I have two autographs that I treasure. One is the neatly written signature of a baseball legend Carl Yastrzemski, blue ink on a white baseball. The other is the hastily scribbled chicken scratch of Madness singer, Suggs McPherson, black magic marker on a wrinkled cocktail napkin. I have asked other people for their autographs in my lifetime, but those have been forgotten and misplaced, and were never as cherished as these two.

My name is Dicky Barrett, and I am in the Mighty Mighty Bosstones. Growing up in Boston, two things meant a lot to me and my friends, baseball and rock 'n' roll. While baseball stayed fairly consistent (the Red Sox would break our hearts every season,) rock 'n' roll and popular music would constantly change - what we were into in the summer might be forgotten by the winter. We could effortlessly switch our devotion from Van Halen to the Sex Pistols, Devo could take out AC/DC in a heartbeat, and that's the way things were, until we discovered Madness. Madness were different, they were like us. They looked like us, dressed like us, sang about things we cared about, and they came from a city that was a lot like the one where we grew up. They were from London, and London's weather, it's architecture and it's culture are very similar to our beloved Boston. We has the Red Sox, and now we had Madness.

I feel I've started this out poorly and, in fairness to myself, the task of writing about a band that has meant so much to my friends and I is an enormous one. I'm not taking it lightly, and I was thrilled when I was asked to do this. What should I write about - them or what they mean to me ? I'll continue to do both.

Although Madness were formed in 1976, we discovered them around 1980. I came across a copy of 'One Step Beyond' and it didn't so much change our lives, as let us know we weren't alone, and we were all right. The members were Suggs, Tompa Thompson, Mark Bedford, Woody Woodgate, Barso and Chrissy-Boy (I'm not Chas, sure if some of these are really their nicknames or just the names we gave them, but, hey, we felt like we knew them.) They were part of the 70's Ska revival, second wave, the whole Two-Tone thing, but they had their own style. They called it the 'nutty sound'. It was carnival-like fun and extremely fresh. The lyrics talked about love and life in North London. So much about Madness was appealing, but the thing that appealed the most to me was the way they seemed like seven really close friends.

I could state the obvious and go on and on about how Madness has influenced the band I'm in. Anyone who knows the Bosstones can see what we have borrowed from them. Instead I would like to tell my favorite story.

In 1984, me and my friend, Patrick, found out that Madness would be appearing on Saturday Night Live. So late on Friday night, we caught a Greyhound bus from Boston to NYC. Arriving early Saturday morning, we headed to the television studio and scored a pair of tickets. At the studio we met some guys, who later formed the Ska bands Skinnerbox and the Toasters, and spent the day hanging out in the Big Apple.

That night we caught Madness' performance, exited the NBC building, stood out front on the sidewalk waiting for our heroes to emerge. When they finally did, we were speechless. Suggs broke the silence, 'Why don't you come along with us?' The rest of the night we rolled with Madness from club to club, bar to bar, talking about music, friendships, baseball, football (soccer) growing up in Boston, growing up in London, and then at one point when no one was looking, I slid a wrinkled cocktail napkin in front of my new friend, Suggs, who pulled out a black magic marker and gave me his autograph.