Adam Ant

A Conversation withADAM ANT

By Eileen Shapiro, edited by Adam Kluger

Adam and the Ants followed on the heels of the punk explosion. What are your memories of the end of punk and the evolution of your band?

I think punk had become very much a caricature of itself and it got very grey and very political. The kids were wearing the same kind of drab outfits. I’ve never been a political artist. I keep that out of my work. I’ve never been interested in that. I think it had become quite excessively violent, the gigs were getting more violent because of that, and it was just not enjoyable. Post-punk brought out some interesting music, but I felt that I just needed a way to suddenly make it a bit more colourful. Up until that point, I’d only used black and white in the graphics, in the handbills and record covers and stuff like that. So I suddenly just wanted to do the opposite of that, something heroic and celebratory, really. That’s where “Kings of the Wild Frontier” came out, I wanted to be like a king; not just some guy hanging on the corner moaning about everything and spitting, and wearing safety pins, which I’ve never been interested in!

Looking back, was Malcolm McLaren’s career advice to you worth the heartbreak of him stealing your band?

At the time it was devastating because obviously we were buddies. Dave and Mathew, myself, and Leigh Gorman was the new kid who had just joined. There’s one thing a band splitting up, but with that there’s a friendship, and there’s the camaraderie, and that came into question. I think Malcolm saw a situation where he could conveniently get a really good band to back up the idea that he had. A lot of water has gone under the bridge since then, we’ve made up and everything, but it was devastating on a personal level. On a professional level, it turned out to be pretty good for both parties. I couldn’t have seen it happening without that. We were very close doing our thing, and then someone else came in and started casting doubts amongst us. That created a kind of mutiny if you like. But gladly they did Bow Wow Wow which I thought was a really good project and sounded great, and I did “Kings” which was my view of things.

Is it true that when you were going to release “Kings” with your signature ethnic beat, that Bow Wow Wow were trying to steal that sound in recording their album?

We’d all sat around listening to hours and hours of philosophy by Malcolm about taking rock n’ roll back to its basics, and playing us all kinds of records from Django Reinhardt to Charlie Parker, through to various ideas that Malcolm had in his head. He’d talk to you for about an hour on something, and if you were lucky you would understand a minute of it.

Making those kind of ideas turn into reality just involves a lot of work. I just sat there and listened, and it sparked off certain directions for me. But what he was talking about in those meetings was pretty much what you hear when you hear the Bow Wow Wow sound. Mine was more…there are timpani drums in “Kings of the Wild Frontier.” There are 30 layers of vocals on it, which I did, so I didn’t fit into that idea that Malcolm wanted us to fit into. I had to put my hand up and say “this really isn’t working for me, I’m not quite getting the vibe off this.” When he got the band to say they wanted to leave, I certainly had the name and I had these threads of ideas, but nothing that fitted in with what they were doing, so I came out of it and went and started again. There was still a competitiveness. I thought, I’m not going to waste all this time sitting, listening to this lot and not use it, because I paid for it. I gave Malcolm £1,000 to manage the band. I think I got my money’s worth.

When you released Kings in the USA, you changed the tracks. “Making History” was removed and “Physical” and “Press Darlings” replaced it. Why was that?

I didn’t change them, they were changed for me. I was quite shocked to see various tracks taken off. I know they had a meeting and they decided that they wanted to take certain tracks off, and they did. At the time there was nothing I could particularly do about it. So it was a big shock to me. That was one of the nice things about doing the “Kings” gold boxset is having it in its original form. They made the decision for me, I wasn’t consulted, there it was.

Why didn’t your label want you to tour “Kings” in the USA At the time?

No they didn’t, I think there was a lot of suspicion about guys wearing makeup and outlandish clothing, etc. They’d seen a lot of the glam thing, certainly people like T-Rex, who were great. I love Marc Bolan and Roxy Music being two of my favorite bands, big influences, just hit paydirt in America; it was still very “rock” then. Regardless of Alice Cooper and stuff like that, there seemed to be a lot of suspicion from upstairs about what we were doing? There was a lot of excitement about “Kings” when I went to New York and LA, but the actual decision-making upstairs in terms of budgets and commitment to get behind the band…I think there was a decision made where it was not “yo ho ho” as you might say, it wasn’t “the charge” that I thought it would be. That’s how we felt. We didn’t actually tour it, we just went over there and did a few showcase gigs.

We had the New York Dolls, they were pretty flamboyant.

I know, but that’s an American band, it was the stuff coming over from the UK. It’s very peculiar, maybe that’s just my imagination, but I did feel the fact the people that came (to the showcase gigs) seemed to love it, and I remember doing a very serious chat with Tom Snyder as well, which was quite a challenge for my first interview in America. It was a quite straightforward thing. Eventually we pushed on through and kept going. I didn’t tour America with “Prince Charming” either. That was just never going to be on the cards. It was far too expensive a production. “Goody Two-Shoes,” by the time I did the “Friend or Foe” album I went solo, I was able to go ahead and really play live a lot, play a lot of gigs, and I think that’s what you have to do in America.

Did your famous white stripe have a hidden meaning?

Well I’d been studying Native American various tribal makeup, and decorations to the face, and it was more like a war stripe; a declaration of war on all that kind of nonsense in the music business and the political stuff that I didn’t like. So we felt kind of heroic. I always find that very inspiring, that whole philosophy, to me; I felt it was appropriate just declaring war on the music business really. That’s what we did.

When “Antmusic” first came out it was revitalising, refreshing, adventurous, exciting, and it still is today. When a pop artist today can’t seem to stay relevant for 35 seconds, how is it that “Kings” is still so relevant after more than 35 years?

You don’t consciously think “this is going to change everything.” I think at that point you’ve got a big mouth and a sharp pencil. The main thing is to get the record out of your head sounding like that sound that I could hear, and not saying it’s completed until you heard it in the mixing room. We all got in there and it was very much an experimental sound. Really the first track that encompassed everything, and I knew “Ah” that was definitely the sound that I think we can take as the blueprint of this whole album was “Dog Eat Dog”. That was the first track in the studio that all the other vocals, and the kind of crashing sound, and all the arrangements of the TWO drummers. I thought, “ah! oh, ok” that was the blueprint there. So basically from that we applied the same kind of premise to “Kings of the Wild Frontier,” “Antmusic,” and the rest of the album. So having cracked it on one track, you then take it to the other songs. Then fortunately, we were able to produce a record that was done pretty much in relatively one go, going into it with no distractions down in the studio in Wales. We were just more or less going into work every day and really doing it with no distractions whatsoever. So in a way I think it benefited from that certainly. I didn’t say it was finished until it was really finished. It was not a particularly expensive record to make, it was just a lot of energy that went into it. I’d waited a lot of years to get the opportunity to get that done. Chris Hughes was in the band, that’s another thing; he was one of the drummers, so him behind the mixing desk, I think he played an important part as well, as one of the band. It wasn’t like bringing in an outside producer to put their mark on it. He knew because he was playing drums every night on the songs. We all had a good idea of what we were after. It wasn’t like when you sometimes bring in a name producer who makes some good suggestions and also makes some suggestions that might change the thing completely. We didn’t have that. I think that was why maybe its lasted, because it’s a time capsule.

What do you think it is about “Kings” that caused it to be such a landmark event?

There was an effort to make it look as good as it sounded. There was always this certain element to early punk rock where certainly the work that Malcolm and Vivienne were doing in World’s End: SEX and Seditionaries, their two shops that were very influential. Those clothes were expensive, it wasn’t tacky, there was always a sense of what one would say is a sartorial correctness about it. I wanted to do something that looked as good as it sounded, so the record having been made, you want to produce something that looks like it was made by the guys onstage so there were certain influences there, that I think we were able to project on the stage, through make up, clothes and attitude. The attitude was there. On our own, we were like buccaneers. The thing was, you’d docked the galleon, gone in and just grabbed everything you could put on, so the jacket was almost as if I’d taken it, put it on and run off with it. It was all that kind of playful, heroic thing: The Highwayman, The Buccaneer, and The Native American Indian, which I felt was always this glorious, certainly iconic imagery that appealed to me growing up, and still as an adult. It was that kind of feel for me.