Complete Madness was formed in 1994 out of a band called Beat The System which itself was born in 1989 with original members Mark Keegan and Derek Wood who are still with Complete Madness today.

Mark was always into the original Punk and Ska scene while Derek was more of an old School Rock person, so finding a happy medium of music was always difficult but in 1990 they decided to settle on the New Wave type of stuff featuring bands such as The Clash, Alarm, U2, Nick Lowe, Big Country and Flock of Seagulls to name a few and even though it was great playing this stuff it wasn’t always well received in a lot of clubs.

In 1992 our then bass guitarist, Steve Cliffe, brought up the idea of maybe learning a few Madness tracks, Night boat to Cairo and Baggy Trousers if my ageing memory serves me well. At that time the tracks sounded a bit on the rock side of Ska with having no keyboards but it went down in the clubs very well, it was original and different to say the least.

The band started doing showcases and signed to a decent agency and the work started to get better, and more and more Madness and Specials tracks were being learnt, so it was decided that this was the only direction the band were going to take.

In 1994 we felt the only thing holding us back was the name Beat The System as it didn’t say a lot about what we were doing and even tough we had a decent following in South Yorkshire, to branch out a bit more we needed a more appropriate name. Not sure whether it was Steve (bass player) or Dave (Drummer) who thought of the name but Complete Madness was born, simple, straight forward and more to the point, was also the first Madness album I’d bought.

The band were getting offered work a lot further a field now and it was decided we couldn’t do our day jobs and the bands as well so Complete Madness went professional. Since that day the band have not looked back and now do an average of between 150 - 170 gigs a year.

Like I said at the beginning I could write a novel especially about the type of gigs the band do so I’ll try and condense it.

Complete Madness have done the Army Bases here and abroad, have and are still doing all the top Holiday Parks and have been a regular feature at Butlins for the past 15 years doing the family breaks as well as a lot of the adult breaks.