# Madness perform at Forest Live 2023

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Madness in Concert at Thetford Forest: Why This Was One of the Best Nights of 2022 By Lee Blanchflower, Blanc Creative \| Music Photography & Festival Video Production There are gigs, and then there are nights you genuinely do not forget. Madness in concert at Thetford Forest's High Lodge on the 18th of June 2022 was very much the latter. As the closing headline act for Forestry England's Forest Live series, the Nutty Boys brought everything you'd want from a summer evening with seven of the most reliably brilliant live performers this country has ever produced. I was there as a music photographer with Blanc Creative, capturing the night for our growing festival and live events portfolio. It's the kind of commission that reminds you exactly why you got into this work in the first place.   Forest Live: The Setting That Changes Everything Before we even get to the band, it's worth talking about what Forest Live actually is, because it's genuinely unlike any other concert series in the UK. Organised by Forestry England, Forest Live takes major touring artists and places them in the middle of working forests across the country. High Lodge at Thetford Forest sits in the heart of one of England's largest lowland pine forests, spanning nearly 19,000 hectares across Norfolk and Suffolk. When the stage lights warm up against that backdrop and you've got pine trees lining the horizon in every direction, it creates something that no arena or festival field can replicate. What makes it even better is the crowd it attracts. Forest Live is one of the most genuinely diverse and relaxed concert experiences going. You'll find grandparents next to teenagers, families spread out on picnic blankets with proper food and a bottle of wine, groups of friends who've been coming for years, and first-timers who don't quite know what to expect until it hits them all at once. There's no aggression, no overcrowding, no feeling that you need to fight for space. People lay out their picnics early, stake out a patch on the grass and just settle in for the evening. The food offering around the site is decent too, covering the basics well and letting the whole thing feel properly relaxed rather than rushed. It's family-friendly without being sanitised. It's communal without being chaotic. For a music photographer, the atmosphere produces genuine emotion across the crowd, and that's what makes for compelling images. A Two-Year Wait Well Worth It Madness were originally booked to play this very stage in 2020. Covid shut that down, as it did so much else. When the show was finally confirmed for the summer of 2022, there was already an extra charge in the air before anyone had played a note. That kind of anticipation is palpable, and it ran right through the Forest Live crowd from the moment gates opened. Fresh from the Isle of Wight Festival, Madness arrived at High Lodge to a sold-out crowd and, characteristically, wasted absolutely no time. The show opened with One Step Beyond, and the effect was immediate. The fezzes went on. The pork pie hats came out. The blow-up saxophones appeared from nowhere. Whatever the weather had been doing moments before ceased to matter. Madness in Concert: Forty-Plus Years and Still the Real Thing It's worth pausing on what Madness actually are, because familiarity can make people take them for granted. The band formed in Camden Town in 1976, originally under the name the North London Invaders. By 1978 they'd settled on Madness, named after a Prince Buster song they loved, and by 1979 they were releasing records on 2 Tone and climbing the charts. One Step Beyond, their debut album, went to number two. What followed was one of the most remarkable runs in British pop history, with 15 top ten singles including House of Fun, their only number one, Baggy Trousers, It Must Be Love, Our House, and My Girl. They spent 214 weeks in the singles charts across the early 1980s. Two Ivor Novello Awards. A West End musical, Our House, that won the Olivie

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