One Step Beyond…

Complete Madness, 1982

Carl says…
This is our second release, it was written by Prince Buster and was released on the B side of Al Capone – that’s the one that sounds like Gangsters, if the Mads had never covered this one I probably wouldn’t be writing this now, you see a long time ago Lee asked me to introduce the Mads so I made up the intro and because I could shout loudest they let me shout One Step Beyond a few times before they’d kick me off, after a while I got well pissed off being kicked off so I started moving about avoiding them, everyone thought ‘Wow a new dance’ ha ha. I haven’t stopped moving yet.

The Lot, 1999

Carl: I was originally in the band as a bass player, but I left after falling out with Mike. I was working in Kent when Lee asked me to travel up to London and introduce the band onstage. On the train, I wrote the words that formed the introduction to One Step Beyond.
Mark: One Step Beyond was originally a sax instrumental. We used to do it without an introduction. Then Carl began introducing it. He became part of the band after we did a gig in Aylesbury. He was late, so we did the song without him. Then, halfway through, he arrived and was carried, Messiah like, over the heads of the crowd, who wanted us to play the song again.

One Step Beyond, 2023 CD reissue

Mike: I always loved ‘One Step Beyond…’ – the Prince Buster version is a great track. There were a lot of instrumentals around on the pub scene in those days – The Jam covered the Batman theme, and we used to do Hawaii Five-O. We loved going back to those old tracks. So ‘One Step Beyond…’ was the same thing, really.
Woody: Cathal was a part of the gang. He was always around. Suggs and he were a double act, really. So they would go in to the booth together, singing and fucking around most of the time, which was really great. It was a great atmosphere. So when Cathal came up with the intro to ‘One Step Beyond…’, we were like, “Yeah, put it down!” He was just a mate who was always there and joining in, and although he didn’t have anything to do with the writing and the rehearsing, as such, he was always there at the gigs. And so it was a natural process that he contributed to the album, and eventually joined the band.
Bedders: I think ‘One Step Beyond…’ was chosen as the single because it was a good Prince Buster song, and Lee could play it and was well into it. And you could dance to it – that’s the main thing. It wasn’t a big anthem for the band before we recorded it, we just liked the song and put it in the set. And it’s really snowballed over the years. As has been well-documented, it was very short. We played the tune literally once around the houses, and that was it.
Woody: We only gave Dave a minute or so of music. And then he cleverly vari-speeded it, made it go up a little bit quicker, and spliced it together to make a three-minute single.
Chris: There’s this urban myth about ‘One Step Beyond…’ started by Dave Robinson. He said it was only a minute long, and that he made it longer. But if you listen to it, that first section is longer than one minute – one minute doesn’t even take you to the end of Lee’s sax part. Cathal’s intro alone was 30 seconds long! They added a short bit on the end to make it a bit longer. But what mattered was the precedent it set – Dave had said this was going to be the single, and it became a hit, so we gave him total control over that. He was always right.
Woody: We’d argued like hell with Dave over releasing ‘One Step Beyond…’ as the first single off the album, because it was an instrumental. We just couldn’t see it being a hit. And he was adamant about putting that out, he really put his foot down. And we needed that. Because, you know, there are seven of us – or actually six of us, because Cathal wasn’t officially in the band yet… But we needed a father figure, someone to say, “Look you lot…”. And we wouldn’t take any shit from anyone, but we took it from him, eventually. And he was like, “If this doesn’t work, I’ll give you my house”. When it was a hit, we were like “Okay, he knows what he’s talking about.” He really had his finger on the pulse of the music industry and the way it was going. He said, “You’ve got to get your own imagery, the way you want to project yourself, on the telly. Get yourself on the telly.” So, if music videos were the way forward, he was up for that. He was quite advanced, and communicative.
Chris: We filmed bits of the video on the road with this guy Chuck Statler while we were off on tour. He’s very important to the whole thing, because that’s how we learned how to make music videos. He had a very small film crew – it was all quite commando, you know? One of my abiding memories was that while we were on the 2 Tone tour, all three bands were on Top Of The Pops. At that point, we were higher up the bill than The Selecter. Our single was ‘The Prince’, which got to number 16 in the charts, while The Selecter’s ‘On My Radio’ was in the top 10 – I think it was at number three – so they started thinking they should be higher up the bill. But when ‘One Step Beyond…’ came out, that was that, you know? It did really well. The 2 Tone tour was a fantastic time. We were quite trendy, we were on the cover of The Face magazine… It was all go.

The song first appeared on the ‘One Step Beyond…’ LP (Stiff)

‘One Step Beyond…’ was Madness’ second single

There are a few different versions of ‘One Step Beyond…’ with long or short intros, and with different musical sections.

The 12″ includes a version featuring a sample of Prince Buster saying ‘One Step Beyond’.

The intro was also recorded in Spanish and Italian

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