Soundtrack to my Life: "Antmusic" by Adam and the Ants

Artist: Adam and the Ants
Track: Prince Charming/Label: CBS A1408/Album: /Release: 12th September 1981/Highest Chart Position: 1

When I was five years old, I wanted to be Adam Ant.

It was my first real desire for pop stardom and the wonderful characters that represented fantastic noise that was coming from the box with the lights in the corner. I was fascinated with the TV. I knew it was a luxury, a temptation and in many ways, something that was illicit, especially when we hid from the TV licence man.

Compared to Dexys Midnight Runners, my love and sudden infatuation with wanting to be a dandy highwayman eclipsed what I had felt about music before this point and like many other kids my age, I yearned for a big, white stripe across my face.

Stand and Deliver was the first single to be lifted from the extremely successful Prince Charming album and after watching me sit through the video on TV for the first time in dumbstruck awe, my mother with har passion for music, knew she had to buy it for me.

Holding the 7” in my hand for the first time, my first record, felt like I was holding some sacred piece of looted treasure. I spent hours just staring at the cover and the fabulous, mythical characters that adorned it and read and re-read every last one of the liner notes, whilst playing the single to death. I daydreamed that I was a member of Adam’s band too, one of his merry band of men. They all had such fantastical names also, as was displayed on another track on the album, Ant Rap:

“Marco, Merrick, Terry Lee, Gary Tibbs and Yours Truly”

Whereas Adam and the Ants wore the military jackets, the leather trousers, the flowing, open collared shirts and the ribbons from their hair, my father returned one day with a Zorro costume to attempt to satisfy my desires further. The costume consisted of a black, plastic cape and eye mask. There was also a plastic sword with a piece of white chalk emdedded in the tip, which probably fails all modern health and safety laws today. I brattishly and probably unforgivably, protested.

“Awww Dad, this is all wrong...”

“What’s wrong with ya? I went to a lot of trouble to get that. It’s just like the guy in the music video you fancy.”

“I don’t fancy him, Dad.”

My mother jumped to my father’s defence and told me not to be so ungrateful. I tried to compromise with the logic available to any five year old. Cape, yes... Mask, okay... he wears a mask at the beginning of the video, but the comparisons stopped there though. After all, when you are that age, it’s a question of weaponry.

“Adam has pistols... this is a sword...”

“You already have a gun...”

He was right. Granted, I did have a gun but it was not a dandy pistol, it was an imitation M16 in desert colours that ran out bullets, or at least the sound of bullets firing six months previous when I used it in a swordfight with Peter Gibbon. It just wouldn’t have been the same jumping off a pretend horse and sticking up my imaginary victim with a machine gun. It lacked glamour somewhat.

“...and he has a white stripe.”

“Jane, get your make up...” he said towards my mum.

Luckily for me, the early eighties was a good time for cosmetics manufacturers with all of the flamboyance around. I wasn’t too sure though.

“Come with me, I have some white foundation...” she took my arm, which was suddenly reluctant to go anywhere. I hesitated. After all, this went against all the principles of a of a five year old boy in the north east of England. I mean, what would all the other kids say?

I turned to my dad and let out a whimper.

“Son, what do you think that pansy uses, flour and water?”

“But...”

“Get upstairs to your mother and put some make up on.”

I suspected that was the only time I’d ever hear my father say that phrase in my life. That day, my mother made me up like Adam Ant in the Stand and Deliver video and for a few days late in the Summer of 1981 and dependent on the weather at the time, the coastal town of Whitby, in North Yorkshire was covered in the markings of Adam ‘Zorro’ Ant.

I scratched the letter Z onto everything. Paving stones, walls, doors, my sister and every single one of the fabled 199 steps that lead to the abbey. The fashioned sword with the chalk tip was Adam ‘Zorro’ Ant’s weapon of choice in the end. I had to make do. The package actually encouraged you to don the mark of Zorro onto people as he would slice the shirts of the men he would be facing in battle but my mother told me that I was (under no circumstances) to ‘make like the movies’ and stick to walls and paving stones before I took my sisters eye out. She had a point though, it was a dangerous time to be playing as a child. This was a time when children were happily sold fireworks at the corner store.

But it wasn’t Zorro I wanted to be really. I wanted to be Adam. I wanted to be Adam Ant so much, this was a continuing desire that stayed with me for another twenty years, up until I found myself in a really rough pub in the centre of Middlesbrough with The Big Man and the girl I was living with at the time, her name was Michelle. We were together for about two years until I woke up in the middle of the night, pinned down with a kitchen knife to my throat.

My crime? I had laughed at the girls on Friends tell a joke earlier that evening and I moved away from her in my sleep, which meant in her logic that I was dreaming about sleeping with one of them, thus I was cheating on her and for that I needed to die. I wasn’t going argue with her, I had a knife shaving the hairs from my neck, after all. She didn’t have me in that position for that long anyway, put it that way.

This new pub chain in the town opened the month we went down there. It’s always a major event in Middlesbrough when something new opens. It’s a novelty and people get very excitable. It was also around the time high strength, super-filtered and cooled turbo beers became popular and of course, we celebrated with everyone else on a trip down shitfaced lane.

They had a karaoke going and the eigth group of lads had just sung the night’s eigth version of Vindaloo by Fat Les and while me and The Big Man were taking the piss, Michelle thought it would be funny to enter me in as Adam Ant. I had told her the dandy highwayman in Whitby story the night we met and she and I had wild sex on her futon while her abusive boyfriend was working nights.

When they called my name, both The Big Man and Michelle admitted they had conspired together and the next thing I know i’m being pushed towards the old bingo hall stage to sing Antmusic, a song I hadn’t heard in about 10 years. As well as having to more or less blag my way through the song in what was technically my first time at karaoke, the guy started the song even before I had climbed the steps and got onto the stage and by the time I grabbed a hold of the microphone and looked at the screen for the lyrics, we were at the first chorus.

The memories came flooding back though and I battled my way through it with considerable style. People were even dancing, but I suspect that was due to the burundi style drumming rather than my competent delivery. I looked around for my friends, expecting them to be cheering me on and/or worshipping me from the foot of the stage but instead The Big Man had his arm around Michelle making her giggle and reciprocate his flirtatious nature.

“Hey, that was great...” they both chimed when I returned.

“You weren’t even fucking watching, Rolf...” I growled, sardonically.

Not long after, I was at one of the men’s urinals having a piss and this huge guy came up behind and threw and arm around me. I expected that it was a fan, coming to applaud my rendition of his favourite songs. I really had forgotten where I was. His arm moved down to my groin and grabbed my flaccid penis and my crotch. Hard.

“My girlfriend thinks you’re pretty hot shit, motherfucker. Just because you sang her favourite song to her... I hope you and your friends are leaving soon... I’ll cut you if you even look at her, okay?”

He was one of the friendlier people I met while I lived in the town.

I bear no grudges with Michelle despite her inherent violence towards me. I realise that its a part of her life and the surrounding soceity. I have often thought about her and for a long time after I left worried.

I can’t remember how far it was into our relationship that she told me she often had sex with her sister.

I finally had realised she was borderline everything and held onto a level of intense jealousy that stemmed from her abusive past that I have never witnessed since. She often spoke about her on/off relationship with her own sister and her husband, who were both ten years her senior.

When I initially pushed her about this relationship, she confided in me that she lived with them both for a while, where they used her willingly as their sex slave upto a point where her and her husband would both gorge on her sex throughout the night and would not let her leave until their carnal desires were fulfilled. I thought that this was one of Michelle’s many stories but her sister was happy to confirm this story when she happily rubbed my crotch in her kichen within five minutes of meeting me. She was more than happy to invite me into their world and despite being as sexually free as I am as a rule, even I passed on the offer.

Not much shocks me, but even I was taken aback about her incestuous tendencies but couldn’t quite understand why her desires stopped with her own sister. When I suggested finding an alternative bisexual playmate for her, she balked and was offended at the suggestion that she had lesbian tendencies. I still haven’t gotten it, to be honest.

As the violence from Michelle continued in any respect, I decided to pack my bags from Brighton (for the second time) to start my new life once over.