Adam and the ants, Prince Charming
These guys are so damn weird. This is a fancy repackaged version I bought to accompany a fancy dress party for my 27th birthday. We all dressed up and looked fabulous – the visual “comedy” of this era can often override the music. Although the ants look bloody uncomfortable, like B&Q operatives who wandered into a fancy dress trunk by mistake – it’s obvious that “Adam”, as the front man is in his element. I suppose he is value for money – I only put the photos in for developing today, I have no idea if I lived up to it (clearly I was the queen of the birthday…)

The track listing on the CD is bracketed into what must have originally been side A and side B of the record (exactly five songs per side. Nicely symmetrical). There are bonus tracks of early demos and unreleased songs. This is the interesting point of bonus tracks, to see the workings out of what was finally given.

The lyrics are thoughtfully reproduced. They’re bloody odd, a lot of surrealism and campy references. Diana Dors, Picasso and the Planet of the Apes all jostle for attention. Although postmodernism is a very over-worked word, there has to be something of it here…what else was the weird appropriation of all the regency-style wear that typified the average New Romantic? Now a country idiom, now aboriginal pomp and splendour (seriously – what IS the structure to Prince Charming all about? It must have been a novelty hit even then, like O Superman, Ernie the fastest milk cart in the west and the Mike Flowers pops version of Wonderwall. Some novelty songs remain incredible).

I remember reading somewhere that 80s pop icons were far more interesting than the icons of the 60s…I’m sure I’ll go into this even more when encountered with Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell, Talking Heads and The Buggles. The 80s is such weird era – the cold war, hyper technology (microchips tasting both sweet and sour in the economy of the time) – people wanting to become robots or robotic in their working/living habits, bowing down in fear and worship of the machine, going against the visceral ugliness of the punk era, regaining elegance but keeping the democracy of it all going. Obviously there are crests to ride with every new generation of musicians and artists who appear; and having grown up in this era and not the 60s (the 90s were my era of being a teenager, which was again subject to fears, changes and notions political, economic, cultural and personal which will have filtered the way I see/saw music from the time, at the time and now), I’ll view them differently from some-one who saw the 60s when they were new and not old hat. None of that coffee-shops and “inner truth” crap they put about then – it’s all fairy-tale highwaymen in deadly earnest.

It’s all very multi-layered all this stuff, lots of different lines falling in and out of each other. Odd to hear in the Ant Rap that they might have coined the phrase “Naughty North and Sexy South” – that seems to be so much of a Heat magazine style utterance I can’t quite equate it with Prince Charming…that’s the difficulty with postmodernism, you can’t tell who appropriated what first.

God I really like the last song. Bit of a soundscape going on. Vocalised the ownership of sex. Nothing coy or lascivious. Height of the AIDS epidemic and all. Never tells you what sharing your body should be like though.