New Again: Adam Ant

In New Again, we highlight a piece from Interview’s past that resonates with the present.

We said it back in 1985 and we’ll say it today: We’ve got a soft spot for Adam Ant. Best known for his kooky get-ups and onstage antics as frontman of ’80s British post-punk group Adam and the Ants, Ant went on to pursue a semi-successful career as a solo artist and a slightly less successful (but wildly amusing) career as an actor. After an 18-year hiatus, Ant released his sixth solo effort, Adam Ant Is the Blueblack Hussar in Marrying the Gunner’s Daughter, last year. Despite the significant lag-time, the album enjoyed respectable commercial success. Now in his late 50s, Ant will return to the stage at New York’s Irving Plaza on August 15th and 16th. Never one to shy away from theatrics, one can expect a show laden with costume stages and perhaps even a throwback striptease. Below, our short profile on Ant from our May 1985 issue reveals a significant amount about the eccentric artist, including his real name!—Allyson Shiffman

Adam Ant
By Interview

We like Adam Ant. He volunteers his age and real name (32; Stewart Goddard: “I thought Adam and the Ants sounded better than Stewart and the Ants”). We remember Mr. Ant in his New Romantic incarnation tricked out in a pirate costume—that is, before he embarked on his partial striptease. Now Adam has effected another transformation—into a hard-working actor of the stage and screen. Having made his acting debut last year in a London revival of Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr. Sloane, the actor Ant is compiling a glittering roster of screen credits. Costarring with Brad Davis and Jonathan Banks in the upcoming In Cold Steel, Ant plays the “angel-faced front for a nasty little gang of bad ones.” And this summer the reformed Romantic will star in Wayne Wang’s Slam Dance. The World Gone Wild, which Adam is now filming in Arizona with Bruce Dern and Michael Pare, is a “cross between Mad Max; The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Woodstock.” But the entertaining Mr. Ant has not left rock—or his pirate get-up—for good: An album is forthcoming. Observes Ant, “I couldn’t abandon music; it’s in my heart.”

THIS INTERVIEW ORIGINALLY APPEARED IN THE MAY 1985 ISSUE OF INTERVIEW.

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