Baggy Trousers

In some quarters, Madness were still viewed as a novelty act. By mid-1980, the 2 Tone/ska revival movement was still in full swing with albums from The Beat (I Can’t Stop It) and Bad Manners (Ska’n’B). But the Specials’ two hits which bookended the summer, ‘Rat Race’ (May) and ‘Stereotype’ (September), revealed how Jerry Dammers was evolving their sound. ‘Stereotype’ was an altogether more sophisticated song with shades of mood music – in other words, they’d evolved beyond the “ska revival” tag. If Madness were to avoid the common pitfall of the “difficult second album”, they needed something special. And that something was their next single, ‘Baggy Trousers’.