Rise and fall, indeed – Madness looks back
In 2011, Kronenbourg shared a two-minute beer advertisement in which some older men sang a song in a pub, then walked out. Well, most of them walked out; the saxophone player kinda sorta drifted away.
For some of the younger viewers of the ad, it was probably an entertaining commercial, though they wouldn’t get mad about it.
There’s also a four-minute long version of the ad, in which scenes from the bar are interspersed with black and white scenes of much younger men. This version goes under the title “Le grand pantalon.”
And yes, the band is Madness, and the black and white scenes were actually anti-colorized (whoops, anti-colorised) scenes from the original “Baggy Trousers” video.
The band has come a long way – it broke up at one point before reuniting – and several years after the Kronenbourg ad, Cathal Symth left the band. He just wasn’t feeling nutty any more.
In a sense, the nutty image of Madness did a disservice to them, because when they did get serious, they were often ignored. (“Blue Skinned Beast”, for example, is about body bags.)
tymshft 