Cardiac Arrest, in February 1982, was the eleventh single to be released by Madness, and proved to be their first not to reach the Top 10 since debut The Prince.
There are a couple of underlying reasons. It was the third single to be lifted from the album 7 which had already been in the shops for four months. It also, despite seemingly having an upbeat and jaunty tune, had a lyric that wasn’t exactly tailor-made for daytime radio, being the story of a stressed-out workaholic who suffers a fatal heart attack while travelling on a bus on his way to his office.
mp3: Madness – Cardiac Arrest (extended 12″ version)
I’ve always thought it genius that the band/producers used the opening few notes to symbolise an increasing heart rate. The extended 12″ version is basically the 7″ take on the song up to 2:54 followed by some instrumentation and a refrain from earlier in the tune, finishing up with the final few notes symbolising a failing heart rate.
Chas Smash later explained the thinking behind the song:-
“We got a lot of trouble over it. People writing to me saying, ‘How dare you write a song like that? My father had a heart attack, you don’t know what it feels like’ etc. But I did know what it felt like – my own father had a heart attack; that’s why I wrote it. It was born out of concern. The message was, ‘Relax darling, don’t get stressed.’ As the Arabs say, ‘Walk through life, don’t run.’”
The b-side, sadly, is not a cover of the debut single by The Jam. Instead, it is a song that was used to sell cars in Japan!
The jingle for the TV adverts for the Honda City was co-written by Madness with the aid of Japanese songwriters. The band also appeared in the adverts. The adverts used the phrase ‘Honda Honda Honda’ as part of the lyric, but this was replaced by ‘doomba, doomba, doomba’ in the version recorded for this particular b-side. It proved to be such a well-loved song that it was included on the Complete Madness greatest hits compilation issued later on in 1982.
THE NEW VINYL VILLAIN 