''Adam Ant Is the Blueblack Hussar in Marrying the Gunner's Daughter'' (2013)
Bravest of the Brave (tbc)
Singles from Adam Ant Is The Blueblack Hussar in Marrying The Gunner's Daughter
""Cool Zombie"/ "Gun in Your Pocket"[2][3]" Released: 21 October 2012[2]
Adam Ant Is the Blueblack Hussar in Marrying the Gunner's Daughter, is the sixth solo studio album by Adam Ant. The album's title was announced by Ant in the NME in April 2010.[4][5] As he had announced at his gig in Chatham in September 2012, the new album was released on 21 January 2013[6] by Ant's own record label, Blueblack Hussar Records.[7] Despite the independent self-release, the album reached number 25 on the UK Albums Chart, only one place lower than its predecessor, Wonderful, released on the major EMI label nearly eighteen years earlier. It had previously been at number 8 in the midweek chart update.[8]
Adam Ant started working on the album in August 2009. Most of the double album was recorded with Boz Boorer on a laptop computer. The former 3 Colours Red guitarist, Chris McCormack, co-wrote six tracks for the album, four of which appeared on the finished product. Originally Ant was due to have been recording with his writing partner Marco Pirroni but they separated and scrapped all work around March 2010, coinciding with Ant's return to live performance. Despite this, Ant utilised five tracks from one recording session just before the split, all rerecordings of songs from the 1997 "Blend Demos" session with Pirroni. Four of these made the final track list - the songs "Sausage" (originally titled "Call Me Sausage"), "Vivienne's Tears", "Hard Men, Tough Blokes" (originally titled "Tough Blokes") and "Punkyoungirl".[9]
Ant explained that the idea behind the album's title was that the Blueblack Hussar was his classic Kings of the Wild Frontier-era persona, back from the dead, while the phrase "marrying the gunner's daughter" (an old naval term for a form of corporal punishment in which sailors were tied to a ship's cannon and flogged) was intended by Ant as a metaphor for how he believes artists are treated by the music industry.[10]
The album first started to receive attention after NME reported that Ant was back in the studio in March 2010.[4][11] In an April 2010 interview for the NME, Ant said that he was working on a new album, with the title Adam Ant Is the Blueblack Hussar in Marrying the Gunner's Daughter. This was planned to have collaborations with McCormack, Pirroni, a member of Oasis (later identified as Andy Bell)[12] and Morrissey's writing partner Boz Boorer. Ant described the album at the time as a "live record that lends itself to performance" which would feature a "kind of concept. It's a very old fashioned, old school, step-by-step album".
In addition, Ant rerecorded a song in tribute to the Sex Pistols' late manager Malcolm McLaren, who had died earlier that month, and who also once managed Adam & The Ants.[13] Named "Who's A Goofy Bunny Then?", the track was only previously available as a demo recorded in the early 1980s, although material from the song had been recycled in 1983 for "Libertine", a track on Ant's second solo album Strip, released that year. Despite this, Ant said he wanted to release a new version in tribute to McLaren. "Malcolm was a sort of mentor in my life," he explained. "As close as you can get to a surrogate father." The song, Ant explained, took its name from a term of endearment bestowed upon McLaren by Ant – referring to his "quite prominent teeth".[14]
The track which Ant and McCormack were reported to have worked on with the Beady Eye member Andy Bell was titled "Cool Zombie". Bell, allegedly at the behest of Liam Gallagher, initially attempted to block its inclusion on the album. This led to a personalised war of words between Ant and Gallagher; consequently Bell denied he had been put under any pressure. "It was totally my decision not to allow the track to be used," he said, "And I'm annoyed at Liam being dragged into this situation which has nothing at all to do with him." Bell also gave further insight into the origins of the song, explaining that he and Ant have "a mutual friend who I had played around on a track with who then passed the music over to Adam without my knowledge. I then explained the track couldn't be used for his album (this was just a rough demo) and thought the matter was closed. Adam then mentioned in the press he had recorded with one of Oasis, but Liam Gallagher had banned the track from being used."[15] Ant eventually rerecorded the song for the final release with two members of his live band, guitarist Tom Edwards and drummer Andy Woodard. The song became the first single from the album.
In early 2011, in preparation for a cover feature for issue 2 of Vive Le Rock magazine, Ant granted journalist John Robb an exclusive listen to the entire work-in-progress for the upcoming album. Robb reported in the feature that the songs written with McCormack were "tough, hard neo-industrial song that sound like the Physical-era Ants" while those written with Boorer were "really cool twangy rockers". "Gun in Your Pocket" was "a rocking neo-Stooges rush" and other songs were described as "slower almost ballad-like songs, and a brace of off the wall angular moments that hark back to the groundbreaking Ants of the debut Dirk Wears White Sox album".[16]
In a 2012 interview, Ant's friend, the backing vocalist and songwriting partner Georgina Baillie, commented on the song "Gun in Your Pocket", reported to be a collaboration between Ant and herself. She confirmed that the track – which had previously been announced as an album track and single before eventually becoming the B-side to Cool Zombie, and which concerned the Russell Brand Show prank telephone calls row of which she had been an injured party – was a different song from "Rubber Medusa" (concerning Brand and mentioning his later partner Katy Perry) which she and her band the Poussez Posse had been performing live in support slots for Ant's tours. "The first one that Adam and I wrote was about an ex of mine – guess who! Which is not on the (Poussez Posse) album, which is called "Gun in Your Pocket". Adam actually wrote that before he met me at the Zodiac Mindwarp gig in April (sic) 2010. That night, he told me 'I have a song about you and your granddad,' and I was 'Oh my God! That's amazing' ... I didn’t see Adam for 4 to 5 months and then I bumped into him around where we both live and we were talking and then the writing started happening ... The first one Adam and I (subsequently) wrote together was "Rubber Medusa", which was about Russell. Adam came up with the title which is a quote from the Jubilee film – the person does look like a rubber Medusa so I see why he said it."[17]
Release and promotion
The album was released as a double album in January 2013 on CD and vinyl in a deluxe gatefold sleeve. Ant had previously expressed the intention to also release the album in the redundant cassette format.[18] According to Ant, the front cover is "Girl in a Cocked Hat" and the back cover is "Girl in a Cocked Hat II", both of which are paintings by Mary Jane Ansell.[5] Ant said that the girl depicted in the artwork was the gunner's daughter, her name is Georgie "and she’s a little punk rocker".[19]
A 40-second clip of the proposed single "Hard Men, Tough Blokes" was released on Ant's official website on 16 August 2011.[20]
A video for the single "Cool Zombie" was filmed on 28 October, with NME running a competition offering readers a chance to be an extra in the shoot. Also cast as costumed extras in the video were several security staff, combining their performances with their normal duties following the unwanted attentions of a fan who had threatened to turn up on location. An on-set source noted how this dual role allowed the security officers to blend in and so be on set at all times. The source further wryly reported, "The guys said it was the first time they'd ever carried out protection work while dressed as Victorian dandies."[21] A USB wristband containing the "Cool Zombie" video was sold on Ant's official website.[22][23]
Critical reception
Allmusic gave the album strong praise, rating it four out of five stars. They concluded that the album's charm is "in its mess" and that Ant "has never sounded this ambitious and arty since the days of Dirk Wears White Socks[sic] and Kings of the Wild Frontier".[24]
John Robb on the music website Louder Than War also gave the album strong praise saying, "It's rare at this stage of the game that anyone can be arsed to be as non-compromising as this let alone remember the creative power of following your own instinct." Robb also praised "the demo stage of the song(s)".[23]
Longtime Ant fan (and Cool Zombie video extra) Simon Price praised the album in his review in The Independent, giving it four out of five stars. "What this album isn't is an attempt to recapture Ant's glory days: there's no Burundi double-drumming and no spaghetti-western guitar. The Ant album it reminds me of the most, in fact, is Dirk Wears White Sox: there's the same mid-fi production, and the same mix of perversion ... It's sprawling, overdue and not for everyone, but at least it's not a play-it-safe comeback with the hot producer of the day. And for that, the Hussar should be saluted."[25]
Q magazine's David Quantick gave the album cautious praise, awarding it three out of five stars and describing it as "full of spit and vinaigrette. His ninth record is ramshackle and there's a lot of it, but it's always entertaining... everything is lively and bright-eyed, despite the demo-ish production."[26]
The London Evening Standard reviewer, John Aizelwood, expressed similar sentiments and gave an identical three-star score. "At 68 minutes, it's a sprawling mess, a stream of consciousness featuring tributes to Malcolm McLaren, Vivienne Westwood and rocker Vince Taylor, and the percussive thrill of Antmusic on Bullshit. Elsewhere, there are digs at Britain's mental health system on Shrink, self-appointed hardmen and the music industry that spat him out. A diligent editor and better production would have meant a wayward masterpiece, but this is an absorbing, troubling, sometimes brilliant album."[27]
A review in The Times was in the same vein and with the same score. Will Hodgkinson wrote, "In the early 1980s Adam Ant was the best pop star on the planet ... Some of that genius is in evidence on this comeback of sorts, but it comes as damaged goods, with a sense of frantic chaos rather than contained energy ... The problem is that all kind of good musical and lyrical themes come across as thrown together, rather than making coherent sense ... Still, there are some gems buried among the cartoonish, throwaway moments ... It's a scrappy, unfocused album, and too long at 17 tracks, but it does reveal the life force beating away inside a fascinating, original, troubled man."[28]
Dave Simpson of The Guardian graded the album three stars out of five, but his review was more straightforwardly enthusiastic. He described the LP as "a rickety but entertaining mix of the best elements of his imperial period: tribal glam stomps, razor-slashed T.Rex guitars, two-drummer Glitter beats, knowing homages to cult icons (Vince Taylor and Vivienne Westwood) and sex ... 'Dirty Beast' offers a sweeter, poppier Ant than the glam-punk of yore. While nothing quite reaches the dizzy heights of Antmusic, 'Shrink' – a perhaps autobiographical romp about a man who needs medication to feel normal – is as riotous as he's sounded in three decades.[29]
Jeremy Allen in the NME was less complimentary, awarding the album 4 out of 10 and considering it to be too lengthy and too experimental. "(This is) an album that gives the middle finger to brevity ... really long name and record, painfully so at times. There are flashes of the old brilliance on 'Shrink' but preceding number 'Hardmenhardblokes' (sic) is as baffling as it is weird ... experimentalism meanders into the bizarre and unlistenable. That said, it's sort of heartening to have him back."[30]
In the Metro, John Lewis was similarly sceptical, awarding two stars out of five and calling it a "patchy comeback album that often sounds like an unfinished, unmixed demo... There are moments (Cool Zombie, Vince Taylor, How Can I Say I Miss You?) when Ant's pop majesty shines through but others (Punkyoungirl, Dirty Beast, Sausage) that sound like Two Ronnies punk parodies."[31]
Singles
It was initially announced that "Gun in Your Pocket" would be the first single, with "Who's A Goofy Bunny?" as the B-side, a tribute to the recently deceased Malcolm McLaren.[4][11][32]
On Absolute Radio on 4 January 2011, Ant announced that the first single would be a double A-side of "Hard Men, Tough Blokes" and "punkyoungirl", both tracks receiving their radio premieres on the show.[33] However, no such release took place.
In an October 2012 Pollstar interview, Ant announced that the song "Cool Zombie" would be released as a 7" vinyl with "Gun in Your Pocket" as the B-side.[3] Ant offered Facebook fans a chance to win a signed copy of the single.[34] Both songs from the single were available for purchase from iTunes from 21 October 2012.[35]
Cultural references
"Vince Taylor" and "Stay in the Game" were used as the opening and closing themes for The Blueblack Hussar, a documentary about Ant's comeback during 2010–2011, directed by Jack Bond. The film contained footage of the above-mentioned preview playback given to Robb in early 2011, in which Ant and his friend Katherine d'Hubert were seen dancing together in Ant's kitchen to the track "Shrink" while Robb looked on.[36]
"Bumpy Capers" (Ant),[42] another rerecording of a 1997 "Blend Demos" track as with Ant and Pirroni's other collaborations on the album. Included on rough demonstration version of the album compiled in early 2011.
Personnel
Musicians
Adam Ant – vocals, guitars (tracks 9, 11 & 14), bass guitar (tracks 8, 9, 13 & 14), electric mandolin (tracks 9 & 13), keyboards (track 3)
Stuart Leslie Goddard, better known as Adam Ant, is an English singer, musician, and actor. He gained popularity as the lead singer of new wave group Adam and the Ants and later as a solo artist, scoring 10 UK top ten hits from 1980 to 1983, including three UK No. 1 singles. He has also worked as an actor, appearing in many films and television episodes.
Kings of the Wild Frontier is the second album by English new wave band Adam and the Ants. It was released on 7 November 1980 by CBS Records in the UK and Epic records internationally. The album was the UK number 1 selling album in 1981 and won Best British Album at the 1982 Brit Awards.
Dirk Wears White Sox is the debut studio album by English new wave band Adam and the Ants. It was released on 30 November 1979 by record label Do It. It was the first number one album on the UK Independent Albums Chart when the chart debuted in Record Week in 1980.
Marco Francesco Andrea Pirroni frequently credited simply as Marco, is a British guitarist, songwriter and record producer. He has worked with Adam Ant, Sinéad O'Connor, Siouxsie and the Banshees and many others from the late 1970s to the present day.
"Stand and Deliver" is a song by British new wave band Adam and the Ants, released as the lead single from their third studio album, Prince Charming (1981). It was the band's first No. 1 hit in the UK. The phrase "stand and deliver — your money or your life", used in the lyrics, is commonly associated with highwaymen in 18th century England.
Martin James "Boz" Boorer is an English guitarist and producer who founded the new wave rockabilly group the Polecats; and for a 30-year period beginning in 1991 was co-writer, guitarist and musical director with Morrissey.
Matt Walker is an American session musician, known for drumming with Filter, The Smashing Pumpkins and Morrissey, as well as being the regular fill-in to Butch Vig from Garbage on three of their tours.
Vince Taylor, born Brian Maurice Holden, was an English-American rock and roll singer. As the lead singer of Vince Taylor and His Playboys, sometimes Vince Taylor and the Playboys, he was successful primarily in France and other parts of Continental Europe during the late 1950s and early 1960s, afterwards falling into obscurity amidst personal problems and drug abuse. He is best remembered for his 1959 song "Brand New Cadillac", which the Clash covered on their album London Calling. He was among the inspirations for David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust character.
Mich Dulce is a Filipina fashion designer, milliner, corsetiere, feminist activist, actress, artist and vocalist of bands Death By Tampon, Us-2 Evil-0 and The Male Gaze.
Prince Charming is the third and final album by Adam and the Ants, released in November 1981. This album features bass player Gary Tibbs in place of Kevin Mooney, the bassist on Kings of the Wild Frontier. The album included the band's two number one UK hit singles "Stand and Deliver" and "Prince Charming" as well as "Ant Rap".
Wonderful is the fifth solo studio album and the eighth LP overall of English musician Adam Ant, released in March 1995 by EMI. It peaked at number 24 on the UK Album Chart and number 143 on the US Billboard 200 chart. The band for this album included Ant's long-time collaborator Marco Pirroni, along with ex-Ruts drummer Dave Ruffy and Morrissey's guitarist Boz Boorer.
Matthew James Ashman was an English guitarist with Adam and the Ants and Bow Wow Wow. He died in 1995 after lapsing into a coma due to diabetes, aged 35.
"I'm Throwing My Arms Around Paris" is a song written by Morrissey along with Boz Boorer, the two being responsible for lyrics and music respectively. The song was the first single to be released from Morrissey's 2009 album Years of Refusal. It was recorded in Los Angeles and produced by Jerry Finn, the man behind 2004's You Are the Quarry. The single was released on 9 February 2009 and has reached No. 21 on the UK Singles Chart, and is his last single to reach the UK Top 40. In Scotland the song topped the Scottish Singles Chart, becoming Morrissey's second of three number one singles on that chart, although this was because the Scottish chart at that point only counted physical sales at a time when download sales had become dominant.
Will Crewdson is a London-based guitarist/writer/producer best known for his work with the UK band Rachel Stamp, US singer Johnette Napolitano and Adam Ant.
Antmusic: The Very Best of Adam Ant is a greatest hits compilation album from Adam Ant that covers his early work with Adam and the Ants as well as his solo work.
Georgina Baillie is an English actor, artist, post-punk singer, songwriter, and formerly a burlesque performer. Her stage names have included Voluptua and Georgie Girl.
Tree Carr is an American author, death midwife and mystic. She has authored books on dreaming.
Adam and the Ants were an English rock band that formed in London in 1977. The band existed in two versions, both of which were fronted by Adam Ant, between 1977 and 1982. The first phase began when the band were founded in May 1977 and were called the Ants until November of that year. They later changed their style from punk rock to post-punk and new wave, and released one album. The final line-up of this version consisted of Dave Barbarossa, Matthew Ashman, and Leigh Gorman—all of whom left the band in January 1980 at the suggestion of manager Malcolm McLaren to form Bow Wow Wow.
"Cartrouble" is a song by Adam and the Ants, released as a single in March 1980 on Do It Records. It peaked at number 33 on the UK Singles Chart. Though usually stylised as one word, the title has also appeared as two separate words.
"Desperate But Not Serious" is a song by Adam Ant, released on 19 November 1982 as the third single from his first solo album, Friend or Foe. It peaked at number 33 on the UK Singles Chart, and number 66 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the US. Ant performed "Desperate but Not Serious" and "Goody Two Shoes" on the very first American Bandstand episode of 1983.
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