And so the insect warrior turns 70.
I have the feeling that, back back BACK! in his youth, Stuart Leslie Goddard AKA the future song stylist Adam Ant, was something of a bane of his teachers’ working lives.
Though, to be fair, most pop stars-to-be probably were little nightmares in the classroom. You can usually spot them a mile off by certain keywords on their school reports – the ones often described as ‘spirited’ and ‘energetic’ and such like.
Coincidentally, I wore my interests on both sleeves, and in a school report from 1981 – ie the year I discovered Adam & The Ants, who were dominating the British charts in a way no act had since glam rock – Mr Pearson at Springfield Middle observed that
“Steven continues to read with great confidence and accuracy. Unfortunately it has been hard to get him to spend as much time broadening his reading tastes as he does delving into “pop” magazines, but he shows he has good flexible reading skills and the ability to use reference books to good purpose. He still needs to know where to draw the line.”
By the summer of ’81, the line I was most interested in drawing was the thick white one across my nose in honour of the Ant man. Which was doubly ironic considering he was about to junk his epochal hybrid military pirate image in favour of a foppish regency dandy garb to accompany Prince Charming and its thumping, clumping playground chant, “Ridicule is nothing to be afraid of…”
Even after the shouts and yelps have faded, the school analogy is a pertinent one because in Adam Ant I discovered not only the joys of purchasing pop music but in his intoxicating imagery, lyrics and the band’s interviews (mainly but not exclusively via the official Adam & The Ants fan club magazine) a mind-blowing, heart-altering mix of sex, subversion, chaos, kink, naughty thoughts, young dreams, and perfect pop platters to boot. And to him it was all perfectly normal. Acceptable in the ’80s then…
“If somebody’s wearing a pair of rubber underpants under a pin-stripe suit it’s funny, y‘know. But I don’t think it’s funny. I don’t think it’s any more strange than watching fucking Crossroads every night.”
Tucked away on the flip side of Ant Rap, the Ants’ final new single and the band’s last release of 1981, was a charmingly parochial ditty called Friends. An update of an outtake from the monochromatic lo-fi Dirk Wears White Sox era, the track sees Adam dashing off a considerable amount of shameless name-dropping to gain access to an unnamed venue.
Summing up how those early Ants records were a gateway drug for me and my ilk, what’s often overlooked is how an intelligent multimedia art school student like Adam acted in a mentor-like fashion in the same way that David Bowie had done a decade prior.
So, waffling over, I’ve extracted 70 words, names or places that the wonderful world of Ants introduced me to. Funny how potent cheap music is…
Alice Cooper
Alienation
Amanda Donohue
American Bandstand
Apache
Art Deco
Bar Italia
Blackfoot
Bondage
Boris Karloff
Bow Wow Wow
Burundi
Cajun
Camp
CBS
Chandelier
Champs-Élysées
Cheyenne
Christian Dior
Commedia dell’arte
Decca
Diana Dors
Dirk Bogarde
Dr Kildare
Drag
Early Bowie
Egon Schiele
Erich Fromm
Freda Payne
Foe
Futurism
Garry Bushell
Goody Two Shoes
Heaven 17
Houdini
Jim Morrison
John Barry
John F Kennedy
Jon Moss
Lawrence of Arabia
Liberace
Libertine
Lulu
Malcolm McLaren
Marco Pirroni
Marilyn Monroe
Marlon Brando
Mile High Club
Minimalism
Montreal
Mohawk
Nick Kent
Patti Smith
Picasso
Post-Punk
Prince
Rick James
Ridicule
Robert De Niro
Roxy Music
Rudolf Schwarzkogler
S&M
Shirley Bassey
Screen On The Green
Sombrero Club
Stanley Spencer
Stuart Sutcliffe
Terence Stamp
Torture
Valise
Vanity
Voodoo
Woodentops
Ziggy Stardust
Steve Pafford
