WHEN the New Romantics music scene burst with pomp and bombast upon an unsuspecting public in the early 1980s, one man stood head and shoulders above the rest in the ubiquity stakes.
With his natty embroidered jacket, lipgloss, rascally ‘dandy highwayman’ persona and much-imitated nose stripe, Adam Ant was the dashing musical rogue that boys wanted to be and girls, well, the girls just wanted.
For a couple of years Adam and his band, the Ants, blazed comet-like through the charts with the boisterous hits Antmusic, Stand and Deliver and Prince Charming. Then just as suddenly, they inexplicably vanished.
Now Adam Ant – who was born Stuart Goddard – is back and on the road with his latest tour, which comes to Bournemouth next month. He will be playing a character called The Blueblack Hussar in a recording project titled Marrying the Gunner's Daughter, a naval term for receiving the lash after wrongdoing.
“The character The Blueblack Hussar is very similar to the highwayman. In fact, he’s the sort of bastard child of the dandy highwayman,” said Adam who, despite his flamboyant on-stage persona, is delightfully softly spoken in real life.
It’s a very similar character but this time he’s come back from the dead. He’s a young character aged about 21 who has fought in Moscow and has turned from a boy to a man. In military history the hussars were the dandies of the Army and known as the ‘cherry-pickers’ for their scarlet trousers. It was all very Flashman.
“But this character is back and he is being given a beating for the things he has done.”
As something of a traditionalist artiste, Adam Ant is The Blueblack Hussar in Marrying the Gunner's Daughter which is being released not just as a CD and DVD but on good old fashioned vinyl. It will be a double disc, no less, with the cover illustrated by cult ’60s photographer Barry Lategan, the man credited with ‘discovering’ Twiggy.
“It is a good, old-school production,” said Adam.
“People have fallen in love with digital music, but I think it’s a very inferior sound. But you can still get record players – you can get one for £34 and have it delivered to your home. DJs still use vinyl and there has to be a reason why – and it’s the quality. Yes, the internet is a useful tool but I think it interferes with the quality of the music.”
In the intervening decades since his Ants heyday, life has not always treated Adam with kid gloves.
There have been well-documented brushes with the law and bouts of mental instability and speaking to him, you get the feeling that pressures of global adulation were too much for his gentle soul.
“Nothing can prepare you for fame – even though we had performed 250 concerts before we first appeared on Top of the Pops,” he said.
“When you are young you sign your life away on a huge record contract and that’s it. I gave them everything and got nine per cent back for my trouble.
“I never went away – I was busy. Then I got glandular fever from an ice cube in my drink in Mexico and that knocked me out for three years. My daughter was born in 1998 and for several years I was a house dad with her, which I wanted to be.”
Then it all went a bit wrong and when he crashed and burned and appeared in court in 2002, the tabloids lined up to nail him to the mast. Now Adam is happy to speak out about his experience of mental illness – the drugs, the harrowing sights he witnessed – and wants to break the taboo on what remains a delicate subject.
“A lot of mental health issues are the product of stress and pressure. We put so much stress on our young people today and as a result, people can’t take it.
“I was taking medicine for epilepsy – I don’t have epilepsy but the drug helped with depression. I was sectioned and when that happens they take away your right to vote and your passport. You have fewer rights than if you are a mass murderer. And then there are the conditions, which in a lot of mental homes are appalling. I have seen sights that would make you sick to your stomach.”
Adam wants to highlight the truth of mental illness and would like to instigate a serious television debate with his friends and fellow sufferers such as Ruby Wax, Gail Porter and Stephen Fry.
Yet he also says that as an artist, he needs the contrast of light and dark moods to help his creativity.
But for now he seems content. He has a tour to perform and a 12-year-old daughter, Lily Caitlin, to dote upon.
“She’s a great kid,” he says, smiling.
“She is studious and wonderful. She plays the saxophone and is the focal point of everything I do.”
He also has great hopes for a screenplay of his life with – and this is where you can still see flashes of Ant-esque arrogance – either Tom Hardy or James Franco, both hot actors-of-the-moment, playing him.
And he has a bone to pick with the gentleman’s style magazine GQ.
“They had a 12-page spread of men’s fashion with the model dressed up like me, nose stripe and all. And the article didn’t mention my name once,” he sniffs.
How times have changed.
• Adam Ant plays Bournemouth’s Pavilion Theatre on November 13
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