Adam Ant interview: 'You should never feel ashamed of madness’

Adam Ant greets me at the door of his west London office in black slippers, tight black trousers, a puffed up 18th-century-style navy blue shirt, dandyish velvet double-breasted waistcoat and red, patterned headscarf. “I’m a great believer in dressing up to go to work,” he says.

The 58 year-old certainly cuts a striking figure, yet the gingerly, shuffling way he moves, body tightly compressed into his clothes, black rimmed spectacles perched on the end of his nose, cigarette permanently dangling between his lips, makes him look more like an old, retired pirate than a swashbuckling superstar. When I ask what he wears on his day off, he laughs, and says, “I probably wouldn’t get out of my dressing gown.”

Stuart Goddard, better known to the world as Adam Ant, is about to release his first album in 17 years, with the unwieldy title Adam Ant Is The Blueblack Hussar In Marrying The Gunner’s Daughter. He explains it to me as we settle down in a small, cramped room, stacked to the rafters with books, paintings, photos and old records, while he chain smokes cigarettes and a giant French mastiff sniffs and slobbers around us.

“I grew up in the glam era and, for me, every album should have a look as well as a sound,” he says, poring over the gatefold packaging of his vinyl double album. “So I’ve gone back to Kings of the Wild Frontier (his 1980 breakthrough, for which he sported a jacket from the film Charge of the Light Brigade) “and thought what would the young Hussar look like 30 years later, if he’s been through the wars?”

“Marrying the gunner’s daughter” is archaic nautical slang for being tied across a cannon and flogged, which Goddard employs as a metaphor for how he was treated by the music industry.

“Some people would probably think I am being over dramatic,” he acknowledges, running through a list of gripes about punitive contracts and minimal royalty rates.

“I appreciate what the record companies did, but in terms of actually getting paid, it was economically suicidal.”

These days, he runs his own label on a modest budget. “I’m a cottage industry and that suits me fine. It’s great to get back to doing what I should be doing.”

An entire wall of Gold and Silver discs stands testament to Goddard’s extraordinary past success: he scored 22 hits between 1980 and 1985. For a few mad years, the art school dropout and former punk became the biggest pop star in Britain and much of the rest of the planet, inspiring the sort of hysteria One Direction stir up today. There was even a name for it: Antmania.

As with most pop sensations, there was an inevitable decline, and he disappeared after his poorly received eighth album, Wonderful, in 1994. “I needed a break from the music industry,” he claims, “but I didn’t plan it. It just worked out that way.”

Goddard’s long absence was compounded by the mental health problems he had been suffering since youth (he attempted suicide at 21 and was briefly sectioned). Following a series of incidents in 2002 and 2003 when he was arrested for causing affray and ordered to undergo mental health treatment, Adam Ant is probably as well-known now for his illness as his pop career.

“It’s the elephant in the room,” he says.

When he embarked on a comeback with well-received live shows in 2010, he made a decision to be candid about all of this. “They call it bipolar disorder, that’s the modern term. It only means up and down, it used to be manic depression, black dog, whatever. It’s a subject surrounded by a lot of ignorance and taboo.

“Where I come from, there’s the poor house – and worse than that is the mad house. You should never feel ashamed of it, but you do. A lot of the time you can’t take these problems even to close family because you fear that you’ll alienate them. So anyone in the public eye that comes forward and discusses it, I think it helps.”

Two songs on Adam Ant’s new album address other singers who suffered mental health problems, Marvin Gaye and obscure British rock and roller Vince Taylor, a figure now remembered more for his breakdowns than his music.

Goddard shuffles across the room and pulls an old 7in single of Taylor’s out of an overstuffed box. “He took too much acid and went on stage claiming he was Jesus Christ but he was really an impressive performer. I thought 'that’s me. I nearly did a Vince Taylor.’”

Among the teetering piles of historical and showbusiness biographies in the room are books about such troubled singers as Johnny Cash and Nina Simone.

“I made some bad mistakes and got into trouble with the police, it was such a shock to me, then you read about some of these old rock-and-roll stars and that’s like an average week for them. When you are constantly working on a creative level, the pressures are sometimes overwhelming. It’s good to find out you’re not going through these things alone.”

It’s great to see Goddard in good health, still handsome (sporting a dashing moustache and goatee, the headscarf hiding his baldness) and considerably trimmer than he appeared during his most troubled period. For many years, he felt his prescription drug regime stifled his creativity but whenever he stopped taking medication, breakdowns were liable to occur. Now he works closely with psychiatrists and his GP to get the balance right.

“Everybody’s condition is unique and the kind of treatments available are quite varied. It’s a very personal thing. But I’m writing again, performing again, and I appreciate how lucky I am.”

I wish I could report that his new album was an artistic triumph. Actually it’s an odd, ungainly set of songs, almost a throwback to his art school punk days, the revealing lyrics too often let down by lo-fi production, haphazard arrangements, wayward melodies, muddy mixes and a general sense of trying to cram too many ideas in.

“I had a lot to get off my chest,” he says and the result is as messily fascinating as his home office space, where books about Nelson and Napoleon are stacked beneath lurid paintings of big-breasted rockabilly women and a photo of Adam with Pop Art hero Andy Warhol nestles alongside a framed topless shot of the actress Jamie Lee Curtis. “We dated for a while,” he explains, “and she gave me that.”

If there is something inherently ridiculous about a man approaching 60 dressing like a pirate and still dreaming of rock glory, then at least Goddard is aware of it. “If you look at the symptoms of bipolar disorder, in all seriousness, the actual alarm signals are practically my job description: promiscuity, spending money lavishly, wearing weird clothes. It’s very hard to get that across to a psychiatrist, who’ll say 'Why are you wearing a leather jacket with studs on?’”

He shakes his head at the futility of trying to explain such things. “I don’t know,” he tells his imaginary interrogator. “I’m a rocker!”

Adam Ant Is The Blueblack Hussar in Marrying The Gunner’s Daughter is out on Blueblack Hussar Records