn't. So I tossed that video and played it again without them.

jon

another go at "crazy". can say i never thought i would try and play this song
but that's another one of the great things about the seasons in that it stretches
you and opens you up to - or at least think about differently -
songs you maybe didn't like much or wouldn't have thought attempting 🙂

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