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‘A.N.T.S.’: When Adam & the Ants parodied the Village People
12.30.2016
02:09 pm
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Flexipop! magazine only existed for a couple of years, ending a run of 26 issues in 1983. Having been founded by a pair of Record Mirror refugees, Flexipop! featured music journalism adequate for a young-adult readership, but so did plenty of other rags, so to set itself apart from the pack, it featured in every issue a preposterous photo-comic story about a featured band, and a flexi-disc.

Lots of mags at the time used flexis to supplement their coverage, but with Flexipop! as the name implies, the disc was pretty much the reason you bought it, and they made it worth buying. Like later adopters of the practice Trouser Press and The Bob, Flexipop! had the prescience to include underground and up-and-coming artists who have gone on to achieve cult classic status. Cure, Bauhaus, The Jam, XTC… it’s a stunning list, check out the mag’s Discogs page and drool.
 

 
But we’re here today not to praise the magazine generally (we’ve done that…) but to focus on the flexi disc from the mag’s 4th issue, featuring Adam and the Ants, who were experiencing astonishing success in the wake of an unlikely image makeover, and who could have simply pumped up their Kings of the Wild Frontier album by providing Flexipop! with a deep cut and let that be that. Instead, they released in that magazine an exclusive recording of their crazy parody of the Village People’s 1978 single “Y.M.C.A.,” titled “A.N.T.S.”
 

It’s a pretty fine line, isn’t it?

Fans of Adam’s live performance will be familiar with ‘A.N.T.S.’, the multi coloured maverick’s anthem to his fans (or should that be f.a.n.s.?). The original Village People superhit ‘YMCA’ is one of Adam’s all time fave songs (see Fallout Favourites last ish) and this cover with amended lyrics reprinted below for your delectation, was once featured as an encore on Ant tours. This studio version, especially recorded for Flexipop, is the first time ‘A.N.T.S.’ has appeared on vinyl.

 

 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Ron Kretsch
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12.30.2016
02:09 pm
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‘Anarchy!’ Malcolm McLaren, punk rock’s Molotov cocktail


 
Phil Strongman’s new documentary Anarchy! McLaren Westwood Gang is a politically-fueled, fashion-conscious deeper look at how the English punk explosion was ignited—how the bomb was built and under what circumstances, in other words.

Coming in at almost two and a half hours with an incredible cast of characters, Anarchy! McLaren Westwood Gang traces Malcolm McClaren back to his birth with loads of never before seen films and photos, personal information and interviews with family members, friends and others, taking us into the all important mid-sixties where the real nucleus of the Sex Pistols concept begins to form within the Situationist movement, King Mob (the UK equivilent), art school and observing the tribal customs and costumes of rock ‘n roll fanaticism.

The 1968 the French student riots had a huge influence on McLaren, who travelled to Paris at the time, and there were key players from that era who played recurring roles in his life. Much of the concepts and ideas—art, slogans, everything really—originated there and then. The interviews with the people from this period were what I wanted to see most and there was no disappointment. The interviews with Malcolm himself indicate that he still was speaking in slogans right up to the very end.
 

 
If you’re looking for yet another love letter to punk rock (yawn) with the same old crap stories, then keep on pogoing as this is a very interesting (for the most part) tale of politics, sex, drugs, bombs, rock ‘n roll, and the all important fashion accessories to wear whilst bombing and rocking and rolling and fucking on drugs. If punk never really happened and this was just a wild tale of a bunch of crazed young people that tried to accomplish what punk wrought and failed, it would still be just as interesting. The fact that first an entire country and then the entire world sat up, noticed, listened and actually feared this tiny group of absurd-looking lunatics (some leading, most following) on their search and destroy mission is incredible to contemplate. Today they’d just be given their own reality TV show.

It’s a bit of a revelation for those who think a few drunk idiots formed a band and yelled and jumped around a lot while desperately trying to learn how to play their instruments. (Even at this late date it is still being said that these guys could not play or sing, which is ridiculous as is easily proven by any Sex Pistols live performance video from any period.) However, someone could have done enough homework to know to leave out Ben Westwood’s totally wrong assumption (stated as fact, of course) that Sid’s mom and girlfriend gave him heroin that he overdosed on (I personally was there that night and I and enough other people have done countless interviews stating what really happened). He even calls Methadone, Methadrone (good name for a band actually). Other than these two minor problems, and the rather large objection that for a film titled Anarchy! McLaren Westwood Gang it’s quite light on the Westwood side of things, this very long film goes by very quickly, and is really well made. Director Strongman was good friends with McLaren, having worked in the Glitterbest offices (the Sex Pistols management company) and was an actual eyewitness to much of what he is discussing here.
 

 
There lots of great interviews with everyone from Adam Ant to Don Letts to Tracey Emin to Boy George (who tells a great story about when he sang for Bow Wow Wow) to Sex Pistol Paul Cook (with amazing black and white footage of the Pistols hanging around at the Berlin wall). The music is honestly the least of the subjects focused on. In fact much of the film is framed with scenes of girls modeling Dame Westwood’s fashions (partially topless) to a modern soundtrack with an operatic vocal sung onscreen. (And thank god for that. I’m sick of these formulaic punk rock docs, aren’t you?)

There’s a lot to get out of this film, historically speaking. It’s intelligent and everything a documentary should be. It just may not be about what you thought it was going to be about. This is the history of European Anarchism as it helps beget the birth of the Sex Pistols. It’s also the story of a man who broke all the rules before that was fashionable, who ran blindly into the fire more than once and always came out the other side… many times with the prize. Or at least some money. I’ve already watched Anarchy! McLaren Westwood Gang three times and I’m not the type to really ever watch anything even twice, certainly not in the same day.

All Malcolm McLaren ever wanted was to be something akin to the “next Andy Warhol.” It’s an idiosyncratic aspiration to be sure, but one category that he (and perhaps he alone) truly belonged in.
 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Howie Pyro
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04.26.2016
02:37 pm
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Young Adam Ant looking like a pretty punk rock Adonis
08.31.2015
12:17 pm
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Adam and the Ants at Eric's Club in Liverpool, 1977
Adam and the Ants at Eric’s Club in Liverpool, 1977 

Before the flamboyant gyrating, Native American-obsessed pirate we all know and love as Adam Ant there was another fellow (born Stuart Leslie Goddard), who looked more like the proto-goths of the 70s such as Siouxsie Sioux (who Adam and The Ants often supported live back in the day) or Dave Vanian of The Damned.
 
Adam Ant and Sioux Siesioux backstage
Adam Ant and Siouxsie Sioux hanging out backstage, 1977
 
After joining his first band in 1975, Bazooka Joe, Goddard bore witness to what was likely the very first performance ever given by the Sex Pistols, who were the opening act for a Bazooka Joe gig. Goddard quickly quit the group and went on to form another band that never really got off the ground called, B-Sides. Following a battle with anorexia and a suicide that landed him in a psychiatric hospital, Goddard was released, changed his name to Adam Ant and eventually formed Adam and the Ants around 1977.
 
Adam Ant and Jordan live at The Vortex, 1977
Adam Ant (with Jordan) at the Vortex, (London, 1977)
 
In addition to some pretty amazing photos of Ant, his band and collaborator/punk fashion icon Jordan (aka Pamela Rooke who worked at the King’s Row boutique, SEX run by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood), I dug up this very punk recollection from UK music and culture historian, Tom Vague on the first time he laid eyes on Adam Ant in 1977:

The first time I saw Adam Ant he had just had ‘Fuck’ carved into his back by Jordan with a razor blade and World’s End was stained with his blood

Who knew everyone’s favorite post-punk jaunty pirate was so dangerous? Well, I’m sure some of you did, but that shouldn’t stop you from enjoying the following photos that pre-date Ant’s 80s fashion and antics.
 
Adam and the Ants (with Jordan) at The Marquee, 1977
Adam and the Ants (with Jordan) at The Marquee, 1977
 
Adam Ant, super goth, 1977
Adam Ant, 1977/1978
 
More, plus early film footage of Adam and the Ants, after the jump…

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Posted by Cherrybomb
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08.31.2015
12:17 pm
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‘Ant music for sex people’: Adam and the Ants live
07.22.2014
10:40 am
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Like Genesis and Ministry, Adam and the Ants had two distinct phases, each with fan bases that don’t always quite overlap 100%. Pre-1980, they were a raw, spiky post-punk band with sharp, fetishy lyrics. Things changed quickly for them in 1980, when their manager, the infamous Sex Pistols impresario Malcolm McLaren, poached most of the band for a new project called Bow Wow Wow. But eviscerating the group proved not to be such a terrible idea. Singer Stuart “Adam Ant” Goddard continued with an entirely new band, and a major sound and image overhaul. On the presentation end, the band dove headlong into an embrace of the new romanticism, favoring an overwrought leather-pantsed-new-wave-pirate look which unaccountably struck people at the time as just absolutely dead sexy. Well, it actually DID look good on Ant. Most of the rest of the band just kinda looked goofy.

Witness:
 

 
On the musical end, the Ants adopted a distinctive dual-drum attack inspired by the Royal Drummers of Burundi, and, just as critically, enlisted Siouxsie and the Banshees’ founding guitarist Marco Pirroni, who’d become Ant’s co-songwriter and a major influence on the band’s direction just as it started to find wide fame. This version of Adam and the Ants released Kings of the Wild Frontier and Prince Charming, both of which featured more sophisticated song craft than the band’s first iteration, and both of which ate the charts for breakfast. The single “Stand and Deliver,” for example, entered the UK charts at #1, and remained there for weeks.

The band broke up in 1982, and Ant embarked on a solo career, but it was an in-name-only breakup, really, as the creative nexus of Ant and Pirroni remained together. In fact, Pirroni has contributed to every Adam Ant solo album, all the way up to one that came out last year.

Live video of the first incarnation of Adam and the Ants is damnably difficult to find. The most widely available representation of that period is the album Dirk Wears White Sox, released in 1979 in the UK, 1983 in the US (A Jack Sparrow-lookin’ Ant recently reunited with band members of that era to play the album in its entirety), but the best video I could dig up is this delightful miming along with “Plastic Surgery” from Derek Jarman’s Jubilee:
 

 
Here’s one that features their early manager Jordan singing the song “Lou,” and Adam Ant backing her on vocals for “Puerto Rican.”
 

 
When I sought live footage of the far better-known second version of the band, holy shit, motherlode. Search for them on YouTube and you’ll see what I mean. Their visual presentation made them a sought-after act for televised music shows—and of course, the band’s early ‘80s heyday coincided with the launch of MTV, who couldn’t play their videos enough—but among the best footage I’ve found is this late 1981 show taped in Tokyo (setlist). I had always wondered if the distinctive vocal harmonies that featured prominently on their LPs were pulled off well in a live setting. Answer: actually not bad.
 

 
And then there’s this heavy performance of “Dog Eat Dog” in Manchester, 1980:

 
When Kings of the Wild Frontier was released in America, Epic Records, probably sensing that they might have a HUGE new act on their hands—maybe even a teeny-bopper phenomenon—lowered the price of the album to just $3.99 at a time when most albums were in the $6.98 list price range. Between that, Solid Gold and MTV, Adam and the Ants soon became famous in the US as well. Here’s a contemporary documentary about the American Ants invasion that is tons of fun:

Posted by Ron Kretsch
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07.22.2014
10:40 am
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Bauhaus, Japan, Cocteau Twins and more on ‘The Old Grey Whistle Test’


 
This morning, in the course of searching for a King Crimson video, I ran across an incredible - and given the criminally low view counts, apparently undiscovered - trove of high quality New Wave and Gothic videos from the legendary British television show The Old Grey Whistle Test, few of which are to be found on the DVD collection. I’ve posted a few of my favorites here, but there’s plenty more on the profile of YouTube user ArtNoyze. Enjoy.
 

Altered Images - ‘Insects’
 

Japan - ‘Ghosts’
 

Adam & The Ants - ‘Ant Invasion’
 
The Teardrop Explodes, Cocteau Twins and Bauhaus after the jump…

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Posted by Ron Kretsch
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11.23.2013
11:57 am
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