Rip It Up and Start Again (40 page)

McLaren positioned Bow Wow Wow as a victory over Thatcherism. Rather than take the obvious postpunk path and bemoan mass unemployment, though, McLaren mischievously framed the absence of work as liberation rather than affliction. Bow Wow Wow’s “W.O.R.K. (N.O. Nah NO! NO! My Daddy Don’t)” declared, “Demolition of the work ethic takes us to the age of the primitive.” Going to school was pointless, because its function (socializing youth for a life of labor) had been outmoded. “T.E.K. technology is DEMOLITION of DADDY/Is A.U.T. Autonomy” goes the chorus chant, taking the situationist fantasy of automation enabling a utopian future of perpetual play and updating it for the microchip era.

When asked by one interviewer about the plight of the unemployed, McLaren declared: “So what if you don’t have a job? I came back to England and everybody looks like bank clerks to me. They look like they’re very, very worried, about their future, about money. There’s a greyness in the culture that’s beating everyone down to a pulp. I think Thatcher really likes it that people are worried.” McLaren’s advice to the jobless was “Be a pirate. Wear gold and look like you don’t
need
a job.” Over endless coffee sessions in Soho greasy spoons, McLaren brainwashed Bow Wow Wow: “Don’t be a grocer—a grocer’s a money grabber, and he don’t spend his money when he have it.” If you had money, he believed, you should squander it.
Feeling
rich was the best way to beat Thatcher. Gold and sunshine were linked in his mind as un-English, the quintessence of spiritual extravagance. He fantasized, with endearing daftness, about importing sunshine, making the British Isles Mediterranean. “Just pretend it’s the tropics” was his remedy for the Thatcher blues. Against the doom and gloom of politicized postpunk, McLaren imagined a kind of unshackled pleasure principle triumphing over economic reality through style and sheer insouciance. Again, McLaren was ahead of the curve. Wham! rode exactly this carefree attitude to fame a few years later, with the pro-dole “Wham Rap!” (essentially a rewrite of “W.O.R.K.”) and the sunshine anthem “Club Tropicana.”

McLaren felt certain that Bow Wow Wow would become the most important band since the Sex Pistols and consign dreary postpunk to history’s garbage heap. But in July 1980, despite getting tons of press and radio play, the debut single, “C-30, C-60, C-90 Go!,” stalled just outside the U.K. Top 30. Always the conspiracy theorist, McLaren believed that EMI had bowed to covert pressure from the BPI, the organization that represented the record industry and was campaigning for a tax to be levied on blank cassettes as compensation for revenues lost to home taping. EMI, he believed, had sabotaged the single, falsifying its sales figures to ensure a low chart placing. Whipping up Bow Wow Wow into a fury, McLaren shepherded the group to EMI’s headquarters, where they trashed a top executive’s office, ripping gold discs from the wall and throwing a clock out the window.

AFTER GETTING KICKED OUT
of his own band, Adam Ant wiped his eyes, decided success was the best revenge, and set to extracting his full money’s worth from McLaren’s image makeover. As a pop package, Bow Wow Wow was crammed with ideas to the point of incoherence. Basically apolitical, Adam boiled it all down to three key elements: heroic imagery, sex music, and tribalism. All had been part of his shtick already—the glam image, the kinky songs, the idea of his following as “antpeople”—but McLaren had given him a striking new look that mixed dashing pirate and Apache brave with a white stripe across the nose. As for the Burundi beat, Adam upped the ante on Bow Wow Wow by recruiting two drummers for maximum polyrhythmic impact. He also teamed up with his new guitarist Marco Pirroni to write a bunch of sharp, catchy tunes. Pirroni had contributed impressively heavy and dissonant guitar to the doomy postpunk outfit Rema Rema, but joining the Ants, he adopted a lighter, swashbuckling style that evoked Duane Eddy, surf music, and Ennio Morricone’s spaghetti Western soundtracks. This sound also happened to be remarkably similar to the twangy, tremolo-heavy approach of Bow Wow Wow’s guitarist, Matthew Ashman.

In the winter of 1980, the singles “Dog Eat Dog,” “Ant Music,” and “Kings of the Wild Frontier” smashed their way into the U.K. Top 10. For just a moment, there was a frisson of danger about Adam and the Ants. Sure, this was bubblegum pop. Yet Adam’s sheer self-belief lent a weird sort of conviction to ostensibly ludicrous lines, like “Don’t tread on an ant/He’s done nothing to you/Might come a time/When he’s treading on you” (which could be read as an oblique warning to McLaren and the former Antz now in Bow Wow Wow). On the cusp between culthood and stardom, the live Ants were an awesome experience. In some respects, Adam’s whole tribal/heroic shtick was like a teenybop version of heavy metal’s warrior-male fantasies. He also recalled glam gang leader Gary Glitter, another pop idol backed by two drummers stomping out a primal beat. Like Glitter, Adam’s peacock swagger was oddly asexual, more narcissistic display than real seduction.

During his early cult years, Adam had been endlessly mocked by the music press. Now he reveled in creating an army of look-alike followers. Even more delicious was the way that Adam used McLaren’s own ideas more effectively than the mastermind himself. That winter, when Adam told
Sounds,
“I think ‘cult’ is just a safe word meaning ‘loser.’ I don’t want it anymore,” he was partly expounding the New Pop ethos of ambition and mainstream infiltration. But he was also sticking the knife into McLaren and the turncoat Antz. For all their manager’s strenuous efforts, Bow Wow Wow remained a cult band, languishing in a hitless wilderness, whereas Adam and his new Ants were the pop sensation of 1980.

Adam’s zenith came with “Prince Charming,” his September 1981 U.K. chart topper and one of the strangest sounding hit singles ever. Its keening coyote-yowl melody resembled a Native American battle cry. The beat lurched disconcertingly, a waltz turning into an aboriginal courtship dance. In the video, Adam glided between a series of arrested poses, frozen tableaux of defiance and hauteur that weirdly anticipated “vogueing,” the New York gay underground’s form of competitive dancing inspired by photo spreads in fashion mags. At the end of the video, Adam impersonates a gallery of icons, including Rudolph Valentino, Alice Cooper, Clint Eastwood, and Marlon Brando. Both song and video expose a certain empty circularity to Adam’s neoglam idea of reinventing yourself. He seems to be suggesting “imitate me as I’ve imitated
my
heroes.” The chorus is oddly brittle and defensive (“ridicule/is nothing to be scared of”) while the ultimate message—dressing up in fancy finery as a way of flaunting self-respect—feels distinctly trite.

“Prince Charming” ultimately suggested that Adam’s destiny was to run through history’s wardrobe until he ran out of heroic archetypes. He’d already been a highway robber with the previous number one single “Stand and Deliver.” In the video for “Ant Rap,” the next big hit from his
Prince Charming
album, Adam dressed up as a knight in shining armor. He ended 1981 with a spectacular, no-expense-spared tour called the Prince Charming Revue. The word “Revue” suggested that he’d moved into the realm of pure showbiz.

In interviews, Adam talked in vague terms about providing kids with hope, a positive alternative to “the rock rebellion rubbish.” He claimed he was perfectly happy offering escapist entertainment à la
Star Wars
or
Raiders of the Lost Ark,
and he defended his squeaky-clean image: “I’m sick and tired of being told that because I don’t drink or smoke or take drugs that I’m a Goody Two-shoes…. I don’t like drugsand that is a threat to the rock ’n’ roll establishment.” This sentiment inspired Adam’s next big hit—and his U.S. breakthrough—the rockabilly-flavored ditty “Goody Two Shoes.” The art school student who had hung around McLaren and Westwood’s SEX and Seditionaries stores, where he was thrilled by the fetish clothing and images of the queen with a safety pin through her nose, now proudly performed at the Royal Variety Show, an annual charity event featuring Britain’s top entertainers. “It would have been exactly the negative, inward-looking rock thing to have turned it down. If people think I’m clean and boring for shaking hands with the queen then that’s up to them. What would be outrageous? To spit at her? Drop me trousers? That’s rock ’n’ roll rebellion and, like I say, I want nothing to do with that.”

WHILE ADAM TRANSFORMED HIS
faux-deviant cult charisma into defanged mainstream fame, McLaren seemed to believe he could single-handedly conjure an entire subculture into being. Music alone was not enough. He and Westwood opened World’s End, their latest King’s Road boutique, to feature her new line of flouncy romantic clothes. McLaren also dreamed of making a movie with Bow Wow Wow, a second
Swindle
based around his new clutch of concepts. In the winter of 1980, he even attempted to start a magazine to promote the subversive sunshine-and-gold spirit embodied in Bow Wow Wow’s music.

McLaren invited his old cohort Fred Vermorel to be the editor of the EMI-funded project. “The idea, as he first broached it, was something like
Schoolkids OZ,
a magazine written from the kids’ point of view and a bit outrageous,” recalls Vermorel, referring to the special edition of the sixties underground paper that resulted in a high-profile obscenity case against the editors.
Playkids
was McLaren’s original working title. He talked it up to the music press as “a junior
Playboy
for kids getting used to the idea that they needn’t have careers…a magazine about pleasure technology for the primitive boy and girl.” Proposed articles included a piece by celebrity ex-convict John McVicar on crime as a career option in an age of rising unemployment, and an article by Bow Wow Wow’s Lee Gorman about prostitutes, outlining where to go, prices, and so forth.

But Vermorel soon became anxious about some of McLaren’s other ideas. Researching pop fandom for a book (later published as
Starlust),
Fred and his wife, Judy, unearthed lots of kinky fan letters, including one from a boy who worshipped Clem Burke from Blondie and dreamed of licking whipped cream from between the drummer’s buttocks. McLaren wanted to publish the letter in
Playkids,
except that now he wanted to call the magazine
Chicken
. “Call us naïve, but nobody, not me and not the people at EMI, knew what ‘chicken’ meant,” says Vermorel. “So we said okay. But of course it’s pedophile slang for young kids.”

Then there were the photo sessions. At one, Annabella was asked to pose nude (she refused). Another session was an all-day affair at a series of regular people’s homes, booked via an agency. “The photographer told me Malcolm got increasingly heavy-handed during the day and generated a kind of hysteria,” says Vermorel. The climax came with McLaren’s badgering a thirteen-year-old girl into removing her clothes. He succeeded, but only after reducing her to tears.

Vermorel believes McLaren’s master scheme was “to create a child porn scandal implicating as many people as he could.” Not just EMI, who was financing
Chicken,
but the BBC, too. A documentary crew headed by Alan Yentob had been following McLaren around for a program on the marketing of Bow Wow Wow. Partly impelled by his usual lust for maximum media mayhem, McLaren also wanted to make a serious polemical point, exposing pop music as porn
for
children (hypersexual material that stimulated them precociously) and pop as porn
using
children (fresh-faced boy-men, jailbait-age girls) to titillate adults.

With typical ruthlessness, McLaren, in his eagerness to embarrass the music and media establishment, showed no concern whatsoever about the youngsters (Annabella and the other teenage models) or old friends (Vermorel) who would have been embroiled in the scandal. When he went to remonstrate with McLaren, says Vermorel, “Malcolm just laughed and said, ‘You should be telling all this to the judge! When the shit hits the fan,
I’ll
be in South America.’ So I told EMI what was going on. And they told Yentob, and he freaked out, and those tapes have been in the BBC vault ever since.” Vermorel also alerted the music press, telling
NME
that the magazine he’d thought was supposed to be “the anti–
Smash Hits,
” aimed at sex-positive underage youth, was actually turning into “a magazine for adults that features kids as objects.”

McLaren accused his estranged friend Vermorel of being a closet puritan. But over the next few years, photos seeped out here and there on single sleeves and “greatest hits” compilations suggesting that the photo sessions had been decidedly dodgy. In one picture, Matthew Ashman wears just a “radio G-string” (a transistor-as-loincloth affair too small to conceal his genitals) and perches a scantily clad Indian boy who looks about eight years old atop his shoulders. In another photo, Annabella, apparently naked underneath a loosely wrapped blanket, lies on top of a studio mixing board with a microphone jutting at her mouth at a suggestive angle. “I wasn’t nude,” she insisted later to
Sounds,
adding, with delicious lack of awareness, “I was lying on a control panel…with all these knobs sticking in me.”

Chicken
never hatched. According to Vermorel, “the only physical evidence of
Chicken
’s existence was the rate card for advertising in the magazine.” But Bow Wow Wow’s second release,
Your Cassette Pet,
continued to exploit the underage-sex angle. Most of McLaren’s lyrics were reworked from the scripts for
The Adventures of Melody, Lyric, and Tune
and
The Mile High Club
. In “Sexy Eiffel Tower,” Annabella plays a suicidal girl about to leap from the top of Paris’s most famous landmark. She gets implausibly horny in the proximity of death: “Feel my treasure chest/Let’s have sex before I die/Be my special guest.” Plunging through the air (“falling legs around your spire”), she enjoys a
petit mort
or two before the
grand mort
of hitting the ground. Annabella claimed, with apparent sincerity, that the panting sounds she expertly imitated weren’t meant to be orgasmic but panicked. “Louis Quatorze” concerns a pervy bandit of love who surprises Annabella with unannounced visits and ravishment at gunpoint. The music, though, almost vanquishes any moral reservations: Bow Wow Wow had developed an exhilarating and unique sound, all frolicking polyrhythms, twangabilly guitar, and frantic but funky bass. Add Annabella’s girlish, euphoric vocals—especially charming on a cover of the Johnny Mercer standard “Fools Rush In”—and the results were irresistible.