Ant Misbehavin’

“Steve Jobs did fuck all for music. He raped songwriters and turned music to a digital hell. He was only into one thing – money!”

Adam Ant is not, it’s fair to say, a fan of Apple and their recently deceased CEO, who was somewhat more benovelently described by Bono as “the hardware software Elvis.”
“Steve Jobs has left a shit legacy for children of my daughter’s age who’ve had music reduced to a commodity,” insists the 57 year-old singer who if no longer the Dandy Highwayman, still cuts quite a dash as he strolls round his London manor. “The art’s been bled out of it by people with no loyalty to the concept of an album or developing an artist. That’s why I’m going to do my new record (Adam Ant Is The Blueback Hussar In Marrying The Gunner’s Daughter) as a double gatefold vinyl – it’s not old-fashioned, it’s just doing things the right way.
“Summat else,” he harrumphs, “there’ll be no free downloads. If an artist considers his work to be worth fuck all, that doesn’t send out a very good message. It cost me money to make it, so they’re going to have to buy it.”
Ant’s dislike of, ahem, hardware software Elvises, is matched by his aversion to major record companies.
“Do you know what royalty rate I was on in the ‘80s with CBS? Nine pence in the fucking pound, and out of that I had to finance the videos, the tours and everything. I remember going to Japan and discovering they’d scheduled 24 hours of interviews for me without a break. Since then I’ve learned three very important words – ‘no’, ‘fuck’, ‘you’.”
My first time seeing Adam in the flesh was in the London Marquee in 1978 when he was dragged onstage at the end of a dog lead by his then manager and Sex Pistols acolyte Jordan (no relation) whose riding crop and 6” stiletto spikes were both used for giddying up purposes. Being a naïve 14 year-old, I hadn’t quite picked up on the sexual subtext of songs like ‘Whip In My Valise’ and ‘Deutscher Girls’, but very quickly did so when a gentleman in an S&M rubber face-mask grabbed my crotch.
“Those were the days, eh?” Adam smiles. “We were young, dumb and full of it. It was sexy, violent, dangerous and a bit of a revolution. Punk rock was the last time music had anything to say, really.”
While portrayed as the devil incarnate by most ex-scenesters, Adam also has fond memories of punk agitator Malcolm McLaren.
“He wasn’t a particularly nice person on the surface, but scrape away and he was very learned, and one of the four only great rock ‘n’ roll managers in history – the others being Colonel Tom Parker, Brian Epstein and Peter Grant who brought the whole of Led Zeppelin along to see me one night. Malcolm was more intelligent than all of them put together and was an anarchist, so he’d take you to the edge and then leave you there. He gave us punk rock and The Sex Pistols, and for that God bless him; I miss Malcolm enormously.”
Having been a chart regular from 1979 to 1985, Adam’s career was badly derailed by mental health issues, which reached their very public nadir in 2002 when he was sectioned for brandishing a starting pistol in a London pub.
“When they put me on the anti-depressants I stopped writing because they knock the crap out of everything,” he reflects. “After the doctors weaned me off ‘em though, the ideas came flooding back and I’m as productive now as I’ve ever been. One of the things I want to do is de-stigmatise bipolar disorder, which is what the doctors tell me I've got. You can get insured if you’re an alcoholic or a junkie but if you’re a bit challenged upstairs, forget it.”
While understandably battered and bruised by his experiences, Adam still considers music to be the Rolls Royce of professions.
“It’s the reason I got to meet Malcolm and the late great inventor of pop art, Eduardo Luigi Paolozzi,” he enthuses. “It also got me an invitation from Berry Gordy to play at the Motown 25 show in 1982. I did a cover of ‘Baby Where Did Our Love Go’ and Diana Ross came on halfway through, which was quite a shock. It was the first time that Michael Jackson had performed ‘Billie Jean’ in public. He was a lovely fella, but damaged by the fact he’d been working from the age of like, four. Rob somebody of their childhood and it’s going to have repercussions. Rob anybody of any part of their life and it's going to have repercussions...”

Adam Ant & The Good, The Mad & The Lovely Posse play Vicar St., Dublin on November 25.