Futurist manifesto: turning Adam & The Ants into the new Bay City Rollers

'Uno, due, tre, quattro ...

Marinetti, Boccioni, Carrà, Balla, Palazzeschi!

Marinetti, Boccioni, Carrà, Balla, Palazzeschi!

Futurist manifesto! Futurist manifesto!'

- Animals And Men

Check it out, man. It's Adam & The Ants (sorry, A - reverse-D - am & The Ants) and something called  "Catalogue". Nice design and colours, no? A deep-red background, a circle-contained green-tinted pic of a topless Mr Ant, and pleasingly-solid black all-caps lettering. 

Worth a few bob: Catalogue

Irresistible, you might say. Well, I thought so, anyway. I came across this last week in a charity shop in happening Streatham in south London (the scene of my recently picking up no fewer than three - THREE - 7-inch mod-ish singles). Again the cheery geezer at the counter's behaviour was intriguing/disarming. Him: "Did you see that Adam & The Ants book in the box, there?" Me (slightly startled): "Er, yeah. No idea what it is though". Him: "Must be worth a few bob, that. Must be rare". Me: "Hmm". Anyway, to cut a long story short, the cheery geezer actually gave me the weird booklet thing along with a Front 242 album I paid hard cash for (£1), both taken from the shop's rather tatty box of records. The old guy, seemingly somewhat fixated on the A&TA Catalogue, said: "I'd rather it went to someone who'd appreciate it". Yeah, yeah, nice. But, er ... would I appreciate it. After all, Adam & The Ants. A strange band, no? For sure, Dirk Wears White Sox was genuinely original. Spindly, poppy post-aggro sounds for the leather-jacketed punks of '79 looking for something a bit different. But also, by 1980, a band being groomed by CBS Records for Saturday morning TV stardom and world domination. The Catalogue booklet (12 stapled A4 pages) was apparently given away with the first 30,000 copies of Kings Of The Wild Frontier. It's a weird confection. Partly a Smash Hits-style fan-mag full of teen-friendly personality stuff (Marco "likes: Frank Sinatra, Mick Ronson, James Bond, John Barry, custard ..."), it also has a strangely-detailed "Antshows & Events" section on the last page in extremely tight print, something which looks like it belongs in the classified pages of Sounds. On the one hand, the emerging "Prince Charming" version of Adam Ant is in evidence in one full-page photo. But this is in fairly murky black-and-white not glossy colour (CBS budget issues?). And meanwhile, Catalogue also has quite a lot of punk-era Adam Ant detail: photos of AA and Jordan and of Marco Pirroni and Soo Catwoman. There's also what appears to be a very particular insistence from Ant and Pirroni over citing "Sex Pistols circa '76" in their likes, not - we can infer - boring old post-Grundy Sex Pistols. And there's a sort of quintessential post-punk urban-chic photo of Ant and Pirroni posing on an outdoor stairwell at the Southbank Centre - a perfect Clockwork Orange-meets-punk-futurism image. 

So Catalogue's pointing forwards and backwards, while also - just about - occupying the post-punk present. Listening back to Dirk Wears White Sox, it's striking how alienated and odd it still sounds. From the very Spizz-ish Animals And Men and the mock-boogie of Family Of Noise, to the oddball art-rock of The Idea and the near-funk of Cartrouble (Parts 1 & 2). It's a strange and very inventive mixed bag. Who the hell could ever like all this? (Actually, me: I got this album in the early-80s and straight away thought it was pretty damn good. Who else made music like this?). But this open-ended strangeness is sort of what the Catalogue is moving on from. Pete Scott's introduction in Catalogue talks about the Cartrouble/Kick single (March 1980) as a "bridge between the old Antsound and the newer, more drum-orientated variant". So yes, Catalogue is a sort of futurist manifesto for the CBS-fuelled Adam & The Ants. Interestingly, the ostensibly very thorough Antshows & Events info in Catalogue only starts the clock at June/July 1976. In other words, we get no mention of the famous Bazooka Joe gig with the Sex Pistols at St Martins (6 November 1975) and Adam Ant's punk epiphany. Would Ant's involvement in a pub rock band like Bazooka Joe spoil CBS's story? And similarly, though Adam Ant's association with Bid, Lester Square and Andy Warren is mentioned in Catalogue, the Monochrome Set themselves are not. Again, would it detract from Adam & The Ants and the supposed singularity of some of their oddball pop if it could be attributed to the influence of oddball pop greats, the Monochrome Set? "Antmusic for sexpeople" was the slogan, and in Catalogue quite a bit is made of what Adam Ant calls (rather awkwardly) the "clandestine" atmosphere at their gigs. I'm assuming that this was meant to mean some kind of "tribal gathering" (a bit like the early-eighties goth shows by Killing Joke or Sex Gang Children?), and there's also stuff about Ant admiring "the warrior ideal, with its simplicity, pride and honour". Plus (gulp), the "daring romance of a swashbuckling pirate". The semiotics of all this are, frankly, completely scrambled, but I guess that's also a pretty accurate picture of the band at this time. In late-1980, when CBS released Kings Of The Wild Frontier and chucked in Catalogue for the lucky few (all 30,000 of them), I imagine the record company had no real idea what they had on their hands with Adam & The Ants and their Burundian-pop music fusion. Was it really chart-conquering music? Maybe, maybe not. Catalogue hedges its bets, but also clearly fancies their chances. Last week, as I acquired my own copy of Catalogue (a mere 46 years after its first appearance), I overheard the cheery charity shop geezer telling his workmates a story about how as a schoolboy his dad had bought him a pair of "Bay City Roller boots", possibly the ugliest footwear ever produced. Cheery geezer: "I said to my dad, I'm not wearing those to school". His dad: "You are!". There you are: parent demands child wears outlandish pop-teen gear so as to be in style. A few years after this happened Adam & The Ants would go on to be as big as the Bay City Rollers, the UK's new pop darlings. Were there mums and dads then demanding that their kids dress up as Adam Ant to go to school?