19 June 1982
The sale of contraceptives had finally been legalised in Ireland in 1980 – but to buy them at a pharmacy you needed a prescription from your doctor. Only in 1985 were they finally permitted for general sale. So, a song about buying condoms topping the Irish charts in 1982 should really have been an act of glorious subversion, like the Contraceptive Train of the 1970s.
However, this is ‘House Of Fun’ by Madness, where those madcap ska boys are giddy teenagers looking for “balloons” and “party poppers”. I doubt the massed ranks of Catholicism were quaking in their cassocks at this.
No one really expects Madness to have been on the front line of any cultural war or serious conversation. But their nutty boy image was often to their own detriment; ‘Our House’, for instance, is a genuinely wistful and lovely song lost under the standard package of gurning and funny dancing, ‘My Girl’ paints an acutely-observed picture of the minor complexities of an everyday relationship, while ‘Michael Caine’ is remarkably sophisticated and empathetic. ‘House Of Fun’ doesn’t pretend to have the same emotional depth, or even any. As with any self-ordained wacky types, it’s grand at first but by the end the joke is starting to wear off.
