Mad World

by Lori Majewski

  In ’81, I did a royal variety show. It was great playing for the queen, marvelous. It’s very popular now—the pop world seems to fraternize a lot with the royals. But back then I got a lot of stick for doing it. They thought I’d sold out: “Oh, you’ve gone very straight.” It was a very traditional thing for me to do. But the queen’s very hip, as she proved with the [2012] Olympics. And she was then. I remember watching the Rolling Stones and the Beatles meeting the queen, so I thought it can be no bad thing.

  MARCO PIRRONI: Adam and the Ants were basically the group I would dream about back in school. This wild, glam-rock, mishmash, looking-weird thing. I didn’t have the pirates worked out, but I wanted everyone in the playground talking about us the next day. Like seeing Roxy doing “Virginia Plain” or Bowie doing “Starman” on Top of the Pops—as soon as you saw that, you couldn’t watch the rest of the show. You couldn’t sleep because you were so excited.

  I was completely done with punk by the end of ’77. It became an excuse to be stupid. It lost style; it lost subversiveness; it got really conformist. I thought the early punk thing was that old Oscar Wilde thing: “We’re all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” Well, the second generation was basically just “We’re all in the gutter.” They never moved on. A lot of them still haven’t.

  I was sitting around waiting for another band to join when I got a call from Adam, which was a surprise. I knew him very vaguely. I’d seen all the incarnations of the Ants, and I thought they were really good. They had some great songs but, me being me, I was always like, “I could do better.”

  It’s really strange, because the only two bands I really liked were the Ants and the Banshees, and I got to join both. But journalists loved the Banshees and hated the Ants. I didn’t think the Banshees were that great, to be honest. I thought the Ants were better. I didn’t understand why there was this constant slagging. It felt like every review was bad. But then, you know what journalists are like, especially back in the day. They were powerful—talk about make-or-break. But “Kings of the Wild Frontier” did get good reviews. They were like, “You are a genius now.”

  When I started working with Adam, he’d just been thrown out of his band. It must have been a right kick in the bollocks. He called me up the day after and said, “Look, I’ve been thrown out of the Ants.” I said, “Eh? How could you be thrown out of the Ants? Adam and the Ants!” I don’t think the band was particularly happy. They weren’t going anywhere. They got Malcolm in as a last-ditch attempt, and Malcolm had other ideas. He had the Bow Wow Wow project. He thought, I can use these three guys, but I can’t use Adam—he won’t do as he’s told. He’s going to be trouble. I think Adam was curled up in the fetal position for at least an hour. I’m sure there were some tears. It was like, “Someone stole my girl! Fucking bitch, I’ll show her!” Quite a normal reaction.

  Malcolm had come up with all these ideas about the tribal drumming, and in my head, it was very much The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. There was a stage show called Ipi Tombi that was all African drummers, and Adam was like, “We should get these guys from Ipi Tombi down.” I was terrified: “I don’t know anything about African drummers, or how to get them, or what I’m supposed to do with them.” Bow Wow Wow also used African drummers, but we went about it in a completely different way. I didn’t see them as rivals as much as Adam did, because he obviously had personal issues. It did turn it into a bit of a race. Until we actually heard them. Once our album was number one, Adam wasn’t feeling any need for revenge.

  MIXTAPE: 5 More Acts of Culture Plunder 1. “Buffalo Gals,” Malcolm McLaren 2. “Rapture,” Blondie 3. “Aie A Mwana,” Bananarama 4. “John Wayne Is Big Leggy,” Haysi Fantayzee 5. “Tantalize,” Jimmy the Hoover

  “Kings of the Wild Frontier” was the first song we wrote together. It was just two guitars. We didn’t have any recording equipment. There was no way of recording it. We didn’t even have a Dictaphone. We had to remember it every time we did it. It wasn’t a fully formed concept at all. I had no clue about songwriting. If it was now, we could just get the records we want to sound like and sample them. But back then it was like we were working on this formless thing that didn’t exist: African drumming plus twangy guitar. It was just a thing in our heads. It took fucking ages. We were in my house, this little flat in Earl’s Court. We worked a few hours a day—you can’t do more than that because then your mind starts going.

  “None of us were averse to wearing makeup. Being glam rockers, Bowie and Roxy fanatics, we had no problem with it…. I’m still the world’s greatest glam-rock obsessive.”

  You start forgetting everything. When we recorded it with the band, it was the first time it sounded like an actual song. But we always had the title. It was from Davy Crockett, which I used to love as a kid.

  My guitar sound wasn’t so much Duane Eddy; it’s more James Bond. It also comes from Phil Manzanera’s solo in the middle of “Needles in the Camel’s Eye” [from Brian Eno’s Here Come the Warm Jets]. There’s a twangy guitar solo on For Your Pleasure. It was more John Barry and Ennio Morricone than Duane Eddy. That’s the way I work: My mind is full of old records. It was also glam rock and Mick Ronson—he was my big guitar hero.

  None of us were averse to wearing makeup. Being glam rockers, Bowie and Roxy fanatics, we had no problem with it. Having two drummers was totally Glitter Band–inspired. It also looked great. I’m still the world’s greatest glam-rock obsessive. Totally pathetic. All my favorite records were made in 1972. For Your Pleasure, Transformer, Electric Warrior—that’s what I still listen to. It’s amazing I still find things to steal.

  The record company left us alone. There were these A&R men—I don’t know how old they were; they seemed ancient to me, [though they were] probably 24 or 26. They just took everything from the NME. When we said, “Look, we want to be this pop band with two drummers and lots of makeup,” they were baffled. We said, “Let us try and explain. You know pop stars, right? You know how they go on telly, and they like guitars and girls and money?” “That’s what you want to do?!” ’Cause that was the uncool thing. But we said, “Yeah!”

  We weren’t marketed. We were just left to our own devices. I didn’t know that musicians were interfered with by A&R men. I didn’t know what an A&R man did. We never went through the traditional routes—we never had art direction, we didn’t go to budget meetings. We only did what we wanted. When we did “Prince Charming,” it was like, “We’re known for records with lots of drums on them—let’s do a record with just one drum.”

  THAT WAS THEN

  BUT THIS IS NOW

  Ant and Pirroni’s hit-making partnership continued through the eighties and into the nineties with Ant solo singles “Goody Two Shoes” and “Wonderful.” Pirroni went on to work with Sinéad O’Connor on her acclaimed albums The Lion and the Cobra and I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got. Meanwhile, Ant dabbled in stage and TV acting and moved to Tennessee to raise a daughter.

  In the early 2000s, he was plagued by a well-publicized series of mental problems that saw him institutionalized on several occasions, including following a 2002 incident in which he threw a car alternator through a pub window. In 2011, he started playing live again with his new band, which he took to America in 2012 for his first tour of the States in 17 years to support his album, Adam Ant is the Blueblack Hussar in Marrying the Gunner’s Daughter.

  ANT: I went to see This Is It after Michael Jackson passed away. I sat there and I thought, A lot of the performers are going. Poly Styrene had passed away, and a number of other musicians, and there is only a certain time in your life when you can physically keep doing this. I’m pretty fit, so I thought, Now’s a great time to get back on board.

  In 2013 [I released] a new album. It may have been 16 years between albums, but it’s hopefully worth the wait. If I wanted to just do it for the money—and money’s not a bad thing when you’ve got a family, you’ve got expenses—then I would’ve just done those eighties-
hits tours where you get paid a lot to go out and sing your hits amongst other people from that generation. Once you do that, you can’t really go back to being taken seriously as a competitive, contemporary artist. Fortunately, I’ve managed to steer clear of that.

  “Not taking any time off for 20 years, it’s hardly surprising I’d succumbed to [mental breakdowns].”

  It’s very tempting because I was offered the O2 Arena. Take Spandau Ballet. I was offered that kind of situation where you hire a massive venue, like the O2, with 10,000 to 15,000 seats; they spend a year promoting it, and that’s it. You’ve made your comeback. Where do you go from there?

  Not taking any time off for 20 years, it’s hardly surprising I’d succumbed to [mental breakdowns]. The main thing with mental health is to realize the alarm bells and the triggers that cause it. In my case, it’s primarily due to overwork. Anybody who’s been through any kind of mental illness will tell you that you have to be very careful and live each day as it goes. I’ve learned to just say no. That was not the case before, where it was all, “Just do another few gigs,” and “We’ve got to have the record out next Thursday.” It was a [hamster] wheel. You’ve got to know how to get off. When I’m on tour, I’m really celebrating for myself. This is me having fun; this is me surviving. This is growing older with grace. There’s still lead in the pencil.

  PIRRONI: We were arrogant back then. We thought everyone else was shit. Looking back, they weren’t all shit. That attitude was a reaction against bands like New Order,** which we hated. They were coming from exactly the same place we were. They had exactly the same records. But at the time, I hated all that gray, grim Northern bollocks. But now I can see it’s just all Low and Heroes.

  As far as working with Adam again, it would be nice one day, but I don’t see it happening. We’d have to speak to each other to find that out, wouldn’t we?

  ** PETER HOOK, New Order: Musically, I love Adam and the Ants. They’re one of my favorite groups. But it was very difficult for me as a Northern male to relate to the dandy look. We would’ve been laughed out of Manchester had we even considered it. Bernard [Sumner] and I used to go out in London with all them lot—Siouxsie and the Banshees to the Embassy Club, Rusty Egan when he used to run the Blitz. We looked like working-class yobs, and everyone else was dressed up as a pirate. Leigh Bowery had a candle melted all over his head, and there’s me and Barney in our motorbike jackets looking like greasers.

  “CARS”

  he late 1970s were teeming with highly regarded synthesizer acts of which great things were expected. The original, enigmatic incarnation of the Human League had a ton of U.K. music-press credibility and a fan following that included the godfather of new wave himself. “Listening to the Human League is like listening to 1980,” Bowie said—in 1979. Meanwhile, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’s debut single on Factory, “Electricity,” put them near the top of most major labels’ sign-them-now lists, and Ultravox received raves for their album Systems of Romance, which saw the group jettison their glam-punk origins and embrace the Teutonic android within. No one expected anything from Gary Numan. You could read your way through a small forest of British pop papers and magazines and never see his name. You could listen to months of late-night radio shows and never hear one of his songs. But Numan was the first and, albeit briefly, the biggest star produced by Britain’s burgeoning electronic music scene. In 1979, less than a year after he made his recording debut, he had two consecutive number-one singles and albums in Britain, and by 1980 “Cars” hit the Top 10 in the United States. He was soon overtaken by the better-known electronic acts he had originally surpassed but, for one shining moment, Numan’s out-of-nowhere success was like discovering an alien among us.

  JB: In 1972, David Bowie made his debut on Top of the Pops performing “Starman.” The next day, legend has it, hardened British soccer thugs were slathering on nail polish and eyeliner. I was too young and clueless to have any lasting memory of that phenomenon. In 1978, Gary Numan, then the 20-year-old leader and focal point of synth act Tubeway Army, appeared on both TOTP and boring elder-sibling The Old Grey Whistle Test in the same week, performing “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?” While Numan didn’t have quite the seismic generational impact that Bowie did, that one-two TV punch sired a vast cult of British Numanoids almost overnight—and that phenomenon, I was absolutely around for. Numan’s glowering mass of worshipers, with their black hair, black suits, red ties, and mad, staring eyes, made quite the picture. Their idol may have lacked Bowie’s performance skills, fluid sexuality, and unique vision, yet there was something about his chalky pallor, panicked gaze, and strangled yelp of a voice that made him seem like a genuine man who fell to Earth. Even when he tackled subject matter as universal as automobiles, he still seemed like an alien visitor awkwardly attempting to acclimate himself to human transportation. But whether you were entranced by his otherworldliness or felt outrage at his wholesale pilfering of leftover bits of Bowie, “Cars” is a compelling testimony to Numan’s ability to pen a hook sturdy enough to last a lifetime.

  LM: In 1980 I was nine years old, and my favorite group was Air Supply. My favorite album was the Grease soundtrack. My father had Warren Zevon’s Excitable Boy on repeat. I knew nothing of Ziggy Stardust, so when “Cars” came out, I thought Gary Numan was the most original thing ever. He was like a space vampire. “Cars” was my introduction to new wave, and that momentous event occurred while I was simultaneously laying eyes on that space vampire! For me, that was the moment when video plunged a stake through the heart of the radio star. Although I didn’t yet know what new wave was, I recognized this Gary Numan guy hailed the arrival of a new sound—music that was dance-y like disco, exciting, and futuristic. Later I found out that everything I thought was new and exciting about him had been ripped off from David Bowie. But I didn’t care and still don’t.

  GARY NUMAN: My introduction to electronic music was by accident. I got signed up by the Beggars Banquet label with my punk band, Tubeway Army, at the end of ’78, pretty much as the punk thing had peaked and was on its way out. They sent me to record what had been my live set up to that point, 40 minutes of punk songs. When I got to the studio, there was a Minimoog synthesizer in the corner of the control room waiting to be collected by a hire company, which, luckily for me, never turned up, and I was able to use it for two or three days. I’d never seen one before, and I loved it. It had been left on a setting that sounded amazing, this huge bottom-end, roaring, rumbling sound. I wouldn’t have known how to get that sound; I didn’t know anything about synthesizers. They were just a bunch of dials to me.

  Over the next day or two, I was able to experiment. I developed a massive passion for electronic music practically overnight. I very hastily converted my pure punk songs into electronic songs, and I went back to the record company with a pseudo-electronic punk album. It wasn’t what they wanted, it wasn’t what they signed me for, and, understandably, they were quite unhappy with it. When we presented the album, it got really silly. One of the directors stood up to fight me—it got that childish. The thing that saved me was the record company had no money whatsoever. Whatever tiny budget they had to put me in the studio, they’d blown it all. They couldn’t afford to put me back in to give them the album they really wanted. It was one of the rare occasions that being on a label with no money was actually a good thing.

  The album, Tubeway Army, went out in 1978, and it didn’t set the world on fire, but it didn’t go down badly the way they thought it would. So they put me back in the studio to do another one just a few months later, and that one, Replicas, went to number one. I had a number-one single [“Are ‘Friends’ Electric?”] and a number-one album at the same time, so I was vindicated.

  Within a few months of “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?” going to number one in the U.K., “Cars” came out and went to number one. I went from never having seen a synthesizer to having two number-one singles and a number-one album in 12 months. It was pretty meteoric. I was doing in
terviews with technology magazines about programming synthesizers and didn’t have a clue what they were talking about. They were asking me about envelopes and fills and boffin shit. I just blagged and bullshitted my way through it. I pretended I knew what they were talking about, then I’d go home and try to figure it out. It was a really exciting time, but I was hopelessly out of my depth.

  I went from being absolutely unknown—I think I’d done one tiny interview with a little local punk fanzine—and then I was number one. There was nothing in between. It was like living in a bipolar world where people you’ve never met love you all of a sudden, then you walk around a corner and somebody hates the air that you breathe even though you’ve never met them. And you’re suddenly doing TV shows with people you’ve loved and admired for years, and now you’re one of them, but you don’t feel like you’re one of them—you feel like an intruder that snuck in the back door. I thought that I’d been very lucky to get where I was and that my songwriting needed to be much, much better to justify the amount of success I had. So I actually felt slightly embarrassed and guilty at times about finding myself in the position I was in.

  I’m glad it happened, nonetheless. I look back on it now and think I probably could have enjoyed it so much more if I had just been a bit calmer and more worldly and definitely if it had happened a little more slowly. I’d made it on my second album, and I’d made it massive. At one point, in the U.K. alone, I was selling 45,000 singles a day. It was all down to Top of the Pops. You got on that program and you pretty much made it overnight. It was very difficult to get on; you had to have at least a small amount of success. Again, with me, I was very lucky.