Interview - Adam Ant: The dandy highwayman rides once again

He may have ditched the stripes across his nose, but as Adam Ant tells Sarah Freeman he is definitely back in business and ready to perform.

For a long while it looked as though Adam Ant was destined to remain on the music industry’s casualty list. In fact, his condition looked critical.

After embracing the eccentricities of the 1980s and producing some of the decade’s undoubted anthems from Prince Charming to Stand and Deliver, things began to slide. Sales dried up, new acts arrived on the scene and the last time most people saw Adam Ant was in 2003 when he emerged from the Old Bailey where he’d answered to his birth name, Stuart Leslie Goddard and pleaded guilty to a charge of affray.

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Wearing dark glasses and a grey overcoat, he looked a shadow of his former self and when a few months later it emerged the singer had been sectioned under the Mental Health Act, it seemed Adam Ant’s career was over.

However, it seems that no-one told him that he was expected to quietly shuffle off into the sunset. For the last few years he has been hard at work on a new project and he’s about to unveil the results. Adam Ant is back and this time he’s calling himself the Blueblack Hussar.

“I just got to thinking what would the character be like after 32 years. He’d be old, mad and maybe just a little bit bitter and so the Blueblack Hussar was born. People have offered me quite a bit of money to put the stripe across my nose, but I’m not doing that. I wanted to create a scenario, a persona to bring back.”

This time Adam Ant is not alone, he spent six months auditioning the Good, the Mad and the Lovely posse. The final line-up includes Georgina Baillie, the burlesque dancer who a few years ago found herself at the centre of the Sachsgate scandal .

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“We’re all having a great time together. Georgina’s a lovely girl and this just feels like the right time to announce my return. I want the fans to leave these gigs sweating, with perhaps a nice T-shirt as a memento and saying, ‘I haven’t seen anything like that before’, but you can’t write songs just because you think the fans will like it.

“The truth is, I’m not all that keen on fans. In the early days I was followed by all these hardcore punks. As soon as I had a number one they didn’t like it and then there were the real nutcases who think you’re almost living their life for them. It becomes a bit like a cult. I just want to get up there and play my music. I respect the fans, but they have to respect me.”

Given his tendency for unpredictability, when Adam Ant says no two shows on his tour will be the same, you tend to believe him.

He is, after all, the man who a few months ago duetted with Boy George at London’s’ Jazz Cafe. “Pop music is nothing if it’s not about fun,” he says. “Sadly, in the 1990s it all got a little bit serious. Blur had a good stab at pop, but then Damon [Albarn] turned into a preachy arts correspondent and it all got a bit boring.

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“Oasis I can’t stand. There have been some marvellous women like Bjork over the years, but it’s about consistency. Now most bands are finished after one album and the internet has devalued a lot of what goes on in music. If I was sat here with lots of money in the bank, I might do a Prince and give an album for free, but I don’t believe in it. It’s my work and I should be paid for it. I’m not a student and I want to be able to pay the bills.”

While Adam Ant no longer has the security of a big record label, in many ways he’s much happier to be going it alone and doing things on his own terms. “Even as a really young child I always knew what I wanted to. It was simple. I wanted to make records, dress up, dance and make money.

“But in the early days it was so much work. The record company set deadlines and if I missed them I owed them another record. It was all about the weekly chart position and that’s not a good mentality to be in. I felt for much of the time like a robot.

“It’s still 10 per cent inspiration and 90 per cent perspiration, but now it’s my own label and creatively I’m in control. I’m not in the debt of someone who will cream off 92 per cent of my earnings without ever having listened to a single record.”

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Adam Ant has clearly lost none of the anger of his youth, but he is, he says, in a much happier place than he was few years ago.

“Whatever you do, if you a realise your dreams you have to accept there’s a price to pay and I paid mine,” he says referring to the court case which saw him fined £500.

“But you know for all the medication I was on, it didn’t completely eradicate my brain cells. I can still write songs and when I hear something like Goody Two Shoes is being used for Shrek Three it gives me an incredible amount of joy. It’s nice to know you have a legacy.”

Not averse to a little acting, Adam Ant is currently in talks about adapting his autobiography, Stand and Deliver, which was published in 2006. He’d quite like to cast James Franco (127 Hours, The Social Network) in the lead and insists it’s a part most actors would die for.

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“Even Jude Law could do it if he put on a bit of weight. When filmmakers do punk, they do spitting, they do shouting, but what they don’t really get, they don’t capture what it was really like – they were dark times. Biopics are not an easy thing to do, but if you get the right people on board I’m sure it’s possible.

“The key is having a good story and my life is one bloody good story.” After all he’s been through, it’s one he hopes will finally have a happy ending.

Adam Ant and the Good, the Mad and the Lovely Posse play Holmfirth Picturedrome, June 3, 0871 230 1101 and the Duchess in York on June 4, 0844 477 1000.

A history of Antmusic

Adam Ant was born in London in November 1954.

Between 1980 and 1983 he had 10 top ten hits in the UK. One of the few British artists to break America, he was once voted world’s sexiest man, largely thanks to his videos which were screened on MTV.

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While best-known for hits like Goody Two Shoes and Prince Charming, Adam Ant has also made his mark on acting, appearing in the likes of Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr Sloane and Steven Berkoff’s play Greek.

He is currently working on a new album entitled Adam Ant is The Blueblack Hussar in Marrying the Gunner’s Daughter.

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