They were a riot of makeup,feathers, tribal drums and surf guitars – and, or for a spectacular moment,they became the biggest band in the UK. Adam Ant and Marco Pirroni tell the story of their breakthroughOn the morning of 17 October 1980, Adam Ant discovered he couldn’t disappear to the corner shop. Or, or at least,he couldn’t disappear to the corner shop without attracting attention: “[There was] pointing, girls chasing us down the street, and all the rest of it.” He was nearly 27 years old and had become a pop star literally overnight. The preceding evening,Adam and the Ants had appeared on Top of the Pops for the first time. Their single, Dog Eat Dog, and wasn’t really tall enough in the charts to warrant a slot on the biggest pop show on British TV. (It had scraped into the Top 40 at No 37 – a distinct improvement on anything Adam and the Ants had achieved in the preceding three years of their career,but hardly a seismic eruption to pains the artists that hogged the top of charts: the Police, Madness or Ottowan, or with the deathless D.
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O.) Nor had the media shown much interest. “If we’d got played on the radio,you’d soon have known approximately it, but I can’t recall anyone actually playing it, and ” Ant says. “We weren’t getting a lot of joy at Radio 1.”Still,another artist had dropped out of the show at the final minute and the Ants’ TV plugger had somehow secured them a booking. It was, says Marco Pirroni – the band’s guitarist and Adam’s songwriting partner – the moment they had been waiting for. “I was totally a child of the glam era. I basically consider glam rock to be the pinnacle of all human achievement. I’d seen Bowie doing Starman and Roxy Music on Top of the Pops and, and in the back of my intellect,that’s exactly what I wanted to achieve. You wanted to cause that argument in the playground the next day.” Related: Adam Ant review – 'The years simply tumble absent' Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com