For singer Adam Ant tour, the New Wave icon stumbled onto a theme almost by accident, after watching the reactions of fans at shows to some of the lesser-known but perhaps equally loved songs in his catalog.
“I’ve come from a different era of A sides and B sides,” he says by phone from London recently. “And I realized that there seems to be as much of a reaction to the B sides of the songs as the A sides when I played them live.
“I remember one night I was playing ‘Christian D’Or” – the B-side to the 1981 single “Prince Charming” – and the audience went mad,” says the 62-year-old born as Stuart Goddard. “So after that I thought it would be nice to do a combination, not just focusing on the singles, but the other side of the singles as well.”
Anthems – the Singles Tour comes to the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles on Saturday, Sept. 30, and if it goes as like it did in the United Kingdom earlier this year it should be a dandy old time for all.
“The reaction was overwhelming,” Ant says of the earlier leg of the tour that finished up at the Royal Albert Hall in London. “There’s a few surprises at each stop. Some of the flip sides are among the rarer songs, many of which I haven’t played live before.”
Anthems represents a different approach for Ant, whose previous tour presented “Kings of the Wild Frontier,” his 1980 album which featured such hits as the title track, “Antmusic” and “Dog Eat Dog,” in full.
“It was quite a challenge to do an album in its original order, not mess around with it, just do it as recorded,” Ant says. “When you do a rock ‘n’ roll gig you constantly keep it open for change. If the set needs a fast song you can switch it, and change things about as you fancy.
“When you’re doing a piece of work that’s carved in stone, as it were, it’s a bit like a play,” says the singer, who has acted on stage and in film and television over the years. “The audience is expecting it, and you’re presenting a whole piece of work, 45 minutes to an hour, of which they know what they’re going to hear.”
Ant brought that tour to Santa Ana and Los Angeles earlier this year, and if it seems like he’s been coming around a bit more often you’re right, he says. He’d taken time off the road after the birth of his daughter in 1998. He took a bit more to write a memoir, “Stand & Deliver: The Autobiography,” which arrived in 2006.
“Coming back into it you kind of appreciate it more for what you hadn’t been doing,” Ant says. “You’re not continually doing the same thing for your entire career. You take a sidestep and then come back into it.”
Since returning to regular touring a few years ago he says he’s again fully embraced the kind of connection between performer and audience that he’d enjoyed since Adam and the Ants made their debut in the late ’70s and Adam Ant as a solo artist was a top draw through at least the first half of the ’80s.
“It’s the forum where you’re judged and it’s your chance to keep it very personal between you and the audience,” Ant says.
And for fans in particular it’s a chance to relive those tribal beats and exotic costumes – Ant always seemed like a mix of pirate, 18th century soldier and Native American warrior – that helped separate him from his peers in the record shops and on television during his initial peak. Both of them are important parts of his performance persona, and both were largely stumbled onto by accident, Ant says.
The tribal drumbeat rhythms arrived after his original and more traditional punk or New Wave band got more or less stolen away by producer and manager Malcolm McLaren to form Bow Wow Wow with singer Annabella Lwin.
“I was more or less an overnight mutiny,” Ant says. “Kind of a baptism of fire. I’d been listening to various traditional and tribal beats and I came away with the idea of it being very grand and classical, and two drummers.”
His sense that punk had become too serious – “Very gray, very politically motivated, so ugly and violent,” he says – led him toward his signature visual style, too, Ant says.
“I wanted something heroic, so I wrote ‘Kings of the Wild Frontier,’ grabbing people’s attention with the pirate theme and the 18th century,” he says. “It was so much this idea of ‘a new royal family of wild nobility'” – a key lyric in that song – “The idea of having a brocade jacket, of Native American influences.
“These were things that I thought were very heroic and gave me a lot of personal strength by interpreting that kind of power and idea,” Ant says. “It was a hybrid. The music was a hybrid and the look was a hybrid of all the things I had a lot of respect for.
“Those things can come out in a mess or – fortunately for me – they came out in a coherent form that people could latch onto.”
His most recent album, 2013’s “Adam Ant Is The Blueblack Hussar in Marrying The Gunner’s Daughter,” was his first in 18 years, a strong collection of 17 tracks, though its commercial impact was minimal compared to his heyday. He says he’s not sure what he’ll do after the Anthems tour wraps up – maybe work up another full album tour for another record such as “Prince Charming” or “Friend Or Foe,” having now done that with “Dirk” and “Kings,” his first two albums.
And eventually the songs he’s been writing and recording during gaps in his touring schedule will find their way out, too, on an album, and definitely on vinyl, given its reborn popularity, Ant says.
“Once it’s ready it’s nice to come in and plan a new record and off we go,” he says. “Keeping it fresh as possible.”
Adam Ant
When: 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 30
Where: The Greek Theatre, 2700 N. Vermont Ave., Los Angeles
Tickets: $29.50-$59.50
Information: Adam-ant.com or LAgreektheatre.com
