Most of all, Bow Wow Wow was McLaren’s retaliation against postpunk. He found angst-wracked groups such as Joy Division drab and sexless. Postpunk was music for students, all atmosphere and mystique. A fan of fifties rock ’n’ roll, he felt that postpunk was progressive rock resurrected, with its albums that were solemnly treated as works of art, and that looked like works of art, what with their lavish, pretentious packaging. Above all, McLaren scorned the path taken by the former Johnny Rotten, saying “I don’t find [PiL] musical. And, if they’re not musical, I don’t care how experimental they are. He’s asking you to take a course in music before you understand it.”
Despite his own seven-year stint in art college, McLaren hated the new art school rock. The middle class had taken over rock once more, he complained. “They didn’t like punk because it was too hard and nasty, so they cleaned it up. They’ve used synthesizers because they think it’s smart and new: ‘Let’s experiment with music.’ Why do they take their lives so seriously? They’re so hung up,” McLaren despaired of the eighteen-year-olds, school-leavers too close to real-world economic pressures to really cut loose. He put his faith in thirteen-year-olds instead. This younger generation, unrestrained by any harsh reality principle, would rise up and “kick out that eighteen-year-old-university-graduate art school generation.”
McLaren also despised independent labels such as Rough Trade. He saw them as a new crypto-hippie aristocracy, politically correct but “poverty stricken in terms of imagination, street suss, and feeling.” By contrast, the old record biz giants such as EMI—who signed Bow Wow Wow despite the company’s troubled past relationship with the Pistols—seemed more trustworthy precisely because they had no countercultural pretensions. EMI-style conglomerates also had the gigantic marketing and distribution machinery that could make pop sensations happen in the most massive way possible. By comparison, the indie labels resembled small merchants, mere “grocers” as McLaren put it witheringly. This cunning sleight of rhetoric artfully connected Margaret Thatcher (“only a grocer’s daughter,” her opponents jeered) to postpunk tradesmen such as Geoff Travis. Both were products of the same dreary English provincialism, Napoleon’s “nation of shopkeepers.” McLaren saw himself as a different kind of entrepreneur: not a petty bourgeois bean counter and ledger filler, but a dandy spendthrift, a cunning con man, a pirate upholding the grand British tradition of ransacking other cultures.
McLaren positioned Bow Wow Wow as a victory over Thatcherism. Rather than take the obvious postpunk path and bemoan mass unemployment, though, McLaren mischievously framed the absence of work as liberation rather than affliction. Bow Wow Wow’s “W.O.R.K. (N.O. Nah NO! NO! My Daddy Don’t)” declared, “Demolition of the work ethic takes us to the age of the primitive.” Going to school was pointless, because its function (socializing youth for a life of labor) had been outmoded. “T.E.K. technology is DEMOLITION of DADDY/Is A.U.T. Autonomy” goes the chorus chant, taking the situationist fantasy of automation enabling a utopian future of perpetual play and updating it for the microchip era.
When asked by one interviewer about the plight of the unemployed, McLaren declared: “So what if you don’t have a job? I came back to England and everybody looks like bank clerks to me. They look like they’re very, very worried, about their future, about money. There’s a greyness in the culture that’s beating everyone down to a pulp. I think Thatcher really likes it that people are worried.” McLaren’s advice to the jobless was “Be a pirate. Wear gold and look like you don’t need a job.” Over endless coffee sessions in Soho greasy spoons, McLaren brainwashed Bow Wow Wow: “Don’t be a grocer—a grocer’s a money grabber, and he don’t spend his money when he have it.” If you had money, he believed, you should squander it. Feeling rich was the best way to beat Thatcher. Gold and sunshine were linked in his mind as un-English, the quintessence of spiritual extravagance. He fantasized, with endearing daftness, about importing sunshine, making the British Isles Mediterranean. “Just pretend it’s the tropics” was his remedy for the Thatcher blues. Against the doom and gloom of politicized postpunk, McLaren imagined a kind of unshackled pleasure principle triumphing over economic reality through style and sheer insouciance. Again, McLaren was ahead of the curve. Wham! rode exactly this carefree attitude to fame a few years later, with the pro-dole “Wham Rap!” (essentially a rewrite of “W.O.R.K.”) and the sunshine anthem “Club Tropicana.”
McLaren felt certain that Bow Wow Wow would become the most important band since the Sex Pistols and consign dreary postpunk to history’s garbage heap. But in July 1980, despite getting tons of press and radio play, the debut single, “C-30, C-60, C-90 Go!,” stalled just outside the U.K. Top 30. Always the conspiracy theorist, McLaren believed that EMI had bowed to covert pressure from the BPI, the organization that represented the record industry and was campaigning for a tax to be levied on blank cassettes as compensation for revenues lost to home taping. EMI, he believed, had sabotaged the single, falsifying its sales figures to ensure a low chart placing. Whipping up Bow Wow Wow into a fury, McLaren shepherded the group to EMI’s headquarters, where they trashed a top executive’s office, ripping gold discs from the wall and throwing a clock out the window.
AFTER GETTING KICKED OUT of his own band, Adam Ant wiped his eyes, decided success was the best revenge, and set to extracting his full money’s worth from McLaren’s image makeover. As a pop package, Bow Wow Wow was crammed with ideas to the point of incoherence. Basically apolitical, Adam boiled it all down to three key elements: heroic imagery, sex music, and tribalism. All had been part of his shtick already—the glam image, the kinky songs, the idea of his following as “antpeople”—but McLaren had given him a striking new look that mixed dashing pirate and Apache brave with a white stripe across the nose. As for the Burundi beat, Adam upped the ante on Bow Wow Wow by recruiting two drummers for maximum polyrhythmic impact. He also teamed up with his new guitarist Marco Pirroni to write a bunch of sharp, catchy tunes. Pirroni had contributed impressively heavy and dissonant guitar to the doomy postpunk outfit Rema Rema, but joining the Ants, he adopted a lighter, swashbuckling style that evoked Duane Eddy, surf music, and Ennio Morricone’s spaghetti Western soundtracks. This sound also happened to be remarkably similar to the twangy, tremolo-heavy approach of Bow Wow Wow’s guitarist, Matthew Ashman.
In the winter of 1980, the singles “Dog Eat Dog,” “Ant Music,” and “Kings of the Wild Frontier” smashed their way into the U.K. Top 10. For just a moment, there was a frisson of danger about Adam and the Ants. Sure, this was bubblegum pop. Yet Adam’s sheer self-belief lent a weird sort of conviction to ostensibly ludicrous lines, like “Don’t tread on an ant/He’s done nothing to you/Might come a time/When he’s treading on you” (which could be read as an oblique warning to McLaren and the former Antz now in Bow Wow Wow). On the cusp between culthood and stardom, the live Ants were an awesome experience. In some respects, Adam’s whole tribal/heroic shtick was like a teenybop version of heavy metal’s warrior-male fantasies. He also recalled glam gang leader Gary Glitter, another pop idol backed by two drummers stomping out a primal beat. Like Glitter, Adam’s peacock swagger was oddly asexual, more narcissistic display than real seduction.
During his early cult years, Adam had been endlessly mocked by the music press. Now he reveled in creating an army of look-alike followers. Even more delicious was the way that Adam used McLaren’s own ideas more effectively than the mastermind himself. That winter, when Adam told Sounds, “I think ‘cult’ is just a safe word meaning ‘loser.’ I don’t want it anymore,” he was partly expounding the New Pop ethos of ambition and mainstream infiltration. But he was also sticking the knife into McLaren and the turncoat Antz. For all their manager’s strenuous efforts, Bow Wow Wow remained a cult band, languishing in a hitless wilderness, whereas Adam and his new Ants were the pop sensation of 1980.
Adam’s zenith came with “Prince Charming,” his September 1981 U.K. chart topper and one of the strangest sounding hit singles ever. I
ts keening coyote-yowl melody resembled a Native American battle cry. The beat lurched disconcertingly, a waltz turning into an aboriginal courtship dance. In the video, Adam glided between a series of arrested poses, frozen tableaux of defiance and hauteur that weirdly anticipated “vogueing,” the New York gay underground’s form of competitive dancing inspired by photo spreads in fashion mags. At the end of the video, Adam impersonates a gallery of icons, including Rudolph Valentino, Alice Cooper, Clint Eastwood, and Marlon Brando. Both song and video expose a certain empty circularity to Adam’s neoglam idea of reinventing yourself. He seems to be suggesting “imitate me as I’ve imitated my heroes.” The chorus is oddly brittle and defensive (“ridicule/is nothing to be scared of”) while the ultimate message—dressing up in fancy finery as a way of flaunting self-respect—feels distinctly trite.
“Prince Charming” ultimately suggested that Adam’s destiny was to run through history’s wardrobe until he ran out of heroic archetypes. He’d already been a highway robber with the previous number one single “Stand and Deliver.” In the video for “Ant Rap,” the next big hit from his Prince Charming album, Adam dressed up as a knight in shining armor. He ended 1981 with a spectacular, no-expense-spared tour called the Prince Charming Revue. The word “Revue” suggested that he’d moved into the realm of pure showbiz.
In interviews, Adam talked in vague terms about providing kids with hope, a positive alternative to “the rock rebellion rubbish.” He claimed he was perfectly happy offering escapist entertainment à la Star Wars or Raiders of the Lost Ark, and he defended his squeaky-clean image: “I’m sick and tired of being told that because I don’t drink or smoke or take drugs that I’m a Goody Two-shoes…. I don’t like drugsand that is a threat to the rock ’n’ roll establishment.” This sentiment inspired Adam’s next big hit—and his U.S. breakthrough—the rockabilly-flavored ditty “Goody Two Shoes.” The art school student who had hung around McLaren and Westwood’s SEX and Seditionaries stores, where he was thrilled by the fetish clothing and images of the queen with a safety pin through her nose, now proudly performed at the Royal Variety Show, an annual charity event featuring Britain’s top entertainers. “It would have been exactly the negative, inward-looking rock thing to have turned it down. If people think I’m clean and boring for shaking hands with the queen then that’s up to them. What would be outrageous? To spit at her? Drop me trousers? That’s rock ’n’ roll rebellion and, like I say, I want nothing to do with that.”
WHILE ADAM TRANSFORMED HIS faux-deviant cult charisma into defanged mainstream fame, McLaren seemed to believe he could single-handedly conjure an entire subculture into being. Music alone was not enough. He and Westwood opened World’s End, their latest King’s Road boutique, to feature her new line of flouncy romantic clothes. McLaren also dreamed of making a movie with Bow Wow Wow, a second Swindle based around his new clutch of concepts. In the winter of 1980, he even attempted to start a magazine to promote the subversive sunshine-and-gold spirit embodied in Bow Wow Wow’s music.
McLaren invited his old cohort Fred Vermorel to be the editor of the EMI-funded project. “The idea, as he first broached it, was something like Schoolkids OZ, a magazine written from the kids’ point of view and a bit outrageous,” recalls Vermorel, referring to the special edition of the sixties underground paper that resulted in a high-profile obscenity case against the editors. Playkids was McLaren’s original working title. He talked it up to the music press as “a junior Playboy for kids getting used to the idea that they needn’t have careers…a magazine about pleasure technology for the primitive boy and girl.” Proposed articles included a piece by celebrity ex-convict John McVicar on crime as a career option in an age of rising unemployment, and an article by Bow Wow Wow’s Lee Gorman about prostitutes, outlining where to go, prices, and so forth.
But Vermorel soon became anxious about some of McLaren’s other ideas. Researching pop fandom for a book (later published as Starlust), Fred and his wife, Judy, unearthed lots of kinky fan letters, including one from a boy who worshipped Clem Burke from Blondie and dreamed of licking whipped cream from between the drummer’s buttocks. McLaren wanted to publish the letter in Playkids, except that now he wanted to call the magazine Chicken. “Call us naïve, but nobody, not me and not the people at EMI, knew what ‘chicken’ meant,” says Vermorel. “So we said okay. But of course it’s pedophile slang for young kids.”
Then there were the photo sessions. At one, Annabella was asked to pose nude (she refused). Another session was an all-day affair at a series of regular people’s homes, booked via an agency. “The photographer told me Malcolm got increasingly heavy-handed during the day and generated a kind of hysteria,” says Vermorel. The climax came with McLaren’s badgering a thirteen-year-old girl into removing her clothes. He succeeded, but only after reducing her to tears.
Vermorel believes McLaren’s master scheme was “to create a child porn scandal implicating as many people as he could.” Not just EMI, who was financing Chicken, but the BBC, too. A documentary crew headed by Alan Yentob had been following McLaren around for a program on the marketing of Bow Wow Wow. Partly impelled by his usual lust for maximum media mayhem, McLaren also wanted to make a serious polemical point, exposing pop music as porn for children (hypersexual material that stimulated them precociously) and pop as porn using children (fresh-faced boy-men, jailbait-age girls) to titillate adults.
With typical ruthlessness, McLaren, in his eagerness to embarrass the music and media establishment, showed no concern whatsoever about the youngsters (Annabella and the other teenage models) or old friends (Vermorel) who would have been embroiled in the scandal. When he went to remonstrate with McLaren, says Vermorel, “Malcolm just laughed and said, ‘You should be telling all this to the judge! When the shit hits the fan, I’ll be in South America.’ So I told EMI what was going on. And they told Yentob, and he freaked out, and those tapes have been in the BBC vault ever since.” Vermorel also alerted the music press, telling NME that the magazine he’d thought was supposed to be “the anti–Smash Hits,” aimed at sex-positive underage youth, was actually turning into “a magazine for adults that features kids as objects.”
McLaren accused his estranged friend Vermorel of being a closet puritan. But over the next few years, photos seeped out here and there on single sleeves and “greatest hits” compilations suggesting that the photo sessions had been decidedly dodgy. In one picture, Matthew Ashman wears just a “radio G-string” (a transistor-as-loincloth affair too small to conceal his genitals) and perches a scantily clad Indian boy who looks about eight years old atop his shoulders. In another photo, Annabella, apparently naked underneath a loosely wrapped blanket, lies on top of a studio mixing board with a microphone jutting at her mouth at a suggestive angle. “I wasn’t nude,” she insisted later to Sounds, adding, with delicious lack of awareness, “I was lying on a control panel…with all these knobs sticking in me.”
Chicken never hatched. According to Vermorel, “the only physical evidence of Chicken’s existence was the rate card for advertising in the magazine.” But Bow Wow Wow’s second release, Your Cassette Pet, continued to exploit the underage-sex angle. Most of McLaren’s lyrics were reworked from the scripts for The Adventures of Melody, Lyric, and Tune and The Mile High Club. In “Sexy Eiffel Tower,” Annabella plays a suicidal girl about to leap from the top of Paris’s most famous landmark. She gets implausibly horny in the proximity of death: “Feel my treasure chest/Let’s have sex before I die/Be my special guest.” Plunging through the air (“falling legs around your spire”), she enjoys a petit mort or two before the grand mort of hitting the ground. Annabella claimed, with apparent sincerity, that the panting sounds she expertly imitated weren’t meant to be orgasmic but panicked. “Louis Quatorze” concerns a pervy bandit of love who surprises Annabella with unannounced visits and ravishment at gunpoint. The music, though, almost vanquishes any moral reservations: Bow Wow Wow had developed an exhilarating and unique sound, all frolicking polyrhythms
, twangabilly guitar, and frantic but funky bass. Add Annabella’s girlish, euphoric vocals—especially charming on a cover of the Johnny Mercer standard “Fools Rush In”—and the results were irresistible.
Even more striking than its musical content, though, was Your Cassette Pet’s radical format. A cassette-only release midway in length between an EP and an album, it retailed at only two pounds and came in a flip-top carton similar to a cigarette pack. McLaren wanted music to become much more disposable, something kids casually picked up at the corner store as they breezed through on roller skates, mere software to pop into their portable cassette players and boom boxes. Traditional record shops, already ailing because of falling sales, would disappear, McLaren believed. EMI liked the idea of the cassette-only release for different reasons, ones that actually subverted McLaren’s subversive intentions. At the time, many years before tape-to-tape dubbing became widely available, cassettes were actually harder to copy than vinyl records. But a fatal flaw ruined the marketing plan. Cassette Pet’s tape sound quality was too poor for radio DJs to play, while the EP-or-album ambiguity confused many record stores and meant that Cassette Pet failed to penetrate the Top 40.
Subsequent singles such as “W.O.R.K.” and “Prince of Darkness”—both released on conventional vinyl—fared no better, and McLaren grew despondent. In the early Bow Wow Wow interviews, he’d argued that kids were famished for ideas. But no one was taking the bait. Gradually, it became apparent to everybody but McLaren that the thing holding back Bow Wow Wow from success was the overbearing presence of their manager. Pop fans recoiled from the pungent odor of hype and the endless publicity stunts. The fact that The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle finally reached cinema screens around this time only exacerbated the impression of McLaren as über-Svengali.
Rip It Up and Start Again Page 36
