Born on November 3: Adam Ant, inventor of tribal punk rock
He was born in the Marylebone district of London and continues to be called Stuart Leslie Goddard in real life - certainly less flashy than Adam Ant!
I haven't found confirmation anywhere but it is very likely that the singer borrowed his stage name from the British adventure TV series "Adam Adamant Lives!", broadcast between 1966 and 1967 on the BBC. As he was about twelve years old at the time, he was part of the target audience! What's more, his stage outfit in the early days of Adam & The Ants in late 1979 and his junk Indian makeup clearly showed a weakness for pseudo-adventurer disguises.
Before he got into an irreconcilable argument with them and they left to found Bow Wow Wow under the leadership of Malcolm McLaren, Adam laid the foundations of "tribal punk rock" with drummer Dave Barbarossa and guitarist Matthew Ashman. Because of their improbable look, they are considered -dare we say it- as somewhat pathetic clowns by the other tenors of the emerging new wave. With an inimitable style, Adam & The Ants nevertheless chalked up a dozen hits and even several number 1s in the United Kingdom. "Antmusic", "Prince Charming", "Kings of The Wild Frontier" and "Stand and Deliver" are comets that streaked across the sky of English music between 1980 and the middle of 1981. Four short laps and then they were gone!
Orphaned by his group, Adam Ant did not give up. Initially relying on rhythms that evoke his short-lived fame, he then broadened his palette with five studio albums which, it must be admitted, met with only relative success. The last one, "Wonderful", was released in 1995.
Today, like many artists of his generation, he regularly talks about new recordings in preparation but with the exception of the strange but interesting "Adam Ant is the Blue Black Hussar" self-produced in 2013, he is mostly content to regularly dust off his aging pirate rags by playing the nostalgia card. There is nothing wrong with that, of course!
(AK/ML - Photo: Etienne Tordoir)
Photo: Adam Ant, in full glory, on the stage of the Ancienne Belgique in Brussels (Belgium) on May 16, 1981 (© Etienne Tordoir)