Adam Ant is best-known in the U.S. for the early ‘80s earworm “Goody Two Shoes” and its accompanying music video, which seemed to be in constant rotation during the early days of MTV.
Yet, the 62-year-old British singer-songwriter is responsible for so much good music, first as the leader of Adam and the Ants and then in his own solo career.
I recently spoke with the New Wave icon who brings his ever-popular brand of “Antmusic” to the Bay Area for two shows this week. Adam Ant (real name: Stuart Leslie Goddard) performs Sept. 28 at the Mountain Winery in Saratoga (7:30 p.m.; $39.50-$79.50, www.mountainwinery.com) and Sept. 29 at the Masonic in San Francisco (8 p.m.; $39.50-$49.50, www.livenation.com).
Q Hi, Adam, thanks for taking the time to chat with me. What’s going on with you today?
ADAM I’m just in London. It’s a quite overcast evening, actually. Everything is lovely, except no sun.
Q I actually got to see you fairly recently, when you brought your Kings of the Wild Frontier Tour to the Fillmore in San Francisco in February. What was it like to revisit “Kings of the Wild Frontier” (Adam and the Ants sophomore effort from 1980) in concert?
ADAM It was more of a challenge than I ever imagined, really. When you do an album in its entirety, you kind of forget that everything is sort of carved in stone. I decided to do it in the sequence that it appeared on the record. Normally, when you play live, you’ve got a set list, but you can switch if you think things need speeding up.
This was more like doing a play – because it was a whole piece of work in a certain order. People sort of know that order, being fans of the album and coming to see it live. It was a bit more tricky than you think. It was very exciting. I’m very glad I did it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o41A91X5pns
Q Would you do it again, focusing on another one of your albums?
ADAM Yeah, I did it the year before with (1979’s) “Dirk Wears White Sox,” the first Adam and the Ants album. I did it over here in the U.K. So, I put my foot in the water in terms of doing an entire album in sequence. But, yeah, it’s something I’d like to do in the future.
Q This time through town, you’re doing something very different than playing a full album in its entirety. Tell us about Anthems – The Singles Tour.
ADAM: I know we don’t have (two-sided) singles anymore. But, obviously, having grown up with singles, I was always very attached to B-sides. The flipsides were as attractive to me as the A-sides, somewhat.
I noticed, in the last few years of playing live, sometimes when you play a B-side – the flipside of the single – it got as much, if not more, of a reaction from the audience as the A-side, the hit side.
So, Anthems is a combination of A-sides and B-sides together. I mix them a bit. It’s been quite surprising, quite exciting for me to do it.
Q There are some songs – like, say, “Goody Two Shoes” – that fans expect to hear each time you take the stage. Do you ever get tired of playing the hits in concert?
ADAM: If I got tired of them, I wouldn’t do them. It’s always a bit of a challenge for me to play them, because they were recorded in the studio and they were quite experimental. It’s always a challenge to try and get them sounding as big as that live. So, every time I sing them live, I’m trying to get them sounding like the record, you know what I mean?
And I don’t do medleys. One thing I really don’t like is when, sometimes, you have the singles all sort of strung together – with maybe just a verse or a chorus of each single. I don’t like that.
For me, I wouldn’t do (the singles) if I was tired of them because I think the audience would pick up on that. The audience feeds on what you put out.
Q Do you talk about the songs onstage, maybe sharing a bit of the back story with the fans?
ADAM: It depends on what happens, really. Sometimes I will have the opportunity, where there may be a little story about where the song came from or what I was doing at the time I wrote it. But I don’t go into (the show) with the intention of talking about things.
Q Yet, it sounds like you would certainly have a lot to talk about if you decided to share it with the crowd. I’ve read some pretty interesting anecdotes, especially in regard to your pioneering days in the music-video realm.
ADAM To me, they were like little three-minute movies. I had been trained – I went to art school and I had been making short films. There, I learned to storyboard the ideas.
So, (in making a video) I had a lyric I had written and had the opportunity to kind of expand on everything, and give a little bit of insight to the ideas behind the lyrics. More than the early videos that were pretty basic – a band would be standing in a room with a window and a chair or something – I thought, “Let’s get outside and do a mini-movie.”
So, suddenly, I was in the forest jumping out of trees and holding up stagecoaches – really just trying to go a bit Hollywood on myself. Those videos were not just sporadically done. It was done to storyboarding, pretty much like a mini-movie.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rm9drIwmmU4
Q Is it true that you almost died while filming the “Antmusic” video?
ADAM There’s one second in the video where I point to this jukebox, with a wooden side to it. I wanted a knife thrower to throw a knife and stick in the side of the jukebox. The first (throw) – I’ve got bad eyesight and I didn’t see it – missed the jukebox and went quite close to my head. I didn’t really think about it. I found out after that it actually happened. I don’t know. I was lucky to get away from that one.
Q “Goody Two Shoes” was your first record as a solo artist and it turned out to be a big hit. Talk about the song and how its lyrics relate to you and your relationship to the media?
ADAM I think it was really a bit of a manifesto. You think you are ready, but nobody can prepare you for that kind of success or interest or bombardment (of media attention). By the time I went solo, I had been through that experience with Adam and the Ants.
It comes with the territory, but (the song) was really a kind of manifesto dealing with some of the questions I had been asked repeatedly. I tried to make it a bit lighter, and made the video quite tongue-in-cheek as well, so it didn’t come across as angry.
The chorus is “Don’t drink, don’t smoke, what do you do?” I didn’t drink or smoke at all. And then there’s this idea that, “That isn’t very rock ‘n’ roll.” So, I just put it to chords.
