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Artist You Should Know: Adam and the Ants
Between the Punk rock of the 1970′s and the New Wave of the 1980′s, there was a brief resurgence of glam rock called New Romanticism. While many of the bands in this genre had the unfortunate tendency to suck (Bow Wow Wow, for instance, who coincidentally were formed when Malcolm McLaren stole them from Ant), there is one band that stands out among the rest. Adam and the Ants combined the aesthetic madness of glam rock with the political and cultural concerns of punk.
Adam and the Ants was the brainchild of Adam Ant, born Stuart Goddard. Ant had been a member of the band Bazooka Joe, whose main claim to fame was that they were the headlining act on the night the Sex Pistols first performed. While the rest of the band and most of the crowd wasn’t particularly impressed with the Sex Pistols, Ant was inspired. He quit Bazooka Joe, changed his name to Adam Ant, and started his own band.
But Adam and the Ants didn’t find success for several years. The band went through several incarnations before they found success in 1980 with Kings of the Wild Frontier, which produced the quintessential single “Antmusic.” The single went on the reach #2 in the UK Pop charts.
Adam and the Ants have a sound that straddles multiple musical influences. Heavy on the rhythm, the pounding drums form the base of a concoction of ululating melodies and Pirroni’s twangy, blues guitar. Pirroni himself was influenced by Link Wray and that combined with Ant’s obsession with funk, soul, and reggae made Adam and the Ant a band that stood out among the synthpop bands of the early 80′s. Pirroni would remain Ant’s songwriting partner for the next decade, the two producing such strange and relentless sounds as “Prince Charming” and “Desperate but Not Serious.”
There’s a purposeful posturing to Adam and the Ants, what with their pirate costumes and strange lyrics all about sex, fetish, history, and ethnicity. I’ve always been of the opinion that unlike a lot of the other bands during the New Romantic movement, Adam and the Ants were perfectly aware of their own absurdity and used it to make the more experimental aspects of their music palatable to the general population.
Below is the video for “Stand and Deliver” which manages to be both incredibly funny and truly awesome at once.