Before We Was We
Mike Barson, Mark Bedford, Chris Foreman, Graham McPherson, Cathal Smyth, Lee Thompson, Dan Woodgate

Narrated By: Mike Barson, Mark Bedford, Chris Foreman, Dan Woodgate, Graham McPherson, Cathal Smyth, Lee Thompson

Duration: 6 hours and 57 minutes

What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

Shortlisted for the Best Ensemble Narration Award at the New York Festival Radio Awards 2020.

This audiobook is Madness' story in their own words - with each band member featuring as a narrator.

In their own words they each look back on their shared adventures. Playing music together, riding freight trains, spraying graffiti and stealing records. Walking in one another's footsteps by day and rising up through the city's exploding pub music scene by night. Before We Was We is irreverent, funny and full of character. Just like them.

Genre

Autobiography: arts & entertainment

Listen to a sample

Brilliantly assembled by journalist Tom Doyle as an oral history featuring the voices of all the members … tells you more about how a band becomes a band than any number of anecdotes about life in the studio

[One of] the best books to buy music fans for Christmas

A rollicking oral history of Madness’s early years ... a goldmine of quirky anecdotes

As much as anything, the book is a social history of growing up on the edges of criminality

An amazing book … one of the best books about a band I have ever read. I've been raving about it to everyone I meet