I was probably born at exactly the right time to appreciate this one. I'd just turned fifteen and was already vaguely aware of the Ants, and if not intimately so, enough so to have anticipated this second album and got some pleasure out of it before you suddenly couldn't escape from the fucking thing. Six months earlier, I'd found the Ants disturbing yet fascinating, mainly because for me - tucked away in the Midlands and still at school - they seemed only to exist as an indie chart presence and rumours. The music press hated them, and the astonishingly thorough lack of coverage lent them the appeal of forbidden fruit. Paul Woods told me he remembered a few of their early performances, notably one in which Ant supposedly provoked audience members into beating him up and appeared to be getting off on the thrashing. This, Paul said, was quite disturbing to watch, and that's my only real clue as to why the Ants should have been so reviled in their early days, although personally I suspect it may have been more to do with the Cromwellian demand for authenticity during those early post-punk years. Adam & the Ants had art college associations and were born from a fifties revival band called Bazooka Joe and were therefore fake, unlike the Clash - something in that general direction anyway.
Of course, it's all bollocks, as was the notion of their having sold out due to thirteen-year old schoolgirls buying this album. Adam & the Ants - here meaning mainly Adam Ant so as to include everything up to Vive Le Rock - had been an essentially theatrical concern from the very beginning, hence few anthems to either the dole queue or boredom as a general condition - very much sons of Bowie, and Roxy Music in particular. It's all too easy too think of this as the third version of the Ants, following on from the fetish-punk decadence then stark European cinema phases; and this was populism, musical eclecticism, Morricone's sense of scale, and songs which specifically referred to being in a band called Adam & the Ants. I seem to remember one critic objecting that these songs were about antmusic, as distinct from actually being antmusic such as we'd heard on Dirk Wears White Sox. Looking back now, without having to filter out appearances on Jim'll Fix It or the Basil Brush Show, it's difficult to miss the continuity. Sure, they were absurd, even pantomime with Los Rancheros and Jolly Roger and a lot of what came after, but they always had been. Music hall was sort of the point, and had been from the very beginning with Young Parisians, Punk in the Supermarket, Il Duce and others. The only difference here is the camera pointing in yet another direction, new scenery, change of wardrobe, and with a shift from black and white to garish technicolor.
Having been listening to the Ants for a full four decades, I still don't fully understand why they weren't massive from the start, so their abrupt ascent to teenybop stardom with this album is hardly surprising because, aside from anything else you might take into consideration, Kings of the Wild Frontier is an unreservedly great record. If Dirk had been European cinema, this was Hollywood, maybe even the Hollywood version of Hollywood - wide-eyed optimism, noble ideas albeit in cartoon form, and Link Wray twanging away in the background establishing a sort of pop classicism. It steals from pretty much everything, blends, mixes, matches, but steals with love, and so we have spaghetti westerns sharing grooves with the b-movie horror of Ants Invasion or Killer in the Home. Mostly it's a collage, elements which shouldn't go together but which work perfectly, and as such it's a pretty fucking weird record to have occupied either a number one slot or a teenage bedroom at the tail end of the seventies.
I've never been embarrassed to admit to loving this album, or Prince Charming or any of those which came after for that matter, and I've no idea as to the general health of the Ants' legacy these days. You may not like it now but you will seemed quite prescient back in November 1980, and I'm sure there's still time if you didn't but nevertheless fancy giving it a go.
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