A. D. Amorosi, August 2013

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW

    During the sweltering heat of July’s steamiest week, a familiar and welcome presence popped onto late night television. There, with NBC’s new golden boy Jimmy Fallon introducing him, was Adam Ant, doing much of the same thing that he did on Tom Snyder’s Tomorrow show back in April of 1981.

    Since this author was at the Tom Synder event, seeing Ant now—decked out in pirate gear and high black boots—was a bit of déjà vu. The songs may have been different (“Los Rancheros” then, “Vince Taylor” now) but the double-drumming Burundi groove, the rockabilly-infused guitars and the palpably giddy feeling of glam rock revisited through post-punk’s ardor was much the same.

    Back then, he was an Ant in between promoting his tribal smash album Kings of the Wild Frontier and his (then) upcoming Prince Charming. Now, after 18 years of not releasing albums, he’s on his own, pushing Adam Ant Is the BlueBlack Hussar in Marrying the Gunner’s Daughter and taking on a mammoth tour of forty American cities, which finds him in Philly on August 15 at Glenside’s Keswick Theatre.

    “It was a great show and I was grateful to get on it,” says Ant about Late Night with Jimmy Fallon mere hours after the live television gig. “Jimmy asked me personally to do “Goody Two Shoes,” this, after changing his mind from “Stripped” at the last minute.”

    Ant is genuinely touched by the fact that Fallon—as well as the rest of America—has seemingly welcomed him back, anxiously and with open arms (this tour is the second go-round for Ant this year, the first featuring theaters, like the Trocadero, that sold out in minutes). He’s always felt appreciated in the U.S. even if late night host (and Philly native) Tom Snyder was brusquer than Fallon. “No one really prepared me for Tom, and I was a bit guarded because of it,” Ant laughs. “I remember thinking that this guy was a bit gruff. But me, too, you know—I was extremely over-serious about the whole thing. The nice thing about the Snyder show was that the audience helped. They always do.”

    To understand a little bit about where the 58-year-old buccaneer is now and what’s pertinent about Adam Ant Is the BlueBlack Hussar in Marrying the Gunner’s Daughter (“marrying the gunner’s daughter” is a naval term for getting punished, a feeling he got from the record industry before his new album), one must duck backward.

    Before the worldwide overnight sensation of Kings of the Wild Frontier there was 1979’s’ Dirk Wears White Søx, a far more roughshod-but-still-glam Ants album. Before that, Adam was the singer for Bazooka Joe, an act that the Sex Pistols opened for at the tail end of 1975 whose eventual manager—the legendary impresario Malcolm McLaren—had acted in a similar capacity for Ant at one point. As Ant never fit completely into punk’s anarchistic rock/politics mold, it was easy for him to float atop it all with glamor and sensuality as his guide.

    “The way I interpreted music, it wasn’t necessarily punk, but the attitude certainly was,” says Ant who chose punk taboos such as sex and sadomasochism for his lyrics. “Those subjects weren’t so very punk, sort of more playful and sexual than punk’s usual. I got a lot of resentment for that. We were the band you loved to hate according to the NME (New Musical Express). We never thought we were going to get signed for all our trouble, so that when we did, we were in shock. We didn’t waste any time after that. We were swift about making our point. That’s punk, right?”

    Despite having returned to his warrior stance and pirate costume for his new album (to say nothing of his past hits that he does in concert), Ant doesn’t seem particularly nostalgic beyond recording one of his unused old tracks, “Who’s a Goofy Bunny, Then?” in tribute to his one-time mentor, the late Mr. McLaren. Though he’s been asked to perform as part of countless ‘80s tribute band shows, Ant has declined. “They’re quite lucrative but I’ve just not been interested in reliving just the hits, especially as I’ve got new music out now and so much more ahead of me. I don’t begrudge any of the bands who do those legacy events. That is their career. Mine is just different, you know?”

    Different, but ever-so-slightly the same, when you consider the forceful rhythmic thunderstorm of two drummers—his usual—that stampedes through each song, old and new. “It’s very entertaining, especially when you consider that no one else does it. You can lose everything else about a song—everything else can fall away—but as long as that beat is going, everything’s all right.” More crucially to where Ant is now is the use of the romantic buccaneer imagery, lyrically and sartorially, that is part of 2013-era Ant, especially when you consider that most of his solo albums previous to this throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s were devoid of any costumed character.

    “I was pretty much just looking back on nine albums; I looked at where I was going with this album, and it was a matter of consolidation,” says Ant thoughtfully. “I had made so many changes, visually and musically, because I had a self-imposed rule with every album—a different look and sound each time. Every album sounds different than the one before it.” One thing he regrets about his rule is that it can ward off an audience looking for a unified vision or vibe. “Sometimes an audience can’t find you in the same way that they could an AC/DC or U2, you know? Their sound is constant and singular, mine was not. So I looked at my repertoire, saw what the strongest materialwas—especially considering live performance—and went from there.” Not only did he choose the pirate-pop of Kings of the Wild Frontier—the idea of the new album would find him looking back on that same character 30-plus years later, only “Napoleon has walked back to Moscow through the snow,” and the daughter has become a metaphor for being adrift in the corporate machinery of the major label biz (Ant released his new album himself) and made to suffer. “Admiral Nelson is in there. The Charge of the Light Brigade. I really was coming back to that persona, but to parts and storylines that I had never fully explored or exploited.”

    Adam Ant hadn’t written songs for 16 years when he started in on BlueBlack Hussar. One could point to the UK gossip pages filled with stories of mental health problems and beyond. Pish posh. In reality, Ant got out of the biz to get out of pop’s rat race and become a dad. It’s fascinating, though, that one of Ant’s most popular new songs is “Vince Taylor,” a tune about the late, great, flashy post-rockabily singer who was one of David Bowie’s biggest influences on his Ziggy Stardust character. “I took Vince’s story to heart,” says Ant about rock n’ roll’s legendary unsung hero, who became, among other things, a biblical prophet and an acid casualty by the mid-1960s. “There were questions about his mental health and how he died too young, but make no mistake, he was one of the great outsiders.”

    Before anything stupid happened to Ant, he took a break from pop and came back when he was ready. After being away so long there must have been trepidation that had to be overcome with sheer nerve and utter confidence. “Absolutely. Coming back into it after being away for that long period of time gave me more trepidation than not. Not only was I out of practice making albums, I stopped writing, performing and being in the business of promotions to such a degree that I didn’t think of myself as an artist. I had chilled out and become a dad. Coming back into it with fresh eyes, I took my time. I was in no great hurry. That’s why the new album sounds so good, albeit a mess. The next album will be much sharper and focused. That’s the difference between the past and the present. The music is just as good as the Kings of the Wild Frontier days. Only, now, I won’t be rushed.”

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If A.D. Amorosi can’t be found writing features for ICON, the Philadelphia Inquirer or Metro, he’s probably hitting restaurants like Stephen Starr’s or running his greyhound.