Suggs (singer) - Early Life

Early Life

McPherson was born in Hastings, the son of William Rutherford McPherson (1935–1975) and Edith Gower, who married in Paddington in 1960. Suggs was raised in Hastings by his mother; his father had left by age three. In a 2009 interview he was asked about what happened to his father:

" I don't know, but what I've heard hasn't been good: heroin, injecting his eyeballs with paraffin, being sectioned. He must be dead now. I mean, he would have got in touch if he was alive, wouldn't he? Yeah, he must be dead, poor bugger."

As a child he moved around a lot. He spent three years of his childhood in Haverfordwest in Pembrokeshire and had just started at a grammar school when he moved to North London. He then went to comprehensive school at Quintin Kynaston, Swiss Cottage, North London. On the official Madness website he says

" I was born in Hastings on a stormy evening on 13 January 1961. I only lived with my mum, so we were free agents. She was a singer in the pubs and clubs. We moved to Liverpool then London. I lived with relations in Wales for a while and came back to London. Because I was an only child, I was pretty insular and stubborn. All the upheaval made me lazy academically, so by the time I got to Quintin Kynaston school in St Johns Wood I didn't bother much, I stayed on to the sixth form for social security reasons, and got two O-levels and a CSE on the way. I met Mike Barson hanging around Hampstead School.""

In August 2012 Suggs appeared at the Queens Hall in Edinburgh as part of the Festival Fringe. In his show, titled "Suggs: My Life Story in Word and Music" he talks about his early life and his search to find out more information about his father. He references his Wikipedia entry and states that some of the information relating to his early life is untrue, adding that he would get bored in interviews and make things up. He confirms that although he was born in Hastings, the family moved around and he spent much of his early life in Wales. He states that his father left when Suggs was three, not before he was born.

Suggs got his nickname from randomly sticking a pin in an encyclopedia of jazz musicians (hitting Peter Suggs) while he was still in school, to avoid being labelled as the member of an ethnic minority owing to his Scottish name. To capitalize on the name he went as far as to create a myth around it, writing lines like "Suggs is our leader" on the walls and only answering to that name.

A large part of Suggs' young life was the band Skrewdriver where he was a part of Ian Stuart Donaldson's "crew" of skinheads and eventually became a roadie for Skrewdriver in 1977. It had no wage but it meant he could get into gigs for free. Later he would lend Skrewdriver gear for their London gigs..