Maureen Cleave interviewed the man of the moment in the world of pop for the Observer Magazine of 10 January 1982 (‘The Ant Phenomenon’). ‘Adam Ant,’ she wrote, ‘is a genuine teenage idol and he has put the scream, silent these 15 years, back into pop music.’
‘He is the very stuff of infant fantasy, part pirate, part highwayman, part Big Indian Chief, decked in all the random glories of the dressing-box.’ Ant, real name Stuart Goddard, then 27, took four hours preparing for his photograph. ‘Style is very, very time-consuming,’ he admitted.
However, ‘to think he is just a cosmetic creation to appeal to little girls,’ wrote Cleave, ‘would be to deny four years of unremitting toil in nasty clubs up and down the country where they spat at him and insulted him and made him suffer for his art and for his clothes.’
One eye-opening moment for Ant was when he saw the Sex Pistols play at St Martin’s School of Art in 1975. ‘They didn’t give a damn that they couldn’t play very well – it was the energy that mattered,’ he said. ‘In the 60s, every band could play, but music was dead. Nothing dangerous had happened in music since Elvis joined the army.’
Cleave defined him as ‘a passionate, though disillusioned, romantic’ and very anti-drugs – he said he blamed the Beatles for negatively influencing an entire generation. But he was particularly scathing about the commodification of punk: ‘Then came second-generation punk, which had an element of the football terraces; you got the skinhead revival, sectarian violence and dole-queue martyrdom. Punk was brought to the masses by the Daily Mirror, who printed the Do’s and Don’ts.’
Two months later, he went solo. Real punk, he argued, was a tiny nucleus of 100 people in London. ‘The aim was to alienate yourself from society and make a stand.’ And deliver, presumably?
