Adam Ant is the Blueblack Hussar in Marrying the Gunner's Daughter (2013)

Well, as we all know, Adam was substantially unwell for a little while, as became apparent when a friend discovered him digging a tunnel in his kitchen using just a teaspoon, a tunnel proposed as a means of visiting an ex-girlfriend. I possibly have some of the details wrong but that's how I heard it, although for what it may be worth a number of my most valued friends have spent at least a little time detained at the pleasure of the psychiatric profession. To be honest, I was more bothered that the previously reliable Ant had seemingly fallen so hard with those last two albums, Manners & Physique and Wonderful. To be fair, I've only heard them in bits, but what I heard wasn't anything great, so I stand by my perhaps only vaguely informed disdain. He could be forgiven Strip, and he could be forgiven Where Did Our Love Go on the telly at the behest of a man who is alleged to have married small boys during clandestine wedding ceremonies, but somehow, somewhere it felt as though a bridge had been crossed and that it was kind of a one-way deal; and yes, I know he wrote a genuinely great autobiography, but even so…

Adam Ant is the Blueblack Hussar in Marrying the Gunner's Daughter suggests a certain degree of mania as titles go, which might not bode well. I suppose one could argue that Marrying the Gunner's Daughter is actually the title of an enterprise in which Adam Ant plays a character called the Blueblack Hussar, but maybe it doesn't really matter. After all, he's done this sort of thing before - Picasso Visita el Planeta de los Simios etc. etc.

Just to get the objection out of the way, Adam Ant is the Blueblack Hussar in Marrying the Gunner's Daughter is listed as alternative rock, lo-fi on Discogs which can fucking fuck the fuck off for starters. I assume most of the album was recorded in Boz Boorer's spare room on his computer despite which, it doesn't sound like a tape by Another Headache from 1992 and is no more fucking lo-fi than those early Beatles albums recorded using a Coke can and a bit of string for a microphone - or even Sgt. fucking Pepper for that matter. Lo-fi is what young men with beards listen to as they open up their Hoxton cafés ready for another day of selling overpriced breakfast cereal to tossers. Lo-fi, my arse.

Anyway, to get to the actual point, Marrying the Gunner's Daughter is the last thing I expected to hear from Adam Ant - not only a decent record, but a record that's at least as decent as most of the good ones. I get the impression it's mainly Adam with Boz Boorer, musically speaking. You could argue that it resembles an extended demo tape by virtue of the fact that they obviously liked these tracks well enough to stick them on the record rather than shell out for a fancy studio, but I'm not sure it matters. As a whole, the thing doesn't sound like a manifesto as Dirk and maybe a few of the others did, but it holds together simply as a set of fucking great songs pulled together by people who clearly had a blast writing and recording them. Cool Zombie is at least as monumental as Deutscher Girls, Miss Thing or any of the others. There are even surprisingly moving tributes to both Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren - surprisingly because I've tended to regard those two as a pair of twats, personally speaking. My expectations were fairly low, but this album really got to me through its raw honesty and emotional power. I don't know if it will be his last one - given that it came out about eight years ago and I've only just heard of it - but if so, he's ending on a much higher note than surely any of us could have predicted.