And that was us.” So Adam Ant told me in 1995, describing the reconstructed Adam and the Ants, which formed in early 1980 with the arrival of guitarist/songwriter Marco Pirroni, who was sitting next to him. Back then, I didn’t tell them I was 15 in 1980, forever sprinting across dancefloors pretending to be Adam Ant, chiffon scarves tied to knees, limbs flailing like a whirling Cossack. Pirroni hears this today and laughs.
I can’t imagine anyone saying, ‘Wow, I desperately want to be in Cabaret Voltaire. They must be earning no money, look boring and nobody likes them – that’s the band for me!’” Pirroni, 67, is a winningly wry character, his sardonic eye enlivening his rollicking memoir, Your Money or Your Life: From Punk to Prince Charming. The book leads us, in forensic detail, through his teen years in mid-to-late 70s London.
He was involved in every aspect of punk, every character, clothes shop, incident, ludicrous look and iconic gig. He was also a friend and bandmate of Sid Vicious, temporary guitarist with Siouxsie and the Banshees – and was obsessed with Roxy Music, John Barry and the spaghetti western soundtrack thrills of Ennio Morricone. These were the sensibilities he brought to the newly adrift Adam Ant in late 1979, after three original Ants were stolen by estranged manager Malcolm McLaren for new proteges Bow Wow Wow.
They informed the Ants’ landmark second album, Kings of the Wild Frontier, released in November 1980 and mostly written in Pirroni’s bedroom in his parents’ home in Harrow, London. The pair conjured a feat of audacious imagination, a call-to-arms cacophony of twangy guitars, lusty yodelling, voodoo incantations, comedy gunshots and euphoric, communal chanting. Underpinning everything was their pioneering, two-drummer, Burundi beat sound.
This was first suggested by McLaren, as was Native American imagery, and the result was a band that looked like a charging tribe of invincible warriors thundering over the horizon, fronted by a pirouetting pirate in feathers-and-frills, an “Apache” white stripe slashed across his nose. The impact was rapid, global and era-defining: Kings of the Wild Frontier wasn’t just No 1 in the album charts for 12 weeks, the band’s singles and narrative videos – storyboarded by Ant – laid the theatrical, visual-pop foundations for MTV in the US in 1981. They were dastardly, suggestive and definitely grownup, but they nonetheless ignited primal stirrings in even preteens, who saw in Ant a supernaturally attractive superhero, even before his turns as glossy-lipped Dandy Highwayman and pompadoured Prince Charming.
Ant wore glasses: thick-lensed, National Health whoppers. The first night Pirroni saw him without them on, wearing that white nose stripe and dressed in the 19th-century, gold-braided Hussar jacket from the film The Charge of the Light Brigade, his appeal was obvious. The band travelled with three huge wardrobe trunks.
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