DAY 457.
The Cramps............................Songs The Lord Taught Us   (1980)











Songs The Lord Taught Us celebrates the trashiest elements of twentieth-century Americana. The Cramps debut chewed up rockabilly riffs, punk rebellion, and B-movie imagery, and spat out a gloriously primeval gob of rock 'n' roll noise.


It may have been a flop, but this album exerted a huge influence. It showed groups like The Gun Club and The Birthday Party that they did not have to burn rocks back catalogue, just reinvent it in their own twisted way.

DAY 458.
Dead Kennedys..............................................Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables   (1980)











DK’s debut album, released in 1980, is considered a landmark in the hardcore punk genre. With songs offering a searing satirical take on just about everything from war to mental illness, the record set the stage for the political, humorous bent of the music made by the scores of bands this record would inspire.


 


 The album blends surf rock with the fastest, hardest sounding punk made up to that point to create possibly the creepiest album ever to come out of the Bay Area. The album art is a photograph of a protest which took place following the death of the San Francisco politician and activist, Harvey Milk. Rioters set on fire several police cars, as seen in the image.

 The album exists in several versions, each with a unique album cover, the most common release being used here for the track listing. Many early ‘80s copies featured “Police Truck”[/url] between [url=https://genius.com/Dead-kennedys-lets-lynch-the-landlord-lyrics]“Let’s Lynch the Landlord”[/url] and [url=https://genius.com/Dead-kennedys-drug-me-lyrics]“Drug Me.”[/url] “Police Truck” is thus featured here as an unnumbered track. It would later find more widespread album release on [url=https://genius.com/albums/Dead-kennedys/Give-me-convenience-or-give-me-death]Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death[/url]. Additionally, a release in 1980 by Cherry Red added [url=https://genius.com/Dead-kennedys-too-drunk-to-fuck-lyrics]“Too Drunk To Fuck” to the album, so it is featured here as well.

Goodie Conway 2 wrote:

PatReilly wrote:

A wee story about Dexys. You know how  a story gets repeated so often, that folk begin to believe it? Well, I was the banjo player in Dexys, although not on this album, but the follow up. I let folk in on this when 'Come On Eileen' hit the charts, could hardly deny it because I'm there, in the video, playing the banjo. Periodically people still ask me about it.

Some of the stuff I've told people, I begin to wonder myself if it's true.
 

 
Really Pat? Wow!

No, it's not true. But a pile of folk believe it now, so I just let it lie. And the banjo boy was/is my double, nose and all.

Another one I thought wasn't true, but told people at airports anyway, was that I had metal in my knees..... to get out of the awkward questions when I set the scanners off.

But after an MRI scan yesterday, it turns out that it is a fact.

So now I'm wondering about some of the other stuff which has come out of my mouth over the years.
 

DAY 450.
Michael Jackson................................................Off The Wall   (1979)













Right, Off The Wall a great album, but a great album only in it's time frame in my humbles. This album has some great tracks, I still think the intros on "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough" and "Off The Wall" are two of the best from the disco genre.


I know I shouldn't let the "kiddy fiddlin' " rumours cast a shadow on my thoughts on Michael Jackson, but I do struggle to detach Jackson the musician from Jackson the pay-off king.


Anyways back to the album, I was never really into his music anyway but I didn't hate it, I can appreciate it was a very well orchestrated and produced album with decent vocals, but I can't help but feel this album was a lifetime away, with no particular memories which for me is pretty abnormal, most songs have at least a glimpse of what I was doing at this time but "Off The Wall"...............Nada. 


The title track and "Rock With You" and "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough" are alright, but thon "She's Out Of My Life" certainly "cuts like a knife" every time I hear it, what a load of unadulterated fuckin' drivel.


This album wont be going into my collection.




Bits & Bobs;



Michael was the seventh of nine children (Janet and Randy are younger). They grew up in a two-bedroom house in Gary, Indiana. The six boys slept in one room, while the three girls shared the other with the parents, Joe and Katherine.


Here are the siblings, in order of birth: Rebbie, Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, La Toya, Marlon, Michael, Randy and Janet


.
He was married twice, first to Elvis Presley's daughter Lisa Marie from 1994-1996, then to his former housekeeper Debbie Rowe from 1996-1999.


Lisa Marie explained, "We probably connected because our lives were different to most other people." She said that their marriage fell apart when it became clear that he wanted her to be part of his public life, whereas she shied away from the spotlight.


 
He had two children from his marriage to Debbie Rowe: Prince Michael Joseph Jackson Jr. and Paris Michael Katherine Jackson. Macaulay Culkin is their godfather. His third son, Prince Michael Joseph Jackson II (nicknamed "Blanket), was born to a surrogate mother.


 
The actress Elizabeth Taylor was his best friend. She is the godmother of his son, Prince.


 
His idols included Charlie Chaplin, Fred Astaire, Gene Kelley, Berry Gordy, Quincy Jones, The Three Stooges and Walt Disney.


 
Here's his connection with tennis player John McEnroe: his first date was with actress Tatum O'Neal, the daughter of Ryan O'Neal, who went on to marry and divorce McEnroe.


 
As a teenager, he had terrible acne which made him very self-conscious.


 
The "King of Pop" moniker was Jackson's idea, and his label tried to talk him out of it because they thought it would backfire. Dan Beck, who was in the marketing department of Epic Records at the time, he explained: "Our feeling was that radio was going to just roll their eyes and say, 'Screw you!' This was around the time of Dangerous, the late '80s and beginning of the '90s, and here was a guy that the tabloids were starting to talk about his skin color, they were starting to talk about the plastic surgery and the Elephant Man and the hyperbaric chamber – I guess those were probably the first four aspects of Michael starting to take hits in the media."


 
He suffered from a disease called vitiligo, and he also is allergic to too much sunlight. That's why he wore sunglasses in public and usually had an umbrella with him.


 
In 1985, Jackson made perhaps his best financial decision when he bought the publishing rights to most Beatles songs for $47.5 million, using money from the profits of Thriller. This ended his friendship with Paul McCartney, who felt betrayed by Jackson.


 
In 1984, he was awarded a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame directly in front of Mann's Chinese Theatre.


 
On June 25, 2009, Jackson collapsed at his rented mansion in Los Angeles. Attempts at resuscitating him by his personal physician were unsuccessful, and he was pronounced dead at the UCLA Medical Center at 2:26 p.m. local time. Jackson had been preparing for his This Is It tour, a series of 50 concerts to be held at London's 02 Arena beginning July 8. It was to be his first tour since 1997.


 
His memorial service at the Staples Center in Los Angeles on July 7, 2009 was a major event, with most TV networks covering it and many celebrities speaking at the service. 17,500 tickets were made available to the public, and more than 1.2 million people signed up for a lottery to get them.


 
Michael Jackson's famous crystal-studded glove was actually just a modified golf glove.


 
Michael Jackson was raised as a Jehovah's Witness and was active until his disassociation in 1987. Despite his tremendous fame and great fortune, the Thriller star was still door-to-door proselytizing for his faith twice a week in the mid-1980s and regularly attending meetings at Kingdom Hall with his mother when he was in town.


 
The actor Marlon Brando was one of Jackson's best friends who would sometimes visit him at Neverland Ranch. Even Brando's son, Miko, was a bodyguard for Jackson for several years and recalled that his dad was treated well by the King of Pop. Brando had breathing problems later in his life and if by some chance he wanted to move around Neverland, Jackson would attach a portable oxygen tank to a golf cart that they would cruise around the ranch in as a means to keep Brando from losing breath.




 Off the Wall is the sound of young Michael Jackson's liberation. Though he would become even more successful in the '80s, Off the Wall remains unabashedly fun to return to for its joy and lack of baggage. For 41 minutes, we can live in the eternally young Neverland Michael longed for, a universe largely without consequence or death.


 In the summer of 1976, a variety show called "The Jacksons" debuted on CBS. The program came about during a relatively fallow period for the showbiz brood, after the Jackson 5 ignited nationwide fervor with hits like "ABC" and "I’ll Be There" but before Michael Jackson set out for solo superstardom. Their future success seemed in doubt, and the show—with its glaring lights, sparkling costumes, and rampant cheesiness—was a Vegas-style extravaganza that played to well-worn pleasures. One recurring segment called "On the Wall" saw Michael inviting various guest hosts to sign a fake brick facade and do a little dance before everyone eventually ended up in a frozen ta-dah! pose. Though Michael was all smiles on "The Jacksons," he later claimed that he "hated every minute" of it. During the show’s year-long run, he was smack in the middle of gangly teenagedom, acne and all. Raised in the limelight by an infamously strict father, Michael was painfully self-conscious, worried that he might never be able to shake his child stardom. He didn’t want to merely cling to his family’s fading notoriety. He wanted to break away from it completely.


 Off the Wall is the sound of that liberation. And he knew exactly what he was doing. On November 6, 1979, just as the album was starting to take off, Michael wrote a note to himself on the back of a tour itinerary, a proclamation of self so ambitious it could make Kanye blush. "MJ will be my new name, no more Michael Jackson. I want a whole new character, a whole new look, I should be a totally different person. People should never think of me as the kid who sang ‘ABC’ [and] ‘I Want You Back,’" he jotted down. "I should be a new incredible actor singer dancer that will shock the world. I will do no interviews. I will be magic. I will be a perfectionist, a researcher, a trainer, a masterer… I will study and look back on the whole world of entertainment and perfect it. Take it steps further from where the greats left off."


 Those words were eerily prescient in many ways, of course, but they also highlight one of Michael’s most important dualities: He wanted to be magical—to defy expectation and reality—but he knew that such skills could not materialize from thin air. He understood that exceptionalism took hard work. Growing up in the Motown system, he would often sit in on sessions, soaking up lessons from the greats: Diana Ross, Marvin Gaye, the Temptations. He studied the way James Brown, Sammy Davis Jr., and Fred Astaire moved their feet onstage, in movies, and on TV. At 17, he counted hallowed masters like Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, and Duke Ellington among his favorite songwriters. He had released four solo albums in the early ’70s, but Off the Wall, which came out when he was 21, finally allowed him to flex all those hours of research into something that was his.


 It also marked a moment of idealism. Around the time of Off the Wall, Michael’s musical and physical changes felt natural—joyous extensions of the black American experience. Disco was overwhelmingly popular, breaking down color lines and radio formats while offering utopia on the dancefloor. Coming from the segregated, working-class city of Gary, Ind., Jackson's achievements and acceptance represented a rosy view of the country’s future. But 1979 was scarred by the beginning of the quasi-racist "disco sucks" backlash; Michael also got his first nose job that year, narrowing his nostrils. And though he would become even more successful in the '80s, those astronomical heights sometimes catered to white tastes—in both appearance and sound—in a way that could seem effortful, cynical, and sad.


 So part of the reason why Off the Wall remains so unabashedly fun to return to involves that lack of baggage. For 41 minutes, we can live in the eternally young Neverland Michael longed for, a universe largely without consequence or death.


 The album was released toward the tail end of the disco era and it managed to encompass much of what made that style so infectious while also pushing out its edges. "Our underlying plan was to take disco out. That was the bottom line," the record’s producer, Quincy Jones, once said. "I admired disco, don’t get me wrong. I just thought it had gone far enough." Jones, a calm, jazzy Zen master who had worked with Dizzy Gillespie, Frank Sinatra, and Count Basie, helped Michael flesh out his own songs as well as tracks written by others, putting forth a record that is at once beautifully simple and sneakily complex.


 Most of these songs follow the most basic disco tenet: Put all of your worries behind you and just dance. Michael took part in this type of ecstasy while filming 1978’s The Wiz in New York City, when he would spend his downtime brushing shoulders with the likes of Woody Allen, Liza Minelli, Steven Tyler, and Jane Fonda at Studio 54. By all accounts, Michael didn’t take part in the club’s notorious orgies of sex and drugs, but he observed it, standing by the DJ booth and noticing which songs drew the biggest reactions. And he would dance, getting high off of the music and movement around him.


 Alongside Jones, Michael made his own disco anthems, but rather than merely copying what came before, he expanded the form with dense, orchestral arrangements that mixed in sophisticated layers of strings, horns, and syncopation while never never losing their underlying funk. This is heard on iconic opener,"Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough" the first song Michael ever wrote by himself and the first of four record-breaking Top 10 hits from the album, which has now sold 30 million copies worldwide. It's an ode to the power of romantic love, something Michael had little experience with at that point. But the track’s intricacies, as well as the singer’s effortlessly rhythmic yelps and phrasing, suggest a deeper understanding, one that goes beyond words. Another Michael-penned track, "Working Day and Night," hints at the detrimental effects of his workaholic upbringing and an encroaching paranoia, though ricocheting guitar lines and exuberant horns keep the groove moving along smoothly.


 There are more overt experiments here, too. "Off the Wall" begins with 15 seconds of sinister-sounding laughter and spaced-out instrumentation—a precursor to the high-wattage oddities of "Thriller"; co-written by Stevie Wonder and originally intended for Songs in the Key of Life, "I Can’t Help It" incorporates smooth jazz and twinkling synths—its influence on Pharrell’s off-kilter funk cannot be overstated. The ballad "She's Out of My Life" risks stopping the album cold with its beat-less melodrama but ends up being a classic of the form, with Michael audibly moved to tears at the end of the song, his voice cracking. It’s an imperfect moment from a noted perfectionist, and Jones’ production handles the emotion with understated grace. "A lesser producer would have milked all that drama for all it’s worth," says ?uestlove in the doc, laughing. "Trust me, if Puffy was producing ‘She’s Out of My Life’ he would have had… Kleenex sponsor the tour."




 The joke resonates. Off the Wall is the product of a boy who was reared by his father to be a product, whose idols were often found on his TV screen, who understood his own commodification enough to want to reject it—while also aiming to sell a gazillion albums and unite the world and become the ultimate entertainer. There are many contradictions in that quest and, in hindsight, Michael’s subsequent pitfalls almost seem inevitable. But Off the Wall was that unlikely moment of balance, when Michael Jackson’s purity and innocence still seemed holy, not stunted or distorted. When he cried on record, he was living his art, giving us a genuine performance.




"Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough"


 
The chorus contains one of the most misheard vocals ever. The line is: "Keep up with the force, don't stop. Don't stop 'til you get enough." Jackson may have been inspired by the movie Star Wars, which popularized the concept of "The Force."


 
To this point, Michael Jackson had recorded four #1 hits with The Jackson 5, and one as a solo artist ("Ben," a 1972 song about a pet rat). But this was the first chart-topper he wrote himself. Quincy Jones, who produced the album, encouraged Jackson to write his own songs, and the young singer quickly developed a talent for composition. Jackson wrote or co-wrote nine more #1 hits in his career, including "We Are The World."



Jackson and Jones first worked together on music for the 1978 film The Wiz (Jackson played the Scarecrow); Off The Wall was the first album Jones produced for him.


 
Jackson wrote this for an extremely high vocal range. Since his voice could not carry this alone, he was overdubbed a few times to create a harmony and fill out the vocals.


 
The video was very advanced for its time. It showed Jackson dancing in front of various funky backgrounds, with three images of Michael on the screen for a while. Director Nick Saxton, who was a production assistant on George Lucas's pre-Star Wars film THX-1138, was brought in to helm the clip.


According to Bruce Swedien, who was the engineer on the session, Jackson, his brother Randy and sister Janet tapped soda bottles with drumsticks to form some of the percussion at the beginning of this song. Swedien recorded this part using old ribbon microphones.

Janet told Ryan Seacrest: "He [Michael] had all these ideas and he needed someone to help him out. We were just kids, we were just babies, and so we're up there playing all kinds of percussion to help him create that to give to Quincy so they could put the real thing down."


 
This was the first Michael Jackson song where he made lots of screams and squeals throughout the vocals. He had tremendous success with the same technique on much of the Thriller album.


 
Musicians on this track include David Williams and Marlo Henderson on guitars, Louis Johnson on bass and John Robinson on drums. Greg Phillinganes, a keyboard player who worked on most of Jackson's solo albums beginning with Off The Wall, made significant contributions to the track. He's credited for "rhythm arrangement" along with Jackson, but Quincy Jones thinks he deserved a songwriting credit as well. "Greg Phillinganes wrote the C section," Jones said. "Michael should've given him 10 percent of the song. Wouldn't do it."


  
Jackson won his first Grammy Award for this song, taking home the trophy for Best R&B Vocal Performance, Male.


 
Off The Wall was the first album Jackson recorded for Epic Records. All of his previous solo work was with Motown.



"Rock With You"


This was written by Rod Temperton, who was the keyboard player and primary songwriter in the group Heatwave. He wrote their 1977 hit "Boogie Nights," which got the attention of Michael Jackson's producer, Quincy Jones, who enlisted Temperton to write some songs for Jackson. The arrangement work out quite well: The first song he wrote for Jackson was "Rock With You." Temperton also wrote the "title track to the album" and later contributed the title song to Jackson's next album: "Thriller."


 
This song is ostensibly about dancing, but the sexual subtext is clear. Jackson wants his girl to relax and let the music take over her body, but when they "share that beat of love," it's not likely to happen on the dance floor.


 
The original title was "I Want To Eat You Up," but it was quickly changed to fit Jackson's image as a wholesome heartthrob.


 
When "rock" is used as a verb in a song title, it typically means to play or enjoy rock music . This song appropriated it as another way to describe dancing while implying something more ("boogie" and "groove" were often used in this context). Justin Timberlake used it the same way in his disco-tinged 2002 hit "Rock Your Body."


Early in the hip-hop era, Run-D.M.C. declared the group "King of Rock," claiming their stake. They distanced themselves from Jackson with the line, "It's not Michael Jackson and this is not Thriller" and by stepping on his glove in the video.


Especially when you watch the video, it dawns on you that this was a disco song... in 1979, when disco was supposed to be sleeping with the fishes (it wouldn't be right to say 'deader than disco'). In fact, it even has some soul overtones. Jackson was well-suited for the dance beats of disco, and was able to work in the genre when it was well past its prime.
 
 Bruce Gowers directed the music video, which was shot the same day as the clip for "She's Out of My Life." Gowers, who also directed Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody," remembered working with a tight budget to create the smoky promo, with Jackson glimmering in a sequined suit. He told Rolling Stone: "In those days they were done for peanuts. Absolute peanuts. I think about all we could afford was the laser. This one was probably about $3,000. If you look at it, there's nothing there but a laser and Michael Jackson. When we did this, this was the start of his solo career. He was very, very timid, very quiet, very unassuming. Really nice, he's an absolute professional, even in those days.


It was filmed on a little stage in LA called the 800 Stage, a little stage that we got cheap because we were shooting quite a lot of music videos. There was minimal editing as well, because obviously in those days editing costs money. It was about $350 per machine per hour. If you were using two playbacks and one record, that was a lot of money Everything was rented, trust me: the cameras, the stage, the Duvetyne drop, the smoke."



"Off The Wall"

This was written by Rod Temperton, a British musician who was the primary songwriter and keyboard player in the band Heatwave. Quincy Jones was impressed with the Heatwave song "Boogie Nights," so he had Temperton write some songs for Jackson.


 
The Off The Wall album sold over 10 million copies and make Michael Jackson the first solo artist with four US Top 10 hits from the same album.


 
Jackson's appearance started to change shortly after the album was released, as he started his run of plastic surgery. By the time Off The Wall was reissued in 2001, Jackson looked nothing like his former self, and the cover used just the image of his feet.


 
Can you even count the honors this album received? Rolling Stone's "500 greatest albums of all time," #68. NARM's "definitive 200 albums of all time," #80. Inducted into the Grammy hall of fame, 2008. Won three American Music Awards, one Billboard Music Award, and as mentioned, one Grammy. Rave reviews sang its praises, then and now. Multi-platinum seller in Australia, Mexico, New Zealand, and the US. 

DAY 460.
The Soft Boys.................................Underwater Moonlight   (1980)












Formed in Cambridge in 1976,The Soft Boys fused pop hooks with folk rock and snotty punk aggression. Lead singer Robyn Hitchcock, guitarist Kimberley Rew, drummer Morris Windsor and bassist Mathew Seligman never quite fitted in with the music trends of the time, but time has a funny way of catching up when the music is this good.


It would be the last proper album by the band, Hitchcock went on to pursue a prolific solo career with Windsor in his backing band The Egyptians, while Rew went on to form Katrina and the Waves. But The Soft Boys legacy grew as bands such as REM and The Replacements cited them as prime influences.

Machine Gun Etiquette: fantastic sounding album, The Damned were very good instrumentalists, and they are still on the go, new album this year and touring (up in Edinburgh in a fortnight, support from Johnny Moped).
 
Really powerful opening and closing tracks too, timeless stuff.
 
Story: when I worked at Denny, a wee lad used to turn up dressed as Captain Sensible, with the wooly outfit and sunglasses/beret. A right good lad, decent footballer too who played Junior in later years. Anyway, I was friendly through football and music tastes with him after he left school, eventually he would come to the local pub which I still regularly frequent. And in the ‘nineties, when The Damned were touring in Scotland, he even arranged for the band to stay in the same pub/hotel. Over and above all this, he has his own band who have since supported The Damned.
 
Aye, The Damned stayed in Larbert. A minor claim to fame.

DAY 453.
The Specials............................................The Specials   (1979)












This is another great album,I was lucky enough to see them at the Hammersmith Palais I think it must have been about 1979/80, I never kept the ticket stub so working it out by the girl I was down there  with it's got to be about that time. Anyways what a concert, it has to be one of the most tiring concerts I've ever been to, non stop 2 tone/ska you couldn't not dance, it was that rammed you just had to go with the flow.The band, every one of them were sweating "like a blind lesbian in a fish shop" and to cap it we got on the stage with what seemed like hundreds of others at the end dancing away with the band, no security trying to lob you out, and the band actually interacting getting boys to sing into the mike, a great night and thank fuck it was before health & safety raised it's sorry arse.


Anyways, this a great album in my humbles, produced by Elvis Costello no less it's another album that you just play from start to finish, no lifting the needle to move it on to another track, their own music and the covers are well worth the entrance fee, Kicking off with the superb Dandy Livingstone's "A Message To You Rudy"  and ending with a cover of Andy and Joe's 1964 number "You're Wondering Now" there's not a dud track on this album (although personally I think Amy Winehouse's version of "You're Wondering Now" takes a lot of beating)


This album will be going into my collection, and if you're ever down in the dumps, stick a bit of Ska on, I promise you wont be down for too long!




Bits & Bobs;





The beginnings of what was to become The Specials as we know them, came about when Jerry Dammers(keys), Horace Panter(bass), Lynval Golding (guitar), Silverton Hutchison (drums) and Tim Strickland (vocals) formed Coventry band 'The Automatics' in 1977. The band hit the Coventry circuit, playing a unique mixture of punk and reggae to local punters, even securing a residency at Coventry's 'Mr. Georges' club.



After a while, vocalist Tim was replaced by former Squad front man Terry Hall, and soon after Jerry also recruited an old acquaintance, Roddy Byers, lead guitarist from 'The Wild Boys'. In fact, Roddy's introduction was just in time to join the rest of the band in Berwick Street Studios, London, under the auspices of Coventry DJ Pete Waterman.



Jerry circulated the tape to the record companies, but they showed little interest. A tape was also sent to John Peel at Radio One, and although overlooked at the time, this tape was rediscovered in 1993 and released as 'Dawning of a New Era, The Coventry Automatics AKA The Specials'.



Jerry persuaded fellow Coventry kid, and more importantly, Clash roadie Steve Connolly to introduce him to their manager Bernie Rhodes. The ensuing conversations resulted in the lads being given the support slot on the Clash's 'On Parole' tour in June/July 1978.



Originally booked for just the first couple of shows, they got the whole tour thanks to Joe Strummer's interest in the band, and Jerry's persistence.



By this point the band had changed their name to 'The Coventry Automatics' due to the fact that another 'Automatics' were already doing the rounds, and they again changed it to 'The Special AKA The Coventry Automatics'. It was finally shortened for claritys sake to 'The Special AKA'.



American support act 'Suicide' were well received by the Clash's crowd, but the reggae influenced brand of punk that the Special AKA played didn't fare so well, getting them spat at and pelted with cans by many of the drunken punk audiences.



One positive outcome of the tour was the addition of former roadie Neville Staple to the line up. Having often heard him toasting over songs at sound check, the band invited him to join them full time on vocals and percussion.



After the experience of the Clash tour, Bernie Rhodes put the band into rehearsals for six months at his dive on the Chalk Farm Road in London. That time in the rat infested warehouse was a real low point in the young bands career, seven of them sleeping in one room, but eventually lead to Mr. Rhodes deciding that they needed some more experience, and he sent them off to France.



On their return to Coventry, the band locked down to some serious rehearsals in the back room of a pub, and started to experiment mixing some ska elements into their sound. Drummer Silverton was increasingly absent from rehearsals, both disinterested in the bands new direction and more importantly looking for a paying job to keep his family fed.



Bernie Rhodes was back on the scene, this time advising the band to think about an image to go with their sound. Jerry, influenced by Paul Simenon of the Clash's off stage look, drew from the looks of the West Indian rude boys and the mods, and settled on what was to become the definitive ska look.



Jerry Dammers had long had a dream of starting his own label, similar to Motown, that they could release their own records on. He composed some artwork, with Horace's help, that was soon to become central to the 2 Tone world, and in fact feature as the label on all their releases. The logo was based on an early album cover picture of Peter Tosh, and with the signature black and white checks dropped in for good measure, Walt Jabsco was born.






Peter Tosh, the inspiration for Walt Jabsco




With a new song written, but no support from the record companies, the Special AKA set about raising some cash from family and friends to record 'Gangsters' themselves.



They were without a drummer however as Silverton had finally quit, so Jerry turned to his then house mate John 'Brad' Bradbury to fill in just for the recording session. It went so well that Brad was made a permanent member there and then, and the band lineup was completed.



Based on the 1964 track 'Al Capone' by Prince Buster. The Special AKA changed the original opening in their version from 'Al Capones Guns Dont Argue' to 'Bernie Rhodes Knows Dont Argue' as a stab at their former manager, and at seedy manager types in general.



Short of cash, the band couldn't afford to record a B-side for the single, so a demo recorded two years earlier by Brad, Barry Jones and Neol Davis was dug out, billed as The Selecter by The Selecter, and stuck on the flip side. They called their new label '2 Tone'.



Jerry then approached Rough Trade for distribution of the new single, who agreed to press 5000 copies. He then got talking to 'The Damned' manager Rick Rogers, who on hearing the single, and then seeing the bands stunning live performance, leapt on board as manager.



'Gangsters' was picking up airplay and favourable reviews rapidly, and Rick Rogers was working his contacts getting the band shows in London in venues such as the Hope & Anchor. Word of their electric live shows spread like wildfire and they started to build a solid following in the capital city and a buzz amongst the A&R departments too.



All this lead to the Moonlight Club in early May 1979, where the Specials played to a packed house of fans and record company execs. Even Mick Jagger was there anxious to sign the band to his own Rolling Stone Records!



They received several offers, but most weren't willing to accommodate Jerry's demands for the 2 Tone label to maintain it's own identity. One who did was Chrysalis Records, and the deal was done - 10 singles a year from 2 Tone, and the Specials were signed to a 5 album deal.




The Gangsters Single Label




Amazingly that show was recorded unbeknownst to those involved. Decca studios was next door and the entire concert was captured through an audio feed they had set up, which serves as a great reminder of the bands early form. The bootleg features plenty of Terry's dry humour on the eve of the Thatcher election, along with a killer live performance to boot. Ironically this bootleg made it onto the streets just days before their debut album was released.



Chrysalis pressed more copies of 'Gangsters', and fuelled by a Radio One session on the John Peel show and an eight week tour of the UK, the single peaked at number 6 in the singles chart, earning a debut appearance on Top Of The Pops.



Along the way, 2 Tone signed it's first band - The Selecter - which was a hastily put together band formed by Neol Davis on the back of the success of the Gangsters/Selecter single. The second 2 Tone signing was Madness, after they had got a tape to Jerry, and had opened for the Specials on a couple of occasions to great success.



Laying down tracks for the debut album began, with Elvis Costello wearing the producer hat - an early fan of the band, he jumped at the chance. At the same time the band made time to dash over to Europe to play a few festivals where they inevitably went down a storm, stealing the show from the likes of the Police and The Cure to name but two.



'A Message To You, Rudy' was released in October 1979, backed by 'Nite Klub' as a double A side, both tracks featured two new honorary Specials - Hornsmen Rico Rodriguez and Dick Cuthell. Rico was already a legend in ska, having played trombone with many of the early ska greats such as Prince Buster, the Skatalites and Laurel Aitken. He had even played on the original version of 'A Message To You, Rudy' by Dandy Livingstone.



Later that month, their debut album, entitled simply 'Specials' was released and shot straight into the UK album charts at number 7. The Specials, and 2 Tone were really on the map, and a 40 date '2 Tone Tour' of the country began in earnest featuring The Specials, Madness and The Selecter.



The tour was a complete success, selling out all over the country, but was tarnished by some violent outbreaks my a minority of troublemakers in some venues, which was of course singled out by the press.



It was a fact that racists from the NF and the BNP were recruiting at the shows, but the bands openly distanced themselves from these people, and made it clear to all that they weren't welcome. It goes to show how stupid these people were, canvassing music fans who were dancing to multi-racial bands and singing along with songs preaching racial unity, and yet some impressionables took the bait.



Half way through the tour Madness were replaced by Kevin Roland's 'Dexy Midnight Runners', a soul band from Birmingham, who although didn't play ska and weren't signed to 2 Tone, still went down a storm.




After the tour, The Specials last show of the decade was at the UNICEF Concert for Kampuchea, sharing the stage with the likes of The Who, Queen, Paul McCartney, The Clash and Elvis Costello to name a few.



Jerry also found time to sign The Beat from Birmingham to 2 Tone, who he and Lynval had seen opening for the Selecter some months before. Their debut single, Smokey Robinson's 'Tears of a Clown' was another success for the label, although the beat subsequently went out on their own forming their own label 'Go Feet'.



In January 1980, along with being filmed for a 2 Tone documentary by the BBC and an live appearance on the 'Rock Goes To College' show, The Specials released their third single 'Too Much Too Young'. It was a 5 track live EP, featuring 'Too Much Too Young' and 'Guns of Navarone' recorded in London, and 'Skinhead Symphony' which was a medley of 'Long Shot Kick The Bucket', 'Liquidator' and 'Skinhead Moonstomp' recorded at an electric homecoming show at Tiffany's in Coventry (which is now the public Library !).



The band played a few shows in Europe, and then headed off to take British ska to the USA.




Having found success in Britain and mainland Europe, it was time for The Specials to head stateside, and a short 3 week tour was arranged. For some of these shows the band opened for The Police, whipping the American crowds into a frenzy, often overshadowing the main act by all accounts.




Some tensions were brought to a head on this tour by Jerry's insistence that they not stay in flash hotels or travel in limo's. In fact the tour manager had to travel ahead to check the accommodations were not too good. Another incident occurred in February 1980 at the Whiskey A Go Go in Los Angeles, when the band arrived to see that the venue had been completely painted outside with black and white checks. Jerry was furious, disgusted by the hype he felt that the record company was generating.




Another moment of sarcasm aimed at the press by Dammers seemed to put the dampeners on the bands ascent after the record company read it in the LA Times. He was clearly not enjoying his time in the US, and when asked by a reporter about that, he sarcastically said he'd 'had more fun on a school trip to Russia'.




Whilst away, 2 Tone continued to rule the waves in England, 'Too Much Too Young' had topped the UK singles chart, and the band returned home to recuperate for a short while, before heading to Europe for a few shows.



In May 1980 'Rat Race' was released as The Specials' 4th single, backed by 'Rude Buoys Outa Jail' on the B-side, which again raced up the charts reaching a high point of number 5. The song, this time written by Roddy, was a straight dig at students, but they strangely had no trouble in recruiting a few to be in the classroom video for the song!



In June they headed off for the 12 date 'Seaside Specials' tour, with new 2 Tone signings 'The Bodysnatchers' as support act. Tensions were mounting still, particularly between Jerry and Roddy, who were openly at each others throats on and off stage, but the band continued with their arduous schedule, finishing the tour and then heading back to the US to appear on the legendary 'Saturday Night Live'. On the show the band turned in a legendary live performance of 'Gangsters' that to this day stands out as one of the best in the shows history.



July saw the band head off to Japan for the first time, but the frenzied crowd reaction in Osaka got them in trouble with the police. At that time, standing at a concert was against the law in Japan, but as was usual for a Specials show, the crowd went wild and invaded the stage. The police were called in and arrested manager Rick Rogers and the club manager, and the band were told to stay in their hotel. The second Osaka show was canceled, but they dutifully played the other couple of shows on the tour and returned home.



Shortly after returning to the UK, Lynval was the victim of a brutal racist attack outside a Modettes gig in London by racist thugs, leaving him needing medical treatment (Lynval was to later describe this experience in his heartfelt song 'Why?').



Out of the public eye for the next few months, the band were holed up in Coventry's Horizon Studio's, finishing off tracks for what was to be their second album.



The recording of the album had been difficult, with disagreements between Jerry and other band members about the direction he was taking the band in, but none the less it was completed and it was a physically and emotionally exhausted Specials that took to the road for the album promo tour.



The single 'Stereotype' was released first in September 1980, and introduced a different sounding Specials to the public. The song took a step away from their signature punk and ska sound, drifting into lounge music and muzak territory. It was yet another sarcastic lyric, this time by Dammers, and this time aimed at the teenage lads of the day who would go out and get pissed and then wind up crashing their car on the way home. Backed by 'International Jet Set', it reached number 6 in the UK charts - suprisingly due to the fact that it was banned by many radio stations as it had the word 'pissed' in it.




The More Specials Tour continued, but violent outbreaks among small sections of the crowds continued to plague the band, and despite their policy of stopping the show when trouble flared, things came to a head in Cambridge. Jerry and Terry ended up getting arrested, the authorities had misinterpreted their efforts to stop the trouble, and charged them with provoking the crowd.



After the tour, they released Lynval's song 'Do Nothing' in December 1980 as the next single, backed by a version of Dylan's 'Maggies Farm' artfully re-worked as a song to then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. It reached number 4 in the UK single chart, and started a well earned studio break for the band.



The album followed the next week, and was warmly received by fans and press alike, reaching number 5 in the UK Album chart.




During this down time, some of the band members took the opportunity to pursue their own projects. Roddy formed the Tearjerkers, a band playing 'skabilly' - his mix of ska and rockabilly. Neville founded his own label 'Shack Records' and similarly Brad founded 'Race Records'.



Also during this break, February 1981 saw the release of 'Dance Craze', a movie made up of live footage of all the 2 Tone bands, in addition to Bad Manners and The Swinging Cats. A soundtrack album was also released, reaching number 5 in the Album charts.



The band regrouped back in Coventry, and in June 1981 released another EP single, fronted by the seminal track 'Ghost Town', with 'Why?' and 'Friday Night, Saturday Morning' on the B-side. 'Ghost Town' perfectly echoed the feelings in Britain at the time, and reached the number one spot in the charts to a backdrop of inner city riots in Liverpool.



Lynval's song 'Why?' on the B-side was a stunningly heartfelt response to the NF thugs who had attacked and beaten him the year before.



Despite the success of 'Ghost Town', the band members were increasingly at each others throats, with Jerry becoming more and more demanding. Still, the band pressed on and played a few shows in England and Ireland, before heading off to the US again for a short second tour.



After a successful show in August in Toronto with the Police, Iggy Pop and the Go Go's, things came to a head when Jerry unceremoniously fired manager Rick Rogers after a heated argument.



The Specials returned to England, and after a lack of activity for a few months rumours started that the band were to split. After initially denying these rumours, it was confirmed that Terry Hall, Neville Staple and Lynval Golding had officially left The Specials. Roddy followed suit the next week, and a shocked Jerry Dammers was left to contemplate the future of the band.



Terry, Neville and Lynval's new group was called 'Fun Boy Three', and a mere 2 weeks after announcing the split, they had released their debut single 'The Lunatics Have Taken Over The Asylum', having been quietly working on their breakaway project for several months.




"A Message To You Rudy" 


This was originally recorded by Dandy Livingstone in 1967. His original recording was a portrait of social unrest amongst the youth in Kingston, Jamaica.


 
The Specials update was a comment on British disaffection in the late 1970s that led to the 1978-79 Winter of Discontent when a succession of strikes seriously disrupted everyday life and later the riots in the Summer of 1981.


 
The trombonist on this, Rico Rodriguez, also played on Dandy Livingstone's original recording.


 
"Rudy" (or Rudi, Rude boy) is a Jamaican term for criminal juveniles.



"Concrete Jungle"



The Specials were a British ska revival band who in the late-'70s and early-'80s were at the forefront of the UK 2 Tone movement. This song, which is a track from their self-titled debut album, was written by their guitarist Roddy Radiation about his experiences growing up in a Coventry council house. He told the story of the song in Inside Housing magazine: "I grew up in a coal mining village outside of Coventry called Keresley End. It had one council house street and the rest were pit houses. Families from all over the UK came to work down the pit, and some of these families were pretty rough and ready. This was in the late 1960s, early-'70s when I was in my teens. At that time the skinhead fashion was at its height and most of the pit family lads were skinheads, whereas me and my mates who lived in the council road followed the Rolling Stones, The Kinks and rock music and wore our hair long and dressed like our heroes. So we became their local punch bags.



I couldn't wait to leave! So after a fall out with my father I moved into Coventry central and slept on a mate's settee for several months until me and my girlfriend got a flat in Hillfields by the football ground as it was then. This was where the local immigrant population lived - Caribbean and Indian/Pakistani mostly at that time. We lived there for three years. By this time I'd changed my appearance and become a punk rocker, which made me even more of a target for the local thugs.


My punk band The Wild Boys had split up and I'd moved in with my girlfriend's family with the intention of buying a house and getting married. I worked as a painter and decorator for the council. At that same time a drinking buddy Jerry Dammers asked me to join his band the Automatics, who a year later changed their name to The Specials. I brought one of my songs from the Wild Boys which I'd written about my experiences in the mining village and living in Hillfields, the song I called Concrete Jungle."




"Too Much Too Young"


This tells the story of a teenage mother. It was based on a 1969 song by Lloyd Charmer called "Birth Control." The specials keyboardist Jerry Dammers sped up the tempo and updated the words.


 
This was the shortest UK #1 of the 1980s. The song lasted two minutes and four seconds.


 
This was the title track to the group's live EP The Special A.K.A. Live. The album was all Ska covers, and became only the second EP to top the UK charts (The first was Demis Roussos' The Roussos Phenomenon in 1976).


 
Dammers told the story of the song in an interview with BBC Coventry & Warwickshire's Annie Othen: "I can remember, obviously, what the song was about... I nearly had a thing with a married woman and it didn't happen in the end - obviously because she was married - so there was all that sort of rage and frustration of a young man.
The song kind of got a happy ending because, obviously, the kid came first. So behind all that rage, it's actually quite nice because we both walked away from it for the sake of the kid."





 




 

The Specials: had a wee look to see what the various members are doing now, didn't realise they'd reformed 10 years ago (some of them, anyway).

That's a decent album, as you say, A/C, a bit of ska cheers the miserable. I always have enjoyed reggae and the derivatives, and of the 2 Tone/ska bands The Beat were and are my favourite.

But The Specials, for all the seriousness of their song material, gave off an optimistic vibe in much of their music, and in other numbers caught the times perfectly (for example the later released Ghost Town).

On that debut album, besides the singles (although Too Much Too Young has been redone in a slower style), Monkey Man and You're Wondering Now are favourites, but these are reggae staples. Oh, and Concrete Jungle.

DAY 454
Adam And he Ants..................................................Kings Of The Wild Frontier   (1980)













I really liked this album in 1980, and listening to it now has done nothing to alter my opinion. This record may well be of it's time but that doesn't detract from the fact that it's got some crackin' tracks. At this juncture I have to let you know, I would have loved to be a drummer, guitar,piano/synth, banjo, you name it, you could stick them up your glencarse, the drums for me give the most rhythms and gives out the most passion of any of the instruments in most bands, but unfortunately I've never played stick against skin.


So to cut a very long story short, the drumming on this album stands out like a pair of nipples on a frosty day, "Dog Eat Dog," "Ant Music" and "Kings Of The Wild Frontier" are perfect examples of great songs but driven by the incessant but nothing less than compelling drums. the three aforementioned tracks are my favourites, but the rest weren't fillers by any stretch of the imagination.



What I liked about this album was there was no big "This is where you've went wrong/this is why I'm heart broken/here's what you should do numbers, just an honest to goodness album that says "I hope this entertains you"


Well Mr Ant you did and your album will be going into my collection, maybe not cool , but like I care!





Bits & Bobs;

Shortly after taking the "Adam Ant" persona, Stuart Goddard established his punk credentials when he had the scenester Jordan (Pamela Rooke) carve the word "F--K" into his back with a razor blade; he had been reading about African tribes and wondered if he could take the pain. The mark helped get him a role in the 1978 Derek Jarman film Jubilee alongside Jordan.


 
He studied graphic design at Hornsey School Of Art in London, but dropped out to pursue music.


 
He got married for the first time when he was 20 years old. Still known as Stuart Goddard, when he took the name Adam Ant, his wife Carol showed her support by changing her name to Eve (Adam & Eve). The couple divorced after 18 months of marriage.


 
In 1979, Ant paid the Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren £1000 for advice on how to make it in the business. McLaren introduced him to the tribal sound - notably the group Burundi Black - that came to define Ants' music, but he also asked his backup band, The Ants, to join his new project Bow Wow Wow, which they accepted. Adam replaced the three departing members with new Ants, including guitarist Marco Pirroni, who became Adam's songwriting partner.


 
Ant was never a drug user, and in the late '70s he also gave up alcohol and cigarettes as well. His big indulgence was sex, which he was open about.


 
He dated the American actress Jamie Lee Curtis for a while. He also had a relationship with Heather Graham.


 
He was diagnosed as manic depressive at age 21, when he went through intensive psychiatric treatment. His depression was a challenge throughout his life, and he had made repeated trips to mental hospitals for treatment.


 
After moving to Los Angeles when his hits dried up, Ant picked up some acting roles, but he also acquired a stalker named Ruth Marie Torres, who believed that he was in love with her. After three years of tormenting Adam, including one incident when she entered his house and left him a cake, she was sent to prison.


 
Adam Ant's mum was Paul McCartney's cleaner for a time during the mid-'60s.


It was one of the greatest transformations in pop, an unexpected switch from toneless to glorious Technicolor, and a significant jump for a band once marked out as one of the monochrome set from the post-punk period, to one of biggest success stories of the eighties. A mess of feathers, leathers, war-paint, walloping drums and twangy guitar, Adam and the Ants made their debut on Top of the Pops in October 1980 performing ‘Dog Eat Dog’, a new single from their soon-to-land LP, Kings of the Wild Frontier. Their appearance was as memorable to a generation as Bowie’s ‘Starman’ was on said show in ’72. Overnight the Ants became a household name, the talk of the playground, and their leader Adam the first real pop pin-up of a new decade.


 A year earlier it was a different story.


 From their formation in late 1976 through early ’80, Adam and the Ants had built up a loyal following notably around small clubs in the U.K and some cities in Europe. Fronted by an often kilt-clad Adam waxing lyrical about fetishism, futurism, bondage and the killing of Kennedy in a tight leather gimp mask, the band’s act remained a talking point, but by the close of ’79 and the discouraging sales of debut LP, Dirk Wears White Sox, it appeared to be the end of the road for Ant and all. After three years of blood sweat and tears the group were written off by press and major labels as just another zips-and-pins punk act with a couple of low-flying indie singles to their name. One last attempt at snatching some serious public interest saw Adam appoint (former Pistols) svengali Malcolm McLaren to manage the group for a month, only to have his Ants abducted by the impresario (who re-assembled them as Bow Wow Wow), leaving Adam with just the band name and a fancy idea about mixing pop with pirates.


 “You may not like it now but you will” yelled Ant through the disco-driven ‘Don’t Be Square (Be There)’ from Kings – it was a line so poignant it could have been lifted from one of his diaries from the time. Yet still scarred from his mauling from McLaren, the one-time graphics student still believed he and his Ants would be stars and within the space of six months miraculously made it all happen. Enlisting the help of guitarist (and key face from the ’76 punk scene) Marco Pirroni, the pair forged a song-writing partnership, assembled three young hombres (bassist Kevin Mooney and drummers Merrick and Terry Lee Miall), and set about making what would be become one of the most iconic, esteemed, eclectic, influential albums in pop –  Kings of the Wild Frontier.


 Crawling with infectious songs that amalgamated rock , disco, glam, surf, spaghetti western and Burundi influences, the record was released to instant acclaim in November 1980 and spat out three smash hits in ‘Dog Eat Dog’, ‘Antmusic’ and the violent, drum-thumping title track.  It went to number one, became the best-selling album of ’81 and like “Beatlemania” in the ’60s and “T-Rextasy” in the ’70s before it, “Antmania”became an international commotion. From their first big hit and untimely split in the spring of ’82 Adam and the Ants were everywhere. More hits with movie-like videos followed and for 18 months were the biggest band in the land.


 To mark the release of this recently re-issued and lavishly re-packaged LP, not to mention the national tour from Adam delivering the disc live in its entirety, Mark Youll grabbed some time with guitarist and co-writer Marco Pirroni, producer and drummer Chris “Merrick” Hughes and bassist Kevin Mooney to talk about their time as Ants, their rise to superstardom and making of their masterwork.


 Marco Pirroni (guitar and co-writer): I remember we were all quietly steeped in punk rock, ’76 punk rock, and so what we were trying do with this album was something totally anti-punk. One of the reasons me and Adam ended up working together was we were so sick of punk, and what it had become. We were just bored of the whole thing. So punk was an influence (on Kings) for all the wrong reasons.


 Kevin Mooney (bass): I saw the Ants play many times early on when it was all about leather and fetish and I thought they were really fantastic. The first time I ever spoke to Adam was on the Kings Road, I was with an anarchist friend of mine called Mark Schlossberg who ran Scum magazine. We bumped into Adam near the Worlds End Market and Mark kind of started an impromptu interview right there. I remember Adam wearing one of those green U S air force WW2 trench coats and had one eye made up kind of Clockwork Orange style. I was particularly impressed with how he had painted his fingernails with black nail polish. I liked the sort of Carry On film humour of his songs like ‘Lady’. ‘Young Parisians’ is also one of my favourite Ant songs ever.


 MP: Adam called me up and I told him I wasn’t up to much. I’d just left my previous band (the Models) and didn’t know what to do. He said he’d just been thrown out of Adam and the Ants and I thought “how do you get kicked out of your own band?” he told me and we went from there. Like me he was just sick of the ghetto we were in and wanted to get out of it and do something new. He re-formed the band again because there was no other option. I didn’t have an option either, we had nothing else. It was that or get a job and I had no real world skills whatsoever, I can’t even drive a car.


 Chris “Merrick” Hughes (producer/drummer): I’d been doing some production work up in Liverpool and by the time I got asked to help (work with the Ants) the band I was also working with (Dalek I Love You) had collapsed. So I took the recordings I’d done in Liverpool down to Phonogram and was waiting to see the A&R guy when I got chatting to a guy called Ian Tregoning. He asked what I’d been up to and I said I’d been doing this experimental drumming and electronic music at home. He asked me for a tape and after a couple of weeks he rang and said he’d listened to the tape but didn’t really like any of it. He said he enjoyed chatting with me and had a mad idea he wanted to speak to me about.


 MP: We had an idea to make punchy two and a half minute songs. We didn’t think too much about it, it was just ‘let’s not do punk’. We had Adam’s b-sides, some of his old songs, above average punk songs (like ‘Press Darlings’, ‘Physical’ and ‘Fall In’) but even then they weren’t shouty 1234s. So in a way we let our punk side out on those.


 KM: Punk exploded very quickly and by the end of 1978 it was all over. The greatest genius of all was Malcolm McLaren, I don’t care what people say about him, it’s true, but when Malcolm stole Adam’s band he picked the wrong pirate to fuck with because in return Adam took all of Malcolm’s ideas and did them better. Adam made off with the blueprints and improved upon them and in the process sold millions of albums, whereby Malcolm did not.


 CMH: So another time I was in the label office, Adam walks in and asked who I was. I’d been asked if I’d would remix, edit or faff about with some Adam and the Ants recordings, some over-spills, which I was happy to do. So I was there and Adam came in and said something like: “I don’t know who the fuck you are but if you think you’re any good and wanna work on stuff of mine why don’t you record me? I’ve got Marco in tow and we’re ready”. Everything happened really fast. My meeting with Adam was one, not out of desperation, but close to Adam needing people around him that could help him make this record.


 MP: It was the first time I’d worked with a producer. I didn’t know what a producer did. We’d had very little experience in making records. Adam had made an album but I’d never made an album before. Chris (Hughes) was the only producer we knew. When we signed to CBS we were in a meeting with Maurice Oberstien (the label’s former chairman). We were sat talking about producers and one producer (Muff Winwood) was interested in doing it. He’d done two albums with Sparks.  But then Maurice said ‘what’s wrong with the guy you’ve been working with?’ and we said nothing, so he said ‘ well you got this far with him why not stick with him?’ So Chris was in.


 CMH: Within a week or two it was suggested we go down to Rockfield (studios in Wales). I’d done some bits and pieces there before and knew the lay of the land. Obviously I played drums and was well versed in how they work but never the less I didn’t want to tell them that.  We got (future Culture Club drummer) Jon Moss down and he played on new versions of ‘Cartrouble’ and ‘Kick’. Adam and Marco were very tight and held the attitude of the day; they wanted everything to be loud, aggressive and angry. I don’t think either of them were that arsed about hearing my thoughts or comments, they were just wrapped up in their own world. I was saying “look you think that’s loud and tough, well this is fucking loud and this is tough”. Through the course of the day they realised I wasn’t a tosser and that I knew what I was talking about.


 MP: We recorded ‘Cartouble’ to fulfil Adam’s Do It (label) contract. This whole new Burundi glam Adam and the Ants thing we wanted to save that for a whole new launch. This was a sort of full stop on the old Adam and the Ants.


 CMH: After recording the ‘Cartrouble’ single, Adam realised there was something to be had with me, Marco and him. He asked if I’d help him choose some drummers for this new group he was setting up with Marco. We held some auditions and there were a couple of kits set up. I was showing some of the drummers beats that might work and at the end of the day Adam turned to me and said “fuck it, why don’t you do it, why don’t you be in the band?” So that’s how I got involved with that incarnation of the Ants.


 KM: I remember (Adam’s ex-wife) Eve and myself were living in an industrial space in North Road Islington. She invited Adam around to look at a possible rehearsal room and as they walked in I just so happened to be playing bass guitar. The next day I had a meeting with Adam at a place called Tootsies in Notting Hill where he told me the whole plan for the new band.


 CMH: Prior to signing (with CBS) Adam and Marco came to my house with Burundi record or cassette. Adam played it and began explaining about the whole Burundi concept and I said “mate, that’s French recording, I’ve got it” and I picked the album out of my rack, I knew that record at an atomic level. I had studied it and I could tell you what part of the beat was a carrier beat for example


 MP:  We had no way of recording demos back then.  We didn’t have access to studios, there was no home recording facilities. It was a case of strumming ideas out and keeping them in your head until we could get into the studio. So me and Adam demoed all the songs before we recorded them.


 KM: The songs of course were completely down to the skills of Adam and Marco. Marco had been in the Banshees, the Models, Rema Rema and was considered one of the best guitarists out there, But for all that effort the financial reward it was pretty much zero. Same with Adam, three or four years of really hard work and at the end of it no cash. So Marco and Adam had no interest whatsoever in being some kind of cult band.


 CMH: We got the band organised and rehearsed and I remember we played the Electric Ballroom. I’ve listened to tapes of that gig subsequently and I wish it had been recorded well. We played really well and we were tight. Adam seemed really confident and quite powerful. Not long after that, still unsigned, we did the Empire Pool in Leicester square. Howard Thompson (A&R for CBS) said he came to that gig, saw the chaos that was going on in the hall, stayed for about three numbers and thought “fuck it, this is amazing, I’m gonna sign them”. And he did.


 MP: Things happened very quickly in those days. We formed the band, rehearsed, did some gigs and got signed in a matter of weeks. Punk developed over a matter of weeks but it was dead within six months.


 CMH: I had this duel relationship with him. On one hand I was producing the record so we discussed ideas and how things should sound, and other side it was him saying you’re in the band and the band is gonna be how I want it to be, which was great. He also suggested the clothing, the design, the flair, all the things you associated with the band at that time. All the engine came from Adam.


 MP: Well we didn’t know what (the single) “Kings” was supposed to be. This strange Morricone thing and a Burundi beat, we were kind of scrambling around in the dark. It’s a little bit easier if you have stuff going on around you, contemporaries that you inspire to be as good, but to have nothing around you, nothing that you like happening, it was really difficult.  We didn’t even know when the song was finished.


 CMH: Somewhere I’ve still got the original bedroom recording of (the single) ‘Kings of the Wild Frontier’. Even on that there were lots of drum ideas and Adam had some of the words down.  I remember endlessly creating a kind of wall of that tom tom beat that I think we multi-tracked. Multi-tracking wasn’t new but we used like 13 or 14 tracks of toms racking away and then mixed that all down to Stereo to build the track from there.


 MP: I thought (Adam’s) writing was direct and to the point. We were floundering around, we weren’t really sure what we were doing, plus there was nobody around that we were really looking up to. There was nothing happening at that time that we liked. Of course there were things like Gary Numan coming up, and there was Madness which we liked. Electronic music was bubbling under. I’m a huge Kraftwerk fan, as is Adam, and people said ‘you’ve done everything without synthesizers, is that because you hate electronic music?’ and we said no we loved it; we just wanted to do something else.


 KM: Rockfield (studios) was a really good place to work. It’s on an isolated farm somewhere in Wales. Having no distractions really helped us focus very clearly on the music. The place is haunted though and I got spooked a few times.


 CMH: The classic drum sound that a lot of people talk about is the real slamming drum sound on ‘Dog Eat Dog’. That was done in the big studio at AIR. That was fibre drum cases played by me and (drummer) Terry (Lee Miall), then it was multi-tracked to death. The idea was supposed to replicate all the Zulu warriors lined up on the hill and they stand there and bash the back of their shields.



 KM: I don’t think there were any computers at all in the studio, everything was recorded to analog and Chris was just incredible at finding new ways to approach sound. Most of the songs had been rehearsed real hard, it was a strict regime. Before we ever got to the studio the band was very tight, Adam was very driven in that way. I remember we recorded the songs in many different ways but as a general rule it was first get a live take, strip it all apart and then overdub layer by layer.


 MP: It was my first album and so all I could do was record to a standard you were happy with. It was about pleasing ourselves really. I had no idea if this music was commercial; the charts were just a dream. To an extent we were free to do what we wanted. We had nothing to follow up. Hardly anything was done live. It was a challenging album to make.


 CMH: I think the whole session for the album took about 12 weeks. Everything was done quite quickly. There was an air of excitement and an air of impatience, both in healthy amounts. We would establish the tempo and flavour of the beat and start. It wasn’t done as straight takes with the whole band playing at once. Adam or Marco would lay out any chords and pretty early on we stick shit loads of drums on and then throw on some vocals. I also have to mention that the bulk of the work on bass was devised by, and played by, Adam. I mean, Kevin (Mooney) was great but when it come to playing the stuff and getting it laid down Adam knew what he wanted and could really play it. On that record the bass playing and bass invention is incredibly over-looked.


 KM: Adam played bass on some of the songs although I played on most of them. Sometimes there are multiple takes where we are both playing, like on the song ‘Ant Music’. I also did quite a lot of the backing vocals and some percussion. I very much enjoyed watching Marco do all this technical stuff and learnt quite a bit at the same time. He did some great set ups with the guitar and his Marshall stack up on full.  There was also a lot of processing and going direct to desk for that kind of James Bond, Link Wray-type sound.


 MP: When we first did Top of the Pops and it went in at 20 we were all excited that we had a top 30 hit, then it went to number 4 and it was like that dream I’d had since I was a kid came true. From there came the excitement of being young in a big band going places, a band that influenced people’s lives. Not having to scrape or borrow and getting people to listen to us, not having that awful feeling of turning up at a gig and only six people being there. It went from that to (our gigs) always being sold out.


 CMH: I remember our first appearance on Top of the Pops was recorded as an after show slot. The way it worked was if your song went up the charts during the week, they would drop that recording into the next week’s show. It was really exciting and because of Adam’s look and general vibrancy of the band it was exactly what telly land wanted. I think we knew that the band, and what we were doing, was pretty exciting and people latched onto it quite quickly. Before that first Electric Ballroom gig we had an in-house party at John Henry’s rehearsal room and invited friends and people around us at the time to come and watch us run through a complete set before we took it onto the stage. It was for our benefit really, to play and get a reaction. We knew from the response, and it wasn’t because it mates, that people were like “fucking hell, that’s amazing”. From then we kind of knew it had an effect, but had no idea of how big it was about to get.


 MP: I’d been wearing make-up since I was 13 so it wasn’t a massive change for me.


 CMH: The make-up and costumes was very much in Adam’s realm, he took all of that very seriously. It was part of the sound, the atmosphere and the feel, he knew how the whole thing had to be looked at, it was all in his head. It was his forte, his baby and we thought it was great, we felt important dressing up and it was good fun. You had grown men traipsing up and down hotel corridors in pirate gear, so there were aspects of it that were really funny. I think there were times when Adam got concerned about the whole feel and look of the band; he carried a lot of the stress which later on of course became more obvious. You have to remember the band was living in a bubble really and there was lots of chaos, lots of mayhem, lots of people that wanted to party with the band, extend what we were doing and make it greater than it was. We never really spotted that Adam was agitated inside. We thought it was chaotic reaction of it all being successful.


 KM: I think the live sound was quite close to the record, maybe better in that there was more adrenalin.


 MP: I have no idea why the record was so successful. If I knew I’d make another one. Does anybody know what makes something successful and why people like what they do? Why do people like music? It’s impossible to quantify. I can’t sit down and explain to you why ‘Starman’ is better than ‘Crazyfrog’…


 KM: I would describe the album as beautifully crafted Ant and Marco songs extremely well recorded by Chris Hughes. And the tribal elements of the record resonated in quite a powerful way among the youth of the early 1980s.


 CMH: I’m immensely proud of the album and also what we achieved as a band. We had a feeling everything made sense so we followed our thoughts and ideas and it came out ok. I’m always charmed and pleased when we people tell me the record was important to them. I like the fact the album has a history to it…





"Dog Eat Dog"



 
"Dog Eat Dog" is an informal expression which means ruthlessly acquisitive or competitive. The lyrics of this song are about bands in competition with each other. It finishes with Adam Ant saying how proud he is of his fans.



In his autobiography, Adam Ant said "Dog Eat Dog" was inspired by a quote by Margaret Thatcher from a newspaper. This was far from a new phrase, of course; Margaret Thatcher was elected Prime Minister on May 4, 1979 and served until November 1990 when she was forced to resign by a Cabinet revolt.


 
This was Adam and the Ants' first Top 20 hit in the UK. It introduced the band's tribal drums (they had two drummers) and spaghetti western guitar sound, which made them one of the most popular acts in the early '80s in the UK. With lyrics like "leapfrog the dog and brush me daddio," it certainly wasn't the words that carried the tune.


 
"Dog Eat Dog" was released on the CBS label October 3, 1980 and reached #37, Adam Ant's first top 40 song. It was co-written by Ant and Marco Pirroni, produced by by Chris Hughes, and backed by "Physical (You're So)".


 
In a 2001 interview on the Adam Ant website, Adam Ant's co-writer and lead guitarist Marco Pirroni was asked what Adam Ant's favorite track was. He replied, "I think he's like me, we have often talked about this. His is probably Dog Eat Dog, it isn't always Dog Eat Dog, but if you were to ask him he would skip explaining like I did and just say Dog Eat Dog."


 
Kings Of The Wild Frontier was named Best Album at the inaugural Brit Awards of 1982.


 
The song got a big boost when the band performed it on the show Top Of The Pops, which gave audiences a look at the group's striking lead singer dressed in tribal gear and modified war paint.


 
Adam Ant recalled to Mojo magazine March 2013 regarding the recording of the song: "We did all kinds of things to make the sound right. We did a 20 foot loop of quarter inch tape all held on pencils round the room, and there was a lot of speeding up, and the gang vocals going 'Aaaah', and (crunch noise), I had that in my head."




"Kings Of The Wild Frontier"



"Kings Of The Wild Frontier" was recorded Saturday, April 19, 1980, at Matrix Studios, "the first of the Ant/Marco songs to be put on tape", according to Adam Ant's autobiography, though according to his comprehensive on-line discography, the Kings Of The Wild Frontier album was recorded at Rockfield Studio, Monmouth, Wales in August 1980. There are though, two UK versions of the album.



The Marco he refers to is Adam's songwriting partner Marco Pirroni, who played in Siouxsie and the Banshees and the Beastly Cads before joining Adam & the Ants. When Adam dispensed with the Ants in 1982, he continued to work with Pirroni.


 
The first track on side two, "Kings Of The Wild Frontier" was produced by Chris Hughes like the rest of the album.


 
With this song, Adam & The Ants introduced what they called "Antmusic for Sexpeople." Featuring African Burundi drumbeats generated by two drummers, the music was aimed at young people who felt alienated from society. Adam Ant introduced a painted warrior look to go with the sound, which included the famous white line across his face.




A review from 28 January, 2016;




    It’s a rare album revisit that makes sense. A celebration of a pop culture artifice and a fantastically bizarre pop record that broke into the mainstream but was perhaps even more art school weird than the preceding Dirk Wears White Socks debut. This is one of those revisits that is more like an archive museum tour -a reminder of the potent brilliance of pop music at its most thrilling and imaginative.


 History has painted this album as the coming of Adam Ant – pop star – the escape hatch from his underground Dirk to fully flowered pop icon status. Whilst this is true in many ways the album that saw him go from the genius claustrophobia of Dirk’s dark, strange, dank world to the glorious technicolour pop it was anything but a straight commercial ploy.


 There had been talk at the time that Adam was going for the pop jugular. Times were changing. Punk had electrified a small but vital community and whilst the rest of the UK was still immersed in pastel shades the battle lines were drawn in the punk fallout. By 1979 there was a feral and wild post punk scene as people made sense of this punk fallout – creating their own culture from the scraps of information that were coming out of punk, making sense of the electricity on their own terms . This could range from experimental music to noise, from angular pop to thrash punk, from anarcho punk to proto goth and new romantic to brave new pop.


 What was someone like Adam Ant going to do?


 Already cemented with rock solid cult status Adam was in a curious position. With his fervent following of Ant fans – a gung ho gang of real characters and maniacs who were dressed to kill/dressed to thrill – this was a micro culture of mohicans and kung fu slippers, Ants or Seditionaries t-shirts, moccasin-style shoes or creepers, studs, wild dancing and hitch hiking around the UK following what was considered the last man standing from the original punk rock big bang, Adam Ant.


 


The debut Dirk Wears White Socks album had been released the year before and despite not being a pop thirty hit had venerated this cult status with its bizarro songs and strange brew atmospheres and sharp and angular music that was bass driven stark songs that combined new disco and funk with the awkward brilliance of punk experimental and lyrics laced with dark humour and taboo challenging artfulness sung in this most English of voices.


 Adam was convinced that the album was going to be a proper hit but it was too weird for the mainstream ears and Adam was confined to being the biggest cult star in the UK – marooned with virtually no press or radio play. His song Press Darlings summed up the war of attrition between him and the bemused music media – a sometimes hostile all out war that left him more and more on the fringes, on the outside looking in.


 Torn between cult status and a natural aptitude to be a pop star Adam made his boldest move yet by calling in Malcolm Maclaren for advice on where to go next. For all his fame with the Sex Pistols it’s this curious and explosive interaction with Adam that could arguably have been Malcolm’s key pop intervention. Despite knowing eachother from hanging in the Sex shop it was a meeting at a late October 1979 wedding that saw the sparks fly.


 The pair chatted about where Adam was at and he talked about the Dirk album and how it had failed to break out of cult status. Malcolm was intrigued – in many ways Adam was his perfect pop star – he had always recognised the flash in these eccentric youth that had gathered around his shop and Adam had the looks and the grit and the determination and the imagination to make it – he just needed someone to light the touch paper. Six weeks later Malcolm would become Adam’s manager – it was going to be a short lived yet explosive ride that would go on to create the biggest pop star of the early eighties and a brilliant second album of musical scope and imagination.


 The first managerial duty that Malcolm did, after Adam handed him a £1000 for the privilege of managing him, was the classic Malc move – he handed over a cassette with 17 songs on it to the young singer and told him that it would help him understand the construction of songs and find his own style.


 This was no mere collection of current hits but a quixotic and fascinating eclectic cross section of songs from all backgrounds and cultures -a multi coloured dayglo collection of musical brilliance that fired up Adam’s mind and would eventually, after a long and tortured year lead to the creation of Antmusic.


 ‘I suppose the music was a soundtrack to what I had learned before I met Malcolm. He was great. He listened to Dirk all the way through, and he would stop and say ‘what’s that song about boy? and I would have to tell him and he would say, ‘right next one!’ The Day I Met God with the bit about the size of his knob was a bit too much, and I paid the price for that by being banned in Smiths.’


 Malcolm looked at the cover of the record and said ‘what’s this cover?’ and I said ‘it’s a woman walking…’ and he said ‘no, no, no! you got good looks and muscles put that on the cover. He said what do you want to be? a cult? that’s all right but if you want to go to the top you are going the wrong way about it- put your face on the cover and in colour.



No one had taken any notice of me until then, and Malcolm was really interested in what I was doing.
He talked to me about scanning the syllables in the songs like when Elvis sings, ‘since my baby left me’, he said listen, it’s 6 then 7 syllables- listen to these singers and the way they sing and he also pointed out the structure- verse chorus solo chorus verse- he said listen to Blue Moon by Elvis and sing it and that’s what fed into Dog Eat Dog and the new songs. It simplified what we did and made it into songs. I remember recently, Mark Ronson saying he finds that song extraordinary and that he plays it before every session to get into the mood.


 For a few weeks it seemed that the Adam/Malcolm team was going to be unstoppable but things never ran smoothly with the firebrand manager. Famously Adam turned up for rehearsal one day to find the Ants in a strange mood and leaving the room and the band one by one – Malcolm had stolen his band to form Bow Wow Wow and back up the then 14 year old singer he had discovered in a laundrette – Annabella Lwin and left Adam high and dry.


 Heartbroken and without his gang of droogs Adam leafed through his address book and set across London and knocked on the door of Marco – the last gunslinger left from punk who had been the youngest person hanging out in in the 1975 Sex shop. Marco had famously played the first Siouxsie and the Banshees gig and was the engine room in the 1977- almost made it – the Models and was making some of the best post punk obscurities in the feedback drenched Rema Rema


 The last of the two punk originals Adam and Marco sat around the kitchen table and hit it off. Bonding over a big bold feedback drenched glam rock pop they talked through ideas…


 A couple of months later in May 1980 they had put a new Ants together and hit the road for the defiant Ants Invasion tour which featured three of their new songs as well as drastic reworks of the back catalogue that now sounded bigger with Marco’s powerful guitar beefing up the songs. Summer 1980 saw the new Ants re-established as cult heroes playing packed venues of happy bizarro Ant fans. Adam had a new look – a kinda wild west/ vive le rock/rocker style of cowboy boots/capped black t shirts and leather – this was the curious period that was the just before the germination of the Kings Of the Wild Frontier album music and style – the moments before the pop apocalypse, the moments before the iconic white stripe.


 In July 1980 they released the first single of the new partnership. Word was getting out that Adam had gone pop


 I clearly remembers someone bringing the pre-release of Kings Of The Wild Frontier up to Blackpool where I lived at the time to play it at our post punk cub that we ran in the town – the Vinyl Drip Club. there was a lot of curiosity – Dirk had been popular in town amongst the small clutch of underground types. Everyone was expecting some kind of plinky plonky style pure pop but this insane explosion of tribal drums, twanging feedback drenched guitars and strange genius exploded from the speakers and these fantastically inspiring lyrics sung in this whirling dervish voice filled the room.


 It was powerful, strident and life affirming and yet a gloriously strange piece of music. No-one knew what to do apart from the resident Ant fan who was a blur of feathers and warpaint who shamanically owned the dancefloor. He had already co-opted the new Ant look, one month before Adam broke huge.


 Like Bowie, Adam was shape shifting – creating his pop as a soundtrack for his personnaes – he had worked through the Kabuki SM freak style and was now remoulding his art school music and art school look into something more bizarre and more flamboyant. The rocker look was morphing into the king of the wild frontier but with a gunpowder potential to ooze into the mainstream. The look matched the music and the looks and sound was explosive.


 It’s difficult to remember now just how underground Adam was at the time. He may have been selling out 1500 capacity theatres in London with his Dirk album but the press ignored him. Adam and The Ants were looked on as the last vanguard of the freak punk rock scene – the dressed up flash, sex warriors – the true hear and soul of punk in many ways and the direct descendants of Sex shop and the Sex Pistols stream of possibilities but they remained an awkward pop culture cargo cult.

 Handsome charisma is never an easy bedfellow with great press and the Ants had been confined to media leper status. Not that this affected their fierce fan base who were selling out venues across the UK. The Ants Invasion tour was the last stand of the freak Ants – by the time the album came out and the autumn tour happened there was the curious crossover with the teeny fans and the Ant fans.


 Adam was convinced he was a pop star – this was from a time when pop stars mattered – it was still a noble profession for art school rockers in the late seventies. He could be just another in the long lineage from the Beatles to Bowie to Roxy Music to half of punk itself – the artful dodger pop star as artist.


 The result was King Of The Wild Frontier. An unexpected technicolor explosion of pop and noise and a collision of music from glam to Burundi drums to soundtrack to punk to pop to weirdness – like the soundtrack to the greatest film that has never been made like all the best albums should be.


 In many ways Kings was even weirder than its predecessor. When most people ‘go pop’ it’s normally time to bring in the songwriters and the ballads. For Adam it was a detailed artist’s gimlet eye for the great moments in pop culture, art and graphics and in that perfect post modern sense reconstructing them in a totally different order to present himself.


 Like Bowie’s famous shapeshifting in the early seventies Adam returned to the frey as the charismatic Jimi Hendrix brocade jacket wearing, electric warrior Ant with the iconic white stripe and tales of wild west. This was the outlaw culture of the British youth in the fifties and early sixties. The vast panorama of the wild west was the ultimate escape in the smoke ridden claustrophobia of post industrial UK – the cinemas ran the Technicolor films with heroic cowboys who became the template for so much in rock culture with their macho swagger and cool gear but the smarter souls were now hooking into the native Americans – the ultimate symbol of resistance to the American machine – the proud and noble and fierce warriors who had been crushed by colonisation but were powerful symbols in culture. Adam appropriated the feathers and the warrior talk without ever claiming to be a warrior – this was an empathy and also and artful eye for the beauty of a dying culture which he explained to the native American when he met representatives a couple of years later.



 In many ways Kings Of The Wild Frontier is the last great western – the final piece in the jigsaw after the spaghetti westerns – this is the last pop culture visit to the wild west that made any cultural sense before the new horizons of the modern age.



 The album is a pop culture dream. There are so many references and shades and colours – an embracing of the sound and violence and sex of the very best of pop culture. It explodes from the very start with Dog Eat Dog the second single released from the album and the first top ten hit that autumn that had kick started the pop mania. Shortly after the single’s release, the band performed the song on Top of the Pops on 16 October 1980, which sent the song to number 4 in the charts and set the scene for the early November album release.


 The thundering swagger of the Burundi drums recorded in sensuround sound at Rockfield studios dominates the single. Decades later their power is still breathtaking and the warm, enveloping full on sound of the track is as powerful soundwise as the Sex Pistols Never Mind The Bollocks released in 1977 – it has that same kind of Tsunami of sound – that daredevil, can do, rush of all great pop. The Burundi drums copped from Burundi Stephenson Black ‘s ‘Burundi Black’ are a stunning pop statement- their thundering rolling power was a whole new pop template- a brand new beat that was super great dance music and also had a thundering life affirming power that instantly made a powerful statement.


 This was a brand new beat and one that worked. You can feel the joy of creation in Dog Eat Dog and can only imagine the thrill of being in Rockfield in August 1980 as this came together. It had all the power of Pistolian punk reimagined in thundering tribal drums and the flash of glam but also a world view by listening intently to those powerful tribal grooves from the unique Burundi drummers.


 In his 2007 autobiography, Stand and Deliver, Adam said that “Dog Eat Dog” was inspired by a Margaret Thatcher quote he’d read in a newspaper. The expression refers to a situation of fierce competition in which people are willing to harm each other in order to succeed. The lyrics of this song are about bands in competition with each other, and doing just that.


 The album sounds like a series of 3D singles – track two is the iconic and manifesto set to song “‘Antmusic'”  – the big hit of the album that entered the charts as John Lennon was assassinated and the sixties culturally came to the end at mark Chapman pulled the trigger with a brutal murder and yet another self referential track.


 Antmusic is a song of empowerment and affirmation. The sound of someone standing up against the tide and singing of heir art struggle. In many ways this is what poop does best – songs about yourself and your struggle are instantly identifiable and especially comes super coated in glam rock anthem as good as this. Antmusic like the album itself is perhaps the last glam rock statement – the end of another era at the end of punk and the end of the sixties…those closing months of the seventies saw an awful lot of full stops!


 Pre punk, glam rock had been the heart beat of teenage music of the early seventies. We were just too young to know of the magical stuff like krautrock and better end of prog that was also going on at the same time. Top Of The Pops was a great conduit to all the lunatic dressed up glam madness that was fascinating the first post sixties generation. Bolan had invented it and Bowie was pushing the envelope and Roxy were doing the smooth and there all kinds of lunatic droog bands doing it as well. It could be argued that Adam was the last chapter in this glorious arena – with the added tough attitude of punk and also his arts school mentality spun in. Antmusic is the closest he got to pure glam rock with the stomping Glitter beat and the huge guitars from Marco and the classic anthemic chorus about unplugging the jukebox and listening to the Ant Music.


 The song is from the heart of classic rebel pop ‘so sad when your young to be told your having fun…’ as images flash into your mind of tepid youth in rank youth clubs at the time not sure how to react to modern culture that now in fast forward or its shiny fringes like punk rock. Adam cast himself as the dashing saviour of youth culture with his pied piper listen to me clarion call – on paper a preposterous task but with an album with this much pizzaz and tracks as pop perfect as Antmusic he actually managed to pull it off.


 With many of the demos of the album now available or floating around it’s fascinating to listen to this song’s development from its scratch chords to its thundering neo tribal swagger, glamour stomp.


 The album is a world to get lost in so by the time the third track, Feed Me to the Lions kicks in you are hypnotised by its panoramic vision. Lions is the closest the second album got to the angular obtuse thrills of the debut Dirk Wears White Socks with it’s oozing riff and brilliantly skewiff melody lines. If Adam has always made a big point of this album being a step away from the debut that he could never understand why it was never a hit there were still moments like this that you could well imagine lodged on the debut and yet, yet this has now become a pop music. Pop music at it best – taking weird and wonderful ideas into the mainstream.


 Lyrically it’s a defiant Adam literally singing his heart out – he may have ‘gone pop’ but the raw emotion is on display here – the performer in the blinding spotlight opening up emotionally in a stuffy country – the gladiator in the ring – the performer bearing their soul with all in their emotional nakedness surrounded by the slavering critical barbs of the surrounding critical lions. It’s classic stuff and delivered with the powerful emotional sincerity of fellow post punk now operating in unlikely lion strewn colosseum of pop, Dexys Midnight Runners .


 Not everything is heavy though. The album is dotted with cinemascope moments like the twanging high chaparral western of the next track, Los Rancheros. Adam is typically vocally great on this track and makes what is a fun track sound fantastically and hypnotically serious with his trademark holler. The gunfire effects add to the 3D of the track that surfs along on Marco’s tremeloed guitar twang and the shuffle beat of the drums and the track exits with those distinctive deep backing vocals and chiming bells and is a warm and enveloping wall of sound. You can almost see the posse riding across the great plains. The big country.


 Ants Invasion  is one of the key tracks on the album – a dark and heavy song that is quite strange for a number one album. It’s rare that pop music can sound this enticing and darkly strange. The track enters on a simple twisting psychotic guitar figure from Marco operating in the shadows of the feedback laden Rema Rema track he had released on 4AD. The song is again brilliantly hypnotic and lyrically a series of thought provoking shards and snippets like ‘Antics in the forbidden zone’ – where did that come from! classic Adam phraseology – a master of writing lyrics that sounded like slogans that could be tattooed on to the hearts of a vibrant fan base.


 The album may be defined by its famous hits but the darker tracks like Ants Invasion and the next track, Killer in the Home are at its core. A tribal stomp incorporating native American melodies and ghost dance atmosphere with some really great drumming Ants Invasion sees the drums switch from fractured patterns to reverse reverbs as the song strips everything away to create a powerful atmosphere and is a real high point on the album.


 Adam is also working overtime on the vocals with many layers of backing vocals helping to create an impassioned and powerful paean to the native Americans. From this song you can hear the soon to come real Ants invasion of fellow brilliant groups like Bauhaus, Southern Death Cult and even the Fall coping some of the feel and sound from the Antman creating the pounding tribal sound that was at the core of the so called goth music and surrounding indie bands.


 Opening side 2 Kings of the Wild Frontier was the opening seven inch salvo from the album and the first sonic missive from the record that people heard of this new sound. It was the debut of the two drummer Burundi beat which is still most people’s aural image of the group. The drums, of course, sound fantastic pounding away with the vibrant Burundi beat but it’s Marco’s feedback that entwines with the drums that is so effective – reminding the listener of the guitarist’s previous work in the great Rema Rema and the pure sex of the electricity of guitar.


 The song packs a real power and has the ebb and flow of great dynamics and sees the singer lay out the case for the warrior culture within the white man ‘suffering from centuries of taming…’ what a powerful line, what a powerful image that added to the verse is a defiant paean to warrior culture.


 A new Royal Family, a wild nobility, we are the family
A new Royal Family, a wild nobility, we are the family
A new Royal Family, a wild nobility, we are the family

 I feel beneath the white
There is a redskin suffering
From centuries of taming


 Released late July 1980 the single had caught the Uk public unaware and peaked at number 48 in the charts but after Dog Eat Dog went Top Of the Pops and Ant Music followed it into the top five Kings was rereleased the following February and in the middle of Ant-mania became one of the greatest singles of all time to hit number 2 in the charts.


 Band as gang, gang as band. All the great groups have manifestos and all the cool ones write a song about it.The Magnificent Five  is stuffed full of references to the new Ants whilst Don’t Be Square (Be There) is another great song of affirmation and another hint at the spiky neo disco weirdness of the preceding Dirk album. The lyrics even manage to break out into chant of the Dirk album title. The bass works overtime as it plays against the super angular guitar lines. If Adam had not been the sex pin up of 1980 and this song had been released by a post punk Peel band it would have been looked on as some long lost underground classic – the type of weird and wonderful tune that you wonder why it as never a hit- the cool thing about Kings was that it was turning these weird and wonderful ideas into hits. Sex music for Ant people sang Adam laying out the slogan that would capture the next eighteen months of his life


.This is the new insect nation with a dose of the inky sex that was the key part of the earlier Ants – that dark, subversive sex that enthralled and appalled a UK still trying to escape its Victorian stuffiness. Fucking in the streets may be common place in the 21st century but seventies UK was a curious place full of seaside postcard sex, weird TV perverts and sex scandals whilst real sex, pop culture sex was tabloid controversial – figure that out! Bringing sex into the open was pop music’s most acute political gesture. The Stones had been raw sex, Elvis had hips and Adam had songs that dripped with the stuff.


 Even the lightweight moments like “Jolly Roger”  are loaded with meaning, punk always liked to represent itself as rebel music, appropriating all the images and ideas of the rebels from film and pop culture – from bikers to pirates, from wise guys to native americans – rebellion in pop may ultimately have no real meaning apart from being sexy but it’s very much at the heart and soul of the whole culture.


 I love this period – the post punk cultural crossroads where ideas were the currency – this insect intersection between the wily fox Malcolm Maclaren and his head full of pirate garb, rebel lore, biker chic, that list of records he handed to Adam – the entwining and defining of punk as some kind of descendent of the dread pirate culture – the culture outlaws on the fringes of society and even if this came with no cultural baggage then the clothes looked great. The pirates were the rock n roll stars of their time and had been part of the heart of rock n roll culture for ever from the great Johnny Kidd onwards. In 1980 a skull and cross bones was a novel symbol in pop – now every shop has endless items covered in te damn things.


 “Making History” is a deceptively dark song of murder and morality that keys up the closing cut which is perhaps the final cornerstone and the epic the throbbing shamanic dance of ‘The Human Beings’ . With its pounding beat and its list of Indian tribes decimated by the wave after wave of white faced immigrants pouring in from Europe in the 18th century the sound is a powerful piece epic in its scope and sad in its tragic subject matter. Musically a powerful work – the spooked intro bass line and the powerful throb cold be straight off a Swans album from the 21st century. How the fuck Adam got away with slipping tracks like this onto a pop record is testament to his powerful vision and his command of pop culture.


 Kings Of The Wild Frontier has gone down in history as a moment in time, a white stripe painted across the face of pop culture and whilst this analysis is short and sweet it kinda glosses over the sheer avalanche of great ideas and delivery that make Kings arguably one of the most innovative and to be honest weird and wonderful albums to ever have whole packed theatres screaming up the charts.

 Adam Ant had now been crowned the king of the wild frontier.

 A victory for pop music.
     

Last edited by arabchanter (15/11/2018 12:33 am)

Kings of the Wild Frontier: I bought this when it came out, and still listen to it now and again. It's a happy sound, distinctive and quite original.

Reading about Adam Ant's mental health problems and diagnosis, it's easy to imagine why the band was a relatively short lived phenomenon. But maybe his illness was an influence in the exuberant sound he produced, although Malcolm McLaren was effective too in suggesting the two drummer, Burundi beat.

My future wife's (at the time) brother went about dressed as Adam Ant, again in Denny, probably bumping into Captain Sensible from time to time.
 

Last edited by PatReilly (15/11/2018 5:34 pm)

DAY 455.
Dexy's Midnight Runners...............................Searching For The Young Soul Rebels   (1980)













Yet another album that I bought back in the 80s, this album for me was the proper Dexy's, before they went all diddycoy with their neckerchiefs and dungarees and messing aboot wi' fiddles and banjos, and don't get me started on "Come On Eileen," that song has now become a novelty record a must at weddings, party's and assorted do's along with "Greased Lightning," "The Time Warp," and "Agadoo." Now to be fair, given enough liquid refreshment, I've been known to get up and shake my tush to it, but watching others is far more fun, especially when it gets to that bit where it stops and nobody knows what to do, then it starts building up and for some reason people start running on the spot and bairns take the knees out of their troosers sliding across the floor.



Back to the cool Dexy's, everybody thought they looked great (which they did) but to be honest where I worked that was more or less what we'd been wearing for years, a tammie,jeans and donkey jaiket was "de rigueur."
This album was well played in my house, heavy brass and a proper soul sound, I especially liked  "Tell Me When My Light Turns Green," "There, There, My Dear"  and "Geno" obviously but I thought the cover of Chuck Wood's "Seven Days Too Long" stole the show.


There’s an anecdotal story of Dexys from this era. During rehearsals Kevin Rowland, the singer, would direct the horn section to “play harder!” and their response was to play louder. Furious, he shouted back “Not louder! Harder!” and the horn section finished the evening with their lips covered in blood.


If the horn section spilt blood in the making of this platter,the least I can do is buy this superb offering.
This album will be going into my vinyl collection.




Bits & Bobs;


Dexys frontman Kevin Rowland was originally in a punk band called The Killjoys with guitarist Kevin "Al" Archer. Rowland had an idea to form a big soul band with a brass section and he founded Dexy's Midnight Runners in 1978 in Birmingham, England with Archer, recruiting trombonist "Big" Jim Paterson, saxophonist Geoff "JB" Blythe, alto saxophonist Steve "Babyface" Spooner, keyboardist Pete Saunders, bassist Pete Williams and drummer Bobby "Jnr" Ward.


 
They took their name from Dexedrine – a pep pill favored by '60 mods. The "midnight runners" referred to the energy the Dexedrine gave, enabling the poll poppers to dance all night.


 
It was Bernie Rhodes, manager of The Clash, who steered Dexys early career, by arranging a recording recording career with EMI. The band fell out with Rhodes after he interfered with the production of their debut single, "Dance Stance," accusing him of muddying the sound.


 
Despite the success of their debut Searching For The Young Soul Rebels album, every member of Dexys, bar Sullivan and Archer had left the group by late 1980. The majority of the former members formed a new band The Bureau.


 
Dexys' second album Too-Rye-Ay recorded with a new lineup, reflected Rowland's passion at the time for Celtic-influenced folk music allied to a rock beat. It was a huge success spawning the single "Come On Eileen," which knocked Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean" off the top spot in the US. It was also the best-selling single of 1982 in the UK.


 
Al Archer, exhausted by Dexys' touring schedule, had left the group in early 1981 and formed The Blue Ox Babes. Speaking to Q magazine in 1993, a contrite Rowland credited Archer with being responsible for the Too-Rye-Ay sound. "After Searching For The Young Soul Rebels, when he left we were both experimenting with strings," he explained. "I wasn't getting what I wanted; he found it and I stole it."


 
There was another purge for the third album, Don't Stand Me Down, with Rowland recording with an entirely new set of musicians. However it failed to replicate the success of its predecessors and Dexys Midnight Runners disbanded in 1987. Rowland pursued a solo path for sixteen years, recording the albums The Wanderer and My Beauty. In the spring of 2003 he announced a new six-piece incarnation of the group, with the name shortened to simply Dexys.


 
Fans had to wait until 2012 before Dexys released their fourth album, One Day I'm Going to Soar. Rowland told us that the reason for the long delay was they didn't feel ready until then. "I was aware of the legacy of the first three albums," he explained. "I felt we did really achieve something there, and it wasn't really appreciated at the time. But by the '90s, people reappraised that. We started to get really good notices and people would be coming up to me in the street, talking about Don't Stand Me Down."


He added: "I think subconsciously I was aware that we needed to do something that was at least as good as that."


 
In America, Dexys Midnight Runners are thought of as one-hit-wonders, "Come On Eileen" being their only chart success. However in the UK they achieved nine Top 40 singles, including a second #1, "Geno."



Rowland shared how the Dexys approach their song-writing: "What we normally do is start with a good chord sequence and a good rhythm," he explained. "Let's find a really good rhythm, a drum beat, and let's find a really good chord sequence. We'll put those two things together that are working, and then we start singing melodies over the top. Then we listen back and see what we got."


"I always write the lyrics separately," Rowland added. "I'll go away and write them around what I'm hearing in the track. Something might inspire me, might evoke a certain feeling in me and I'll go away and write the lyric. Or quite often, as I did with a song I've written recently, I just go through my lyric book. I've got a lyric book with a few lyrics in it, and I'll think, 'Oh, this ought to fit.' That's how we do it."






Everybody loves a good gang. That always impressive façade of solidarity and an us-against-the-world attitude. Historically, rock'n’roll is littered with them: The Who, The Ramones, The Clash and numerous other 'The' bands, particularly those that sprang up in the wake of punk. With historical perspective, Dexys Midnight Runners stand out as one of pop music’s most enigmatic and unique gangs, their brass-heavy brand of soul rebellion wildly standing out from their post-punk contemporaries.


 Quite apart from the bold appropriation of a Sixties soul sound, Searching For the Young Soul Rebels is defined by the confessional airing of insecurities mixed with that insatiable drive for passion which pervaded all of Dexys’ work. Kevin Rowland’s slightly strangled voice is as important an instrument as any in this respect:; lacking the conventional qualities of a good soul singer, but in its yelps and pleas imbued with enough fervour for the entire group. Indeed, Rowland’s personality often overshadowed the entire group. He was the (very big) heart and soul of a Dexys whose line-up changed dramatically with every album. Yet every gang needs a leader and it was through Rowland’s excellent command of image and treatment of every album as a sort of project that meant Dexys were a fascinating and ever-changing force.


 Of course the downside of such well defined group aesthetics and sounds is that one incarnation of the group can overshadow all others. On telling people I know that I was reviewing Dexys several slated them as one-hit wonders (actually two-hit wonders and more if we go beyond mere no.1s) and a certain person called them “those gay village people” (er…I think that’s The Village People). For many people though ‘Come On Eileen’ is just a wedding reception piss-up tune (as opposed to one the greatest singles of all time) and Dexys will always be those guys in daft dungarees.


 Rightfully, however, consensus amongst more enlightened types is that the first incarnation of Dexys was the most coherent and vital one. Their blue collar docker-like image, the puritan discipline of pre-rehearsal communal running, the righteous anger, the desperate purging of the soul . It all fitted perfectly. Likewise, Searching For the Young Soul Rebels is their most coherent and consistent record. In fact it’s damned near perfect.


 Its greatest moments bookend the record and demonstrate that although Dexys were an anomaly on the pop landscape of 1980, they also bore the angry young man sentiments of a band for whom punk remained a catalyst. Album closer ‘There, There My Dear’ is a vitriolic open letter to hipsters delivering knockout hooks of brass as Rowland derides the meaningless namedropping of “Cabaret, Berlin, Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, Duchamp, Beauvoir, Kerouac, Kierkegaard” and decries facile pop music (I’d only waste three valuable minutes of my life with your insincerity). The most breathtaking moment comes when Rowland laments his fruitless search for the titular “soul rebels” over Pete Williams’ throbbing bass and staccato blasts from the brass section leading into a frenzied finish.


 Although the cover of the album depicts a Catholic schoolboy in the midst of being driven from his neighbourhood in Belfast in 1969, Rowland admits the photo was chosen for aesthetic reasons rather than political ones. Nonetheless album opener ‘Burn It Down’ is pseudo-political in tone, the chorus chants of heavyweight Irish literary figures’ names, from Oscar Wilde to George Bernard Shaw, a fierce rebuttal to insulting condescending attitudes to the Irish. The stabs of brass are like an exclamation mark as Rowland spits the phrase “Shut it”. It also boasts one of the most distinctive album openings ever; snippets of The Sex Pistols, The Specials and Deep Purple are discernible amongst the hiss and squeal of an old radio before Rowland and co interrupt with group chanting and blaring brass. A similar horn section melody kicks off ‘Tell Me When My Light Turns Green’ which is tonally and rhythmically a more upbeat affair, but paradoxically is a vehicle for Rowland to emote tirelessly about being down on his luck (“I’ve been spat on and shat on and made to eat soap”) and pleading for help, seemingly, from a higher power (“If there’s anyone there looking down on me, I think it’s time you picked my number). In comparison, on ‘I’m Just Looking’ Rowland’s pathos is all-consuming. The church-like organ provides a melancholic base around which the dynamic playing of bassist Williams and the brass section punctuate the melodrama with timely staccato blasts. The opening verse reads like an affirmation of the group’s puritanical outlook, “Uppers give heart impotence, but don’t tell you anything”. However, ‘I‘m Just Looking’ is topped by ‘I Couldn’t Help It If I Tried’ in terms of the album’s downbeat songs and, outwith the album’s rousing anthems such as ‘There, There My Dear’, is the most emotionally affecting song with its powerfully mournful brass section.


 If the number of times I’ve used the word “brass” should suggest that Searching… is a samey affair, then just listen to the way the giddy ‘Thankfully Not Living In Yorkshire It Doesn’t Apply’ follows ‘I Couldn’t Help It…’ with deft organ fills and Kevin Rowland’s daft falsetto trills. While later incarnations would ditch some of the brass and bring in folk instrumentation, it’s astounding how Dexys Mk.I exhibit such a range of expression and musical ingenuity whilst still retaining a signature sound. They were unafraid of wearing their influences on their sleeves either with chart topping single ‘Geno’ a tribute to Geno Washington and ‘Seven Days Too Long’ a cover of a northern soul classic. The only misstep is the slightly comical sound of Kevin Rowland doing a monologue over a wailing saxophone solo on ‘Love Part One’.

 So, a great album indeed.


"Tell Me When My Light Turns Green"




Before forming Dexys Midnight Runners, Kevin Rowland was in a punk band called The Killjoys with fellow Dexy, Kevin "Al" Archer, and Ghislaine 'Gil' Weston who would go on to join Girlschool. Rowland wrote this soulful number when he was still a Killjoy member. He recalled to The Guardian: "I already had an idea to form a big soul band with a brass section. When Kevin Archer joined the Killjoys in Spring 1978, I played him a few songs and when it came to this one he just went, "That's soul, that is." I said, "Ah, that's really good then, because this band isn't gonna go for ever and when it's over I'm gonna form this new band, doing soul."

 
The defiant lyrics reflect the anger Rowland felt as a 23-year-old punk. "Growing up in Birmingham as the son of Irish immigrants, I must have felt really frustrated when I wrote that," he said. "Like most of the lyrics, I'm in it when I write. I write these things because I have to."



"Geno"

This song is about Geno Washington, a US Soul singer the band admired. Washington was never big in his home country, but was a popular performer in the UK, where he played with Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd and scored two Top 40 hits in the '60s: "Water" and "Michael."


As Dexys Midnight Runners were on the upswing, packing club shows and getting positive press, Washington's career had faded, and the once-revered singer found himself on the cabaret circuit. "Geno," which was written by Dexys lead singer Kevin Rowland and guitarist Al Archer, is a tribute to Washington and also a look at the cyclical nature of entertainment.


 
This was the second Dexys Midnight Runners single released in the UK (following "Dance Stance"), and it shot to #1 on the chart, becoming a crowd favorite along the way. Dexys had no distribution in America, so the song wasn't heard in the US. The band would make their splash stateside in 1983 when "Come On Eileen" topped the charts and became an MTV staple.


 
Dexys Midnight Runners made their mark by adding their distinctive Celtic flavor to Soul music. They championed artists like Washington and did covers of songs by Sam And Dave, Aretha Franklin and the lesser-known Zoot Money. "Soul" was part of Rowland's stage patter ("our hearts are full of soul..."), as he made it clear where their musical roots had grown.


On the band's second album, they had a hit with a cover of "Jackie Wilson Said," which was Van Morrison's tribute to another Soul singer.


 
There is a reference to the band's name in the line, "This man was my bombers, my dexys, my high." The "dexys" are pep pills - Dexedrine.


 
Rowland told The Guardian that the lyrics are all true. He recalled: "I saw Geno Washington in 68 at the Railway Hotel in Harrow. I was 15 years old and out with all the older kids – you had to be 18 to get in – short-haired, cool-looking mods-turning-into-skinhead types. Looking back, it's probably not the best gig I've ever been to, but I didn't have anything to compare it to."


 
The video features plenty of scenes running around alleyways and jumping over railway station ticket barriers. Al Archer told Mojo: "We did all those things. It wasn't any kind of gimmick, we did actually bunk the trains and all that."



"There, There, My Dear"

Written as an open letter to a pseudo-intellectual musician called Robin, this horn-led song acts as a dismissal of a dishonest music scene. Rowland told The Guardian: "It's an angry song. In the lyrics, I'm addressing 'Robin,' but he was the personification of a certain type of middle-class musician in NME, quoting Kerouac and Burroughs and all these authors I'd never read."


 
In the Searching for the Young Soul Rebels liner notes, the song title is followed by the line "P.S. Old clothes do not make a tortured artist."


 
After the song's closing notes, Rowland sings unaccompanied the main chorus of Lee Dorsey's 1969 R&B classic "Everything I Do Gonh Be Funky (From Now On)."


When his picture was taken as he fled his Belfast home in the 1970s Anthony O'Shaughnessy had no idea it would become a classic album cover.
 But 30 years on from the photo being chosen as the main image for Searching For The Young Soul Rebels, released by Dexys Midnight Runners in July 1980, the album is often included in lists of top records of all time. But little has ever been known about the youngster whose face stares out from its cover.

 Mr O'Shaughnessy, now 52 and a retired postman, spoke to the Express & Star at an anniversary event celebrating the release of the album, in Birmingham.

 The photo was taken in Cranbrooks Gardens in the Ardoyne area of Belfast after Catholics began fleeing their homes following the introduction of internment by the British government in 1971. This meant IRA suspects could be detained without trial.

 The picture appeared in the Evening Standard in London the day afterwards and was picked up by Dexys nine years later.

 Mr O'Shaughnessy, who was 13 at the time, said: "There were tensions simmering for about three days. People did not know what was going to happen. I thought it was a dream and in the morning everything would be okay, I don't even remember the photographer doing the picture."

 He was one of five children who went on the run with his parents seeking refuge in a Catholic church before moving in to a house left by a fleeing Protestant family.

 He said: "My late mother Kathleen is in the background wearing glasses. On the left- hand side is a young boy in a dark coat which is my brother Kevin and on the right hand side is my other younger brother Gerard carrying a plastic bag.

 "I knew it had been in the paper but didn't think much about it. Years later a friend told me the picture was on the Dexys album, I didn't believe them and went to a record store where I saw it. I just thought 'wow'."

Last edited by arabchanter (16/11/2018 8:04 am)

Great post Pat, lots of good nuggets I didn't know, on the point about them being ''fenians'' that's the first time I've heard of that, I can't recall any bands being talked about in that sense, speaking for myself the sectarian thing wasn't really big in Dundee, when I was at primary there was the St Patricks day scuffles between Catholic schools and Protestant schools, where you were asked if you were "Scots or Irish" and depending on who was asking and what your answer was concluded in getting a shake of the hand or chased/beat up, but that died away and things came a bit more territorial between schemes, and religion was never questioned.