/ In Camden Town / I'll meet you by the Underground

/ In Camden Town / I'll meet you by the Underground."Songs like "Camden Town" are evidence of another faith restored: "I realised how fabulous London was again," he explains "All the detail of it, the subtlety, the colour. The chimney pots, the dustbins with people's names written on the lids, cats, overgrown front gardens .. and all that old nostalgic cobblers. It's a celebration of all the small things, the unrecorded history of English working life, some bollocks like that."Suggs was born in Hastings in Surrey. As a child he moved around London - and Liverpool and Wales - before he settled as an adolescent in Camden, north London, spiritual home of Madness He still lives in the area, as do most of the band And, for that matter, every other band. And the music, I'm finding I can sing along to any chord sequence, and it'll sound OK.

I'm not saying I'm the new Mozart, but I'm not trying to be the new Mozart, because Mozart didn't write words! Ha ha! Couldn't write 'em, could he? Wanker!"The songs are a progression from the Mad old days, but not a drastic change. They are packed with Suggs's conversational, gritted-teeth vocals, and reggae rhythms from some of the genre's best: Jah Wobble, Sly and Robbie, Aswad's keyboard player, and Rico, Jamaican trombonist extraordinaire (and former Special and Skatellite).The lyrics of one track give a fair indication of what to expect: "There's a great crowd of tourists and they're coming down the street / Pleased as punch with brand new Dr Martens on their feet ... How many paintings have you ever actually laughed or cried at? You may have occasionally tittered at a bit of Damien Hirst, but not actually roared with laughter It is a great medium. It's three minutes of noise and a little plastic disc, and it holds your whole life: the first person you met, the first girlfriend you had, the first garden shed you blew up.

It's all there."He obviously adores his forthcoming album - not in the posing, preening, us-against-the-world manner of the latest indie band with the shelf-life of a pint of milk, but with the excitement of a fan who has just bought an album, not made one The working title: The Greatest Pop Record Ever Made "I'm getting more and more serious about writing the words I think I'm getting slightly poetical - whatever that means. I just think that pop music is one of the greatest art forms. It's been the only one over the last 20 years that's actually done anything, said anything, changed anything, communicated on such a great level to so many people It can move you to tears or laughter. Pausing only to intersperse his speech with the qualification, "without getting evangelical about it", he proceeds to get evangelical about it.

"I look at some of my contemporaries, and they're up their own arses with 'moving on' and 'taking another step forward', while their pop careers go slowly down the plughole.""I've got the luxury of having been out of the business for donkey's years so I can have a laugh again like it was the first day I ever did it. A non-Muslim is a non-believer standing as a bulwark against the spread of Islam. I was taken and raped, but I refused to be 'married' to any of them... The three men were captured in a dawn raid that burned their village, Kalkada, to the ground, and taken to the nearest garrison town, Mendi, where their life-threatening wounds were left untreated. Men are forced into government militias, women used as slave labour on farms.The story of Ismael Abdullah Tutu, Hussein Haroun and Abdul Rahman Musa is typical of the Nuba's plight. "She says she'd like to go somewhere in the East where it's very hot and lie under a mosquito net and breathe quite slowly.

BACK STAGE at Wyndham's Theatre one steamy night last week, with Julie Christie a few nights into her West End debut in Harold Pinter's Old Times. Any woman who looked as raddled as Jack Nicholson, no matter how big a star she had been, could look forward to the bit-part hag, crank or grandmother. But I'm glad I've experienced it because now it's not something on the other side of the fence." Perhaps she rejects it because she has it.Julie's had her share of media mischief - things she's said "turned into bland jelly". Draw your own conclusions.)The next phonecall came from the satellite-broadcasting company BSB, who invited him to host his own TV show.