Adam Ant Article-Pure Sex (1977)
Posted: Tue Nov 15, 2005 1:11 amSept/Oct 1977 Ant Interview
Tony: How'd you get the ideas for songs like 'Plastic Surgery' and 'Concentrate on You'?
Adam: The second one, the Concentration thing is called 'Dirk Wears White Sox' because of Dirk Bogarde. He's my hero, I've got lots of heroes, I've always had lots of sort of people to look up to. Dirk Bogarde as an artist, as an actor, as a person comes over very strong to me, and I wrote 'White Socks' about the two films that he did. 'The Damned', not so much 'The Damned', it was more 'The Night Porter', that song is my favorite. I think it's the best because it catches what I think of Dirk Bogarde. 'Plastic Surgery' is about the Hollywood thing. The thing of changing yourself through plastic surgery.
Tony: When I first saw you back in the Man in the Moon you had the leather face mask and everything, why did you stop?
Adam: the S/M thing was, it was really just the way I felt. At that time I felt very aggressive and I used to attack the audience and lift 'em up, hit 'em. Now I've come to the conclusion... I asked Jordan to be our manager on the last gig we did at the Man in the Moon. I don't know if you were there at that gig but everybody left after about 4 minutes. Everybody split apart from Jordan and about 3 others. I realised then that it was getting too heavy, so now I just take it out on myself. Just hit myself instead of the audience, and hit my players if they're not playing hard enough. Basically that's the answer.
Tony: Did you just start the S/M thing onstage or was that...
Adam: No. All the songs you hear now, with the exception of Hampstead, is stuff that I wrote two years ago. I left the group I was in, BAZOOKA JOE, but I had a lot of trouble and illness, I wrote these songs just before I was ill. They were sitting on the shelf for 18 months, I was just too ill to do anything.
Really the S/M thing stems from what I was doing before that. I was at College Art School, with John Ellis (of the Vibrators), and all the time I was at Art College I was very influenced by Allan Jones the artist. All my college work is pretty much like this, this is just a musical equivalent of what I was visually doing at college. I'm not personally into S/M, I mean I never smacked the arse of anybody. It's the power, it's the imagery. There's a certain imagery involved with that which I find magnetic. It's not done viciously, if you read S/M mags and spank mags or anything like that, it's done with an essence of humour... wardress and stuff, that just appeals to my imagination.
Adam: I'm not interested in politics, I hate politics. My music is my music. I write songs for very strange reasons which I couldn't begin to tell you. But politics honestly don't interest me because in my books politics is big business, and I'm not interested in that kind of big business. I really just find politics so boring I wouldn's waste my time trying to...
I like sex. My songs are about sex is... sex is my life. I just find it the most exhilarating experience, and I think it should be done on stage. I think the only people who do it are people like, Jim Morrison did it, and died. And Iggy might have done it. Sex is my source of material, I'll tell you that.
Tony: It's a strange perspective of sex...
Adam: Well, my tattoo is my philosophy, (he shows me his tattoo) 'Pure Sex'. I mean what I do in my own bed is my business and I don't tell anybody what I do or who I do it with, or how I do it. It doesn't interest me to tell them because it would bastardise any relationship I have with any woman.
I just think of certain situations which I think would be very nice to say. I've just written a number called 'Bathroom Function' which is about fucking in the bathroom because I think the bathroom's a very nice place to try out, maybe, that's if I haven't done it, which I'm not telling you. They're not all about sex, a lot of them are about 'Berlin' or about pre-war Germany. I've written quite a few things. I've done a lot of rubber numbers 'cos I like rubber and leather fetishism which I have found a very intriguing subject. At college I spent about 2 years of my life doing a thesis on it.
Tony: A thesis?
Adam: Yes. I left at the end of second year at college, I didn't want to do the thesis because I'd done all the work and everything. Read lots of books and discovered much to my surprise that it wasn't just a kick it was a deadly serious subject. A very sort of medical thing and I found... I got a source of material for my songs. I've written songs like, I wrote a song called 'Rubber People' which is a serious look at rubber fetishism. And I also wrote one about Transvestism. But they're serious attempts to try and just... They're not serious, none of my songs are serious, I mean fucking hell. They're serious to me. But the thing is that with, say, 'Transvestism' people just laugh at people. If somebody's wearing a pair of rubber underpants under a pin-stripe suits it's funny, y'know. But I don't think it's funny. I don't think it's any more strange than watching fucking 'Crossroads' every night. I think that's more perverted than somebody...
Tony: What do you think about your audience?
Adam: I don't like audiences at all... purely because of the reactions I got before I formed The Ants, from audiences, from playing in pubs in the 70's before the Pistols came along. I was on the same circuit as Strummer (Joe Strummer of the Clash) and we used to play with the 101ers. We did a gig once at Camden Town Hall with them. Both bands played their guts out to a load of Teds, and the Teds just didn't react. And now it's imbred in me, I think it's just insecurity in myself that I have to... I can't see the audience because I'm blind without my glasses so...
You've got a choice when you get out on that stage. My choice used to be like do what the audience want, but now I just ignore them. The audience can quite honestly kill themselves, stab/ gun/gas/burn themselves, they pay their money and I give them 100%.
Tony: What if they throw stuff?
Adam: If they throw stuff at me we'll see what happens. I was gobbed at and I just threatened them with a mike stand and they stopped gobbing at me. The point is I will hit them with a mike stand if they hit me. But I'm not into that, I used to do that at the Man in the Moon.
I don't want to hurt anybody at all. The only time I injure myself it happens accidently, I don't know 'till after the show. I don't think people want that because... as you said the early days of the Man in the Moon were really ferocious, some of the gigs there I don't know how the hell I wasn't attacked or murdered. I just took liberties with the audience, and they never reacted. There was nothing! They just stood there. I lifted some bloke up and pogoed him, and he just fucking stood there. Not one person just hit me. Oh only one french girl kicked me in the face once, that was all I got.
Tony: Was that when you were crawling about the floor?
Adam: No. That was when I tried to kiss her feet and she kicked me in the face instead but,... it's strange you saying that, it does worry me in a way if people sort of, react. If they throw things at me, or gob things, if there's 10 of them throw something at me and I see one of them, if I hit him across the head with with the mike stand then I've at least got one of them back. Then they can kill me (laughs). WHAT A WAY TO GO!
Tony: But you come across better on stage than on the recordings you've made. The tape I heard wasn't as good as on stage. You're definitely better in front of an audience.
Adam: That's the danger of trying to do something onstage. I don't plan what goes on, if I started to do that I'd break my neck... I believe the music will eventually, I know it'll eventually come over, but it's obviously the start because of the show, the show's gonna be a lot stronger but I sincerely want the music to catch on, people to recognize the music. I can understand what you're saying, it worries me a lot sometimes, especially when I listen to the recordings. Studio situations are dead anyway... I mean, The sex Pistols managed to achieve a certain sound but... I've seen a lot of the Pistols because the band I was telling you about, Bazooka Joe, that John Ellis was in, and Knox (of the Vibrators) was in for a time. You know the Pistols made their professional debut at the St. Martins College of Art, well they supported us there so I saw them first. The sound they got there, and the sound they got at the Nashville just after, it just could not be put down on record, it wasn't so much a sound it was a Fucking Atmosphere. It just hit you, and the people then just walked out, or pulled the electricity out to stop 'em.
But that sound, you couldn't take that out and box it, which is great. I don't want to be boxed really. This was when the Pistols were just like, Art School. Glen got the gig through my drummer, and they hustled all of our gear off us and all that, and they did the set. What that did for me, and what I'll always be grateful to the Sex Pistols for, and especially John, is the fact that I looked at him (and despite the fact that the music was just so loud you couldn't determine wether it was good or bad) what it did was, I left the group that night, because I said they were good, they struck me as being very much like the early Who. It was so strong I left this group I'd been in for two years because they gave me so much abuse, they said, 'they're useless'. I left because I thought anybody who got that much reaction... but it took me a year to get the Ants together.
Adam: One of the early things was 'No money and no big groups'. You know, take Led Zeppelin, you have to pay £10 to see them and then you see like tiny figures and it scares me shitless, quite honestly, sometimes because within 18 months we're getting very close to a situation where it's going to happen again. That's the trouble when you get very successful, I mean I'd like to know what I should do if I ever got into that situation, what can I do?
That's one reason I'm glad the Ants are in this (the Derek Jarman feature film of the Sex Pistols) film because I was very worried that...
Tony: Was it onstage?
Adam: Yeah. We did a live thing at Drury Lane. I think that a possible solution to it, which I hope to be able to do a lot more of: video work, a lot more t.v. work. Because that's a medium, you can do it and people can see you. The t.v.'s second rate okay, but when the Sex Pistols got on T.O.T.P. fucking everybody watched it because you just can't see them anywhere else. The t.v.'s a poor substitute for live entertainment but it's a gesture at least. I mean what else can you do? I want to know the answer, I want to know what to do. I think I'll just keep playing the Vortex (laughs).
Tony: The Ants music is for a pretty minority audience anyway, because of the S/M thing.
Adam: S/M is a, minority interest is the word. It seems minority at the moment but I think when people... if more people come to see us, more people just sort of watch then... I want them to love us or fucking hate us.
Some bloke came up to me the other day and said it's 'Glam rock'. I couldn't suss him out, he was a bit mad anyway but I mean some of the things you get said to you. That's why a lot of the bands are so aggressive. But I'm getting to the stage now where I hope to be looked upon as a 'performer'. Someone who does something. ...and finally...
I know what I want on record and I want to go into that studio and get it. We haven't got it, yet, but we will get it 'cos nothing's going on with 'The Ants' unless it's exactly Ant music. It's got to be Ant music. It's got to be fucking Ant music. I want to be proud to play it to anybody, that's all I'm in it for, to have good records out. Money can't buy the 'thing' you get when somebody sits there and appreciates your music, just no way.
Tony: How'd you get the ideas for songs like 'Plastic Surgery' and 'Concentrate on You'?
Adam: The second one, the Concentration thing is called 'Dirk Wears White Sox' because of Dirk Bogarde. He's my hero, I've got lots of heroes, I've always had lots of sort of people to look up to. Dirk Bogarde as an artist, as an actor, as a person comes over very strong to me, and I wrote 'White Socks' about the two films that he did. 'The Damned', not so much 'The Damned', it was more 'The Night Porter', that song is my favorite. I think it's the best because it catches what I think of Dirk Bogarde. 'Plastic Surgery' is about the Hollywood thing. The thing of changing yourself through plastic surgery.
Tony: When I first saw you back in the Man in the Moon you had the leather face mask and everything, why did you stop?
Adam: the S/M thing was, it was really just the way I felt. At that time I felt very aggressive and I used to attack the audience and lift 'em up, hit 'em. Now I've come to the conclusion... I asked Jordan to be our manager on the last gig we did at the Man in the Moon. I don't know if you were there at that gig but everybody left after about 4 minutes. Everybody split apart from Jordan and about 3 others. I realised then that it was getting too heavy, so now I just take it out on myself. Just hit myself instead of the audience, and hit my players if they're not playing hard enough. Basically that's the answer.
Tony: Did you just start the S/M thing onstage or was that...
Adam: No. All the songs you hear now, with the exception of Hampstead, is stuff that I wrote two years ago. I left the group I was in, BAZOOKA JOE, but I had a lot of trouble and illness, I wrote these songs just before I was ill. They were sitting on the shelf for 18 months, I was just too ill to do anything.
Really the S/M thing stems from what I was doing before that. I was at College Art School, with John Ellis (of the Vibrators), and all the time I was at Art College I was very influenced by Allan Jones the artist. All my college work is pretty much like this, this is just a musical equivalent of what I was visually doing at college. I'm not personally into S/M, I mean I never smacked the arse of anybody. It's the power, it's the imagery. There's a certain imagery involved with that which I find magnetic. It's not done viciously, if you read S/M mags and spank mags or anything like that, it's done with an essence of humour... wardress and stuff, that just appeals to my imagination.
Adam: I'm not interested in politics, I hate politics. My music is my music. I write songs for very strange reasons which I couldn't begin to tell you. But politics honestly don't interest me because in my books politics is big business, and I'm not interested in that kind of big business. I really just find politics so boring I wouldn's waste my time trying to...
I like sex. My songs are about sex is... sex is my life. I just find it the most exhilarating experience, and I think it should be done on stage. I think the only people who do it are people like, Jim Morrison did it, and died. And Iggy might have done it. Sex is my source of material, I'll tell you that.
Tony: It's a strange perspective of sex...
Adam: Well, my tattoo is my philosophy, (he shows me his tattoo) 'Pure Sex'. I mean what I do in my own bed is my business and I don't tell anybody what I do or who I do it with, or how I do it. It doesn't interest me to tell them because it would bastardise any relationship I have with any woman.
I just think of certain situations which I think would be very nice to say. I've just written a number called 'Bathroom Function' which is about fucking in the bathroom because I think the bathroom's a very nice place to try out, maybe, that's if I haven't done it, which I'm not telling you. They're not all about sex, a lot of them are about 'Berlin' or about pre-war Germany. I've written quite a few things. I've done a lot of rubber numbers 'cos I like rubber and leather fetishism which I have found a very intriguing subject. At college I spent about 2 years of my life doing a thesis on it.
Tony: A thesis?
Adam: Yes. I left at the end of second year at college, I didn't want to do the thesis because I'd done all the work and everything. Read lots of books and discovered much to my surprise that it wasn't just a kick it was a deadly serious subject. A very sort of medical thing and I found... I got a source of material for my songs. I've written songs like, I wrote a song called 'Rubber People' which is a serious look at rubber fetishism. And I also wrote one about Transvestism. But they're serious attempts to try and just... They're not serious, none of my songs are serious, I mean fucking hell. They're serious to me. But the thing is that with, say, 'Transvestism' people just laugh at people. If somebody's wearing a pair of rubber underpants under a pin-stripe suits it's funny, y'know. But I don't think it's funny. I don't think it's any more strange than watching fucking 'Crossroads' every night. I think that's more perverted than somebody...
Tony: What do you think about your audience?
Adam: I don't like audiences at all... purely because of the reactions I got before I formed The Ants, from audiences, from playing in pubs in the 70's before the Pistols came along. I was on the same circuit as Strummer (Joe Strummer of the Clash) and we used to play with the 101ers. We did a gig once at Camden Town Hall with them. Both bands played their guts out to a load of Teds, and the Teds just didn't react. And now it's imbred in me, I think it's just insecurity in myself that I have to... I can't see the audience because I'm blind without my glasses so...
You've got a choice when you get out on that stage. My choice used to be like do what the audience want, but now I just ignore them. The audience can quite honestly kill themselves, stab/ gun/gas/burn themselves, they pay their money and I give them 100%.
Tony: What if they throw stuff?
Adam: If they throw stuff at me we'll see what happens. I was gobbed at and I just threatened them with a mike stand and they stopped gobbing at me. The point is I will hit them with a mike stand if they hit me. But I'm not into that, I used to do that at the Man in the Moon.
I don't want to hurt anybody at all. The only time I injure myself it happens accidently, I don't know 'till after the show. I don't think people want that because... as you said the early days of the Man in the Moon were really ferocious, some of the gigs there I don't know how the hell I wasn't attacked or murdered. I just took liberties with the audience, and they never reacted. There was nothing! They just stood there. I lifted some bloke up and pogoed him, and he just fucking stood there. Not one person just hit me. Oh only one french girl kicked me in the face once, that was all I got.
Tony: Was that when you were crawling about the floor?
Adam: No. That was when I tried to kiss her feet and she kicked me in the face instead but,... it's strange you saying that, it does worry me in a way if people sort of, react. If they throw things at me, or gob things, if there's 10 of them throw something at me and I see one of them, if I hit him across the head with with the mike stand then I've at least got one of them back. Then they can kill me (laughs). WHAT A WAY TO GO!
Tony: But you come across better on stage than on the recordings you've made. The tape I heard wasn't as good as on stage. You're definitely better in front of an audience.
Adam: That's the danger of trying to do something onstage. I don't plan what goes on, if I started to do that I'd break my neck... I believe the music will eventually, I know it'll eventually come over, but it's obviously the start because of the show, the show's gonna be a lot stronger but I sincerely want the music to catch on, people to recognize the music. I can understand what you're saying, it worries me a lot sometimes, especially when I listen to the recordings. Studio situations are dead anyway... I mean, The sex Pistols managed to achieve a certain sound but... I've seen a lot of the Pistols because the band I was telling you about, Bazooka Joe, that John Ellis was in, and Knox (of the Vibrators) was in for a time. You know the Pistols made their professional debut at the St. Martins College of Art, well they supported us there so I saw them first. The sound they got there, and the sound they got at the Nashville just after, it just could not be put down on record, it wasn't so much a sound it was a Fucking Atmosphere. It just hit you, and the people then just walked out, or pulled the electricity out to stop 'em.
But that sound, you couldn't take that out and box it, which is great. I don't want to be boxed really. This was when the Pistols were just like, Art School. Glen got the gig through my drummer, and they hustled all of our gear off us and all that, and they did the set. What that did for me, and what I'll always be grateful to the Sex Pistols for, and especially John, is the fact that I looked at him (and despite the fact that the music was just so loud you couldn't determine wether it was good or bad) what it did was, I left the group that night, because I said they were good, they struck me as being very much like the early Who. It was so strong I left this group I'd been in for two years because they gave me so much abuse, they said, 'they're useless'. I left because I thought anybody who got that much reaction... but it took me a year to get the Ants together.
Adam: One of the early things was 'No money and no big groups'. You know, take Led Zeppelin, you have to pay £10 to see them and then you see like tiny figures and it scares me shitless, quite honestly, sometimes because within 18 months we're getting very close to a situation where it's going to happen again. That's the trouble when you get very successful, I mean I'd like to know what I should do if I ever got into that situation, what can I do?
That's one reason I'm glad the Ants are in this (the Derek Jarman feature film of the Sex Pistols) film because I was very worried that...
Tony: Was it onstage?
Adam: Yeah. We did a live thing at Drury Lane. I think that a possible solution to it, which I hope to be able to do a lot more of: video work, a lot more t.v. work. Because that's a medium, you can do it and people can see you. The t.v.'s second rate okay, but when the Sex Pistols got on T.O.T.P. fucking everybody watched it because you just can't see them anywhere else. The t.v.'s a poor substitute for live entertainment but it's a gesture at least. I mean what else can you do? I want to know the answer, I want to know what to do. I think I'll just keep playing the Vortex (laughs).
Tony: The Ants music is for a pretty minority audience anyway, because of the S/M thing.
Adam: S/M is a, minority interest is the word. It seems minority at the moment but I think when people... if more people come to see us, more people just sort of watch then... I want them to love us or fucking hate us.
Some bloke came up to me the other day and said it's 'Glam rock'. I couldn't suss him out, he was a bit mad anyway but I mean some of the things you get said to you. That's why a lot of the bands are so aggressive. But I'm getting to the stage now where I hope to be looked upon as a 'performer'. Someone who does something. ...and finally...
I know what I want on record and I want to go into that studio and get it. We haven't got it, yet, but we will get it 'cos nothing's going on with 'The Ants' unless it's exactly Ant music. It's got to be Ant music. It's got to be fucking Ant music. I want to be proud to play it to anybody, that's all I'm in it for, to have good records out. Money can't buy the 'thing' you get when somebody sits there and appreciates your music, just no way.