Adam Ant (Wikipedia).
Adam Ant is an English singer and musician. He gained popularity as the lead singer of new wave group Adam and the Ants and later as a solo artist, scoring 10 UK top ten hits from 1980 to 1983, including three UK No. 1 singles. He has also worked as an actor, appearing in over two dozen films and television episodes from 1985 to 2003.
Since 2010, Ant has undertaken an intense reactivation of his musical career, performing live regularly in his hometown of London and beyond, recording and releasing a new album and completing six full-length UK national tours, four US national tours, and two Australian tours[3][4][5] and with a fifth US tour scheduled and a further album completed and awaiting release.
Stuart Goddard was born an only child in Marylebone, London to Leslie Alfred Goddard and Betty Kathleen Smith. Home was two rooms in De Walden buildings, St John’s Wood. He recalls: “There was no luxury, but there was always food on the table.” His father had served in the Royal Air Force and worked as a chauffeur, and his mother was an embroiderer for Norman Hartnell. He is of partial Romani descent; his maternal grandfather, Walter Albany Smith, was Romanichal. This heritage would become a basis for a theme in his later work: a concern for oppressed minorities.
His parents divorced when Goddard was seven years old and his mother supported him by working as a domestic cleaner, briefly working for Paul McCartney.[7]Goddard’s first school was Robinsfield Infants School, where he created a considerable stir by throwing a brick through the head-teacher’s office window on two consecutive days. In the aftermath of this incident, Goddard was placed under the supervision of teacher Joanna Saloman, who encouraged him to develop his abilities in art and whom he would later credit as the first person to show him he could be creative artistically.
Goddard then attended Barrow Hill Junior School where he boxed, was a member of the cricket team and passed the eleven plus exam to gain a place at St Marylebone Grammar School which was an all boys school where he enjoyed history lessons, played rugby and later became a school prefect. After taking and passing six O levels and three A levels in English, History and Art,[6]:72 Goddard then attended Hornsey College of Art to study graphic design and for a time was a student of Peter Webb.[10] He later dropped out of Hornsey, short of completing his BA, to focus on a career in music
Since starting his course at Hornsey, Goddard had married fellow student Carol Mills, with whom he lived at her parents’ residence in Muswell Hill. Shortly after, he developed anorexia. “I just didn’t eat,” he has said of this period, “I wasn’t attempting to slim, I was attempting to kill myself.” Eventually, Goddard took an overdose of all the pills he could find in his mother-in-law’s kitchen cabinet. After having his stomach pumped, he was sent to Colney Hatch mental hospital in North London, eventually being discharged after 3 months[11] on condition of supervision by Mills. “I was totally fucked up in the head. Things went wrong and something snapped. I just became a vegetable for three months. I couldn’t talk to people. I was very ill and that was part of the reason I left college.”[12]
Upon his discharge from the hospital, Goddard renamed himself Adam Ant (possibly a play on the word adamant; Adam being the first man and Ant because “they are resilient little buggers”[citation needed]) with Mills renaming herself Eve. Ant remade connections with fellow former B-Sides Lester Square and Andy Warren and together with drummer Paul Flanagan, they formed Adam and the Ants (initially named just “The Ants”) in 1977, with the inaugural band meeting held in the audience at a Siouxsie and the Bansheesperformance at the Roxy Club in London’s Covent Garden.[13]
Adam and the Ants started as part of the burgeoning punk rock movement. Ant later acted in Derek Jarman‘s seminal “punk” film Jubileein 1977, as Adam and the Ants was beginning to gig around London with manager Jordan from the SEX Boutique on Kings Road. His debut as a recording artist was the song “Deutscher Girls“, which featured on the film’s soundtrack, along with “Plastic Surgery” which was performed in the film itself. “Deutscher Girls”/”Plastic Surgery” was re-released as a single in 1982. The band toured extensively around the UK but proved to be unpopular with much of the British music press who disliked their fetishistic lyrics and imagery. Late 1979 saw the release of their début album Dirk Wears White Sox (1979, Do It Records), with Matthew Ashman on guitar, Andy Warren on bass and Dave Barbarossa on drums.
Adam Ant approached Malcolm McLaren (the manager of The Sex Pistols) and asked him to manage the band. McLaren subsequently took the rest of the Ants from the original group when he introduced the singer Annabella Lwin and began the process of honing Bow Wow Wow for chart success. Later Adam seemed to have reconciled with the fact. “I like to use the word ‘mutiny’. My band was happy to go. Malcolm tried to see if I could fit into Bow Wow Wow, but I never could’ve or would’ve. I might have had a broken heart at the time, but Malcolm didn’t leave me with nothing. He mentored me. He said: ‘Look, what do you want?’ I said: ‘I wanna sell millions of records’, and he said, ‘Well, you’re going the wrong way about it. This [debut album Dirk Wears White Sox] is the kind of esoteric stuff you do when you’ve done eight albums, you’re living on a yacht, and you can do what you want’,” he remembered later.[14]
In November 1981, Adam & the Ants released another highly successful album, Prince Charming. The album featured two United Kingdom No. 1 singles – “Stand and Deliver” and the title track “Prince Charming” – as well as the No. 3 UK hit “Ant Rap“. This trio of singles was promoted by some of the most lavish music videos of the period and paved the way for Adam Ant’s later acting career.[15]The work schedule Adam Ant imposed upon himself was punishing. “I took no holidays – and I mean no holidays. When Kings of the Wild Frontier took off, I was halfway through making Prince Charming, and so on, because we had to bring out an album and four singles a year. But the price you pay… I split my cartilage in Cleveland doing “Goody Two Shoes”, it was my body saying, ‘Look, no!’ Then I was back onstage doing the Motown 25 [in 1983] show 10 days later, having had the operation. Nobody could have stopped me, or make me do it. I did it. I was very, very bad at pacing,” he later remembered.[14]
