After my suicide attempt, there was nothing to lose. It was time to become Adam Ant
Eighties icon Adam Ant went from the top of the charts to a psychiatric ward. He tells Peter Ross about falling in love, falling apart, and that golden period when his pop career fell into place17 September 2006“HELLO,” I said. “I’m here to see Adam Ant.” The hotel receptionist looked at me. He raised an eyebrow. It shot straight upwards on a thermal current, a hot blast of incredulity and amusement. The eyebrow was asking, “Is this a wind-up?” but the receptionist was more circumspect: “I wasn’t aware we had that gentleman here, sir.” He checked the register. It didn’t take long; London’s Covent Garden Hotel is compact and exclusive – home from home for Hollywood’s stars, a small corner of England that is forever Beverly Hills. “Ah, yes,” he said. “First floor, in the library. Go right up.”
It’s understandable that the receptionist had his doubts. That Adam Ant walks the Earth in 2006 is as much of a surprise to Adam Ant as it is to anyone else, and when you actually meet the man he hardly seems solid flesh, more a living ghost or perhaps a hologram beamed into the future from 1981, the year of his greatest success, boring its way through the intervening 25 years on sheer iconic power. People often use the expression “faded star” to describe the once famous; in the case of Adam Ant the cliché is literal truth – he seemed faded, disappearing from view even as he gave my hand an almost spectral shake. It was the most curious sensation, and I wondered – will this be an interview or a seance?
In the end, it wasn’t to be an interview at all. Not on that day. My train had been delayed, I was an hour late, and Adam felt tired. He suffers from bipolar disorder, what used to be called manic depression, for which he takes medication. The people who care about him try to make sure he doesn’t get too worn out, and so his agent, Mal Peachey, decided it would be best to reschedule.
We shook hands again as I left. This time I noticed how pale he was, a complexion of ice cream and moonbeams. When he said goodbye, his soft voice drifted towards me so gently I half expected it to stop and disperse halfway between his lips and my ears; if morning mist could speak it would sound like Adam Ant.
THREE weeks later I meet him again, this time in the office of his publisher, near King’s Cross station. In the intervening period, a national newspaper has been printing extracts from his autobiography, Stand & Deliver, and so Britain has once again become acquainted with his remarkable story – the art-school punk who became a pop phenomenon before sliding into obscurity and then suffering a very public psychological meltdown. In January 2002, following an incident in which he threatened some men with a starting pistol, he was arrested and later sectioned under the Mental Health Act. St Pancras, one of the hospitals in which he spent time, is only a ten-minute walk from where we are today.
He is sitting at a large table. In front of him: copies of his autobiography, a small bowl of dried apricots, a glass of water. He’s wearing a deep blue linen shirt, untucked and buttoned to the neck, and seems more solid and present than three weeks ago. He has lost the excess weight which made him almost unreconisable around the time of his arrest and trial. Now he is clearly Adam Ant, smooth pearlescent skin pulled drum-tight over humped cheekbones, azure eyes agape. Other than some hair loss, hidden by a black headscarf, he seems, at 51, almost untouched by the passing decades. Old Father Time must have overlooked him in his haste to get to Simon Le Bon.
I ask first of all about his experience of writing the book. What was that like? “It was quite emotional,” he says, his voice stronger today although still hesitant. “I’d kept diaries and as important things came up I’d write them down. But I’d never actually read over them. So that was a first-time experience. Obviously there were times when I really wasn’t well, and to read that was quite shocking at some points. But I resigned myself to doing it. The book is the truth, and I think it’s best to tell the truth without dressing it up.”
The revelations come thick and fast. Stand & Deliver opens in the immediate aftermath of his 1976 suicide attempt, as he comes round in hospital following an overdose of pills. When he swallowed them he had still been Stuart Goddard, his real name, but on wakening decided that from now on he was Adam Ant.
How was he different from before? “Stuart Goddard was a rather frightened, insecure graphic design student without any real direction and not knowing which way to turn,” he says, witheringly, about the man he used to be. “After my suicide attempt, I felt there was nothing to lose. It was definitely time to move on and become Adam Ant.”
Was that like becoming another person entirely? “Yes. It was a metamorphosis, really. I felt different in every way. I felt I had nothing to lose and everything to gain. I started from scratch, and went out there and did my best without looking back.”
When he tried to kill himself, he was recently married and was living with his in-laws in Muswell Hill. What was making him so depressed? “I think it was the confined area, and the fact that we didn’t have a lot of privacy, and there were always arguments going on in the house. That drove me spare.
“It reminded me of my upbringing, which I had an aversion to. It was probably a flashback to that time. You don’t see it happening, but as the depression gets worse you are in a sort of goldfish bowl and you can’t get out. There was nowhere to go, nowhere to run, no way to get out. And I took a very stupid and very dramatic way of trying to get out of it by attempting to commit suicide. It was a very stupid thing to do and one I regret enormously.”
It’s interesting that he uses that expression, goldfish bowl. As a child he was insular, happy playing games of make-believe on his own. However, his imagination sometimes veered out of control. Before he was old enough to start school, he was having regular hallucinations. He would imagine himself sitting in the middle of a giant aquarium; the huge brightly coloured fish which swam past his bed seemed real and frightening.
Why was this happening? As he says, it goes back to his upbringing. He had a very difficult childhood in a tiny flat in a slum. His father, Les, was an alcoholic. He’d come home after the pubs closed, shout at his wife, Betty Kathleen, then hit her in the stomach or the face. Adam would run to his mother, pressing his face to hers, trying to make her feel better. Les moved out when his son was seven.
Three years later, Adam caught a severe case of shingles. As his mother was about to have a hysterectomy, and couldn’t look after him, the council took over. He was assigned to a state orphanage and then to a foster home, before going back to his mother after some weeks. It had been a little taste of the institutions looming in his future, and left him with a great fear of being locked up. After school, in 1973, he enrolled at Hornsey College of Art and became interested in erotic work – paintings and photographs of blindfolded women being whipped and spanked. Sadomasochism appealed to him, perhaps because it spoke to his own deep anxieties about confinement and violence.
He started playing bass in a band, and met a girl called Carol Mills, whom he married in 1975. When they started sleeping together, he thought of the experience as “puresex”, a concept of his own invention. “Puresex is when two people are involved with one another and mutually agree that they both feel the same and that there’s no feeling of guilt and possessiveness about it,” he explains. “It’s just a very natural, pure feeling of abandonment and commitment to the relationship at the time.”
I ask whether he called it “puresex” because he was frightened to use the word love. “Yeah, could be. The idea of love was very scary to me at that time, and it seemed whenever that world came up it would just spell the end.”
Sex was massively important to him. In a 1977 interview he declared “sex is my life” and his autobiography is absolutely full of it, including descriptions of relationships with the actresses Jamie Lee Curtis and Amanda Donahoe, as well as Carole Caplin, a dancer when he knew her, but later famous as Cherie Blair’s lifestyle guru.
Adam Ant was fortunate to succeed in a profession, pop star, which made it easy for him to go to bed with a great many women; according to his diary, on November 9, 1978, he slept with four in one day. Playing live fulfilled a similar need. Sex and gigging made him feel well; they were a kind of medicine which lifted him when depressed and brought him peace when he felt uncomfortably elated. “I think that’s because they both involved energy,” he says. “It’s pretty well documented that exercise helps with the serotonin levels in your brain. So both those activities made me feel on a very high level, and would allow me to forget problems and deal with stuff.
“I had a lot of energy, and they would channel it and use it up. It was a bit like being on a marathon run – there’s a point where you feel good despite all the pain.”
Adam And The Ants came into existence in April 1977. They were a punk band, part of the whole scene around the Sex Pistols, and had a heavy S&M image. Punk struck a chord with Adam. The first wave of punks came from poor backgrounds, which he could relate to, and the whole aesthetic was about pain and discomfort – body-piercing, intoxication, pogo-ing; there was a violence at its heart which he understood.
Unlike the Pistols and The Clash, however, the Ants were never critical darlings. Some of those early singles – Zerox, Deutscher Girls – now sound like classics and have become rather influential, but at the time they were a bit of a joke and didn’t trouble the charts.
In early 1980, Malcolm McLaren, who had steered the Sex Pistols to infamy, took over as manager. He persuaded the other members of the band to abandon Adam and form Bow Wow Wow. His music career seemed over before it had properly begun, but instead he formed a new incarnation of the Ants with Marco Pirroni, a guitar player he knew. This was the group which became the first pop sensation of the new decade.
In October 1980 they released Dog Eat Dog as a single. It charted at number 37 and they were surprised to be asked to perform on Top Of The Pops. “It was going on television that did it for us,” says Adam. “That one performance catapulted us through the barrier. I had never been on television before, and I think when people saw me they made their own mind up. They didn’t have to rely on reviews. They just decided they liked the look of it and the sound of it and that was enough.”
Dog Eat Dog shot up to number four. In the next three years, Adam Ant had a string of hit singles, including three number ones – Stand And Deliver, Prince Charming and Goody Two Shoes. During one particular week in 1981, the band had no less than five songs in the top 40.
There was also a rapid-fire succession of strong images. Given that he grew up without a very good male role model, it’s interesting that he chose to portray himself as various Boy’s Own versions of heroic masculinity – highwayman, pirate, astronaut, knight in armour, Indian brave. Whatever the psychological reasons, he was smart to do so – Britain fell hard for Adam Ant and he even attracted the pre-teen audience which has since become such an important part of the music market. He was an innovator in other ways, too – giving interviews to the tabloids and kids’ TV, and exploiting the potential of the fledgling pop video format.
“I never wanted to stay a cult,” he says. “For me, that’s a polite word for loser, and being a cult doesn’t pay the rent. I had always wanted to be established as a household name.”
In some ways, it’s surprising that he succeeded to such a degree. While his songs were undeniably catchy, they were also deeply odd. Double-drumming, Spaghetti Western riffs, lyrics about Picasso visiting the Planet of the Apes – none of this seemed precision-tooled for the mainstream; listen to Kings Of The Wild Frontier now and it still sounds downloaded from another dimension, and yet it reached number two in the charts.
Was this deliberate subversion? “No, it wasn’t a conscious thing. It was just that I felt very insular. I didn’t feel part of any scene whatsoever. In fact I tried to stay clear of that so that the music always stood apart. What used to annoy me was getting lumped in with all the New Romantics, which I hated. I didn’t like any of that. It all seemed very fey and contrived. Our stuff was much rawer and much more street-level and punk-orientated. But I always used to think a good pop record is sex, subversion and style, so that subversive element was in there, and also in the way I was presenting myself. I wasn’t the boy next door, and I certainly wasn’t someone you would think would get pinned up on the wall. But I did.”
He was so busy during this period that it kept his serotonin levels up and his depression at bay. I had assumed that it was hypomania – a manic state characterised by racing thoughts, hypersexuality, grandiose thinking and excessive energy – which drove him forward in the years of his greatest success, that his illness was actually the engine of his creativity. But he says no. “The manic depression was something that came on a lot later, really. While I was working I was able to waylay that, and I was too busy to think too much about that sort of thing. I just worked through it.
“The hypomania kicked in later. It kicked in when the work wasn’t there. That’s when the problems start – when the work’s not there. You are dealing with a void, a space of time, and you are filling it with various things. Some of those things can be bad, and certainly were for me.”
When the hits started to dry up, he took it very hard. He’s terrified of rejection and failure, and this felt like both. I ask whether he found it problematic that he had invented Adam Ant to be a star and when he stopped being a star the persona had no purpose. He dismisses this. It’s wrong to say Adam Ant was created to be a star, more that he embodied a set of values – independence, confidence, decisiveness, inner strength – which all still applied. Adam Ant wasn’t just a brand, a set of golden arches, he was who Stuart Goddard had become. He still thinks of himself as Adam and even in his darkest moments has never considered reverting back to Stuart. You might as well ask a butterfly to get back into its cocoon. Nevertheless, as the Eighties came to an end, he was struggling to fill his days and gradually grew very depressed. There was some respite in 1990 when his Manners And Physique album became a hit in America, but that was a blip. By 1991, living in Los Angeles and studying acting, he was scrabbling around, looking for things to do.
Worse, a woman had started stalking him. Over the course of one three-day period she came to his door 42 times; once she broke in. He bought a gun to protect himself but found that he was having suicidal thoughts. He lay in bed and heard the gun beckoning from his bedside drawer. Kill yourself. Go on. He was back with the horrors of 1976 – shaking and sweating, seeking a way out.
For a time he found happiness with Heather Graham, a then unknown acting student. They moved in together in 1994, but that same year he suffered a manic episode followed by two weeks of incapacitating misery. He spent two weeks in the psychiatric ward of Cedars-Sinai hospital, where he was diagnosed for the first time as having manic depression. What was it like to receive that diagnosis?
“It gives you a starting point of how to deal with it and get better,” he says. “Once it’s been identified you can address it properly. You can learn about it and address the curing of it. So in a way it was a bit of a relief. It was a relief to know what it was at least. It was no longer just this terrible malady that would come and affect me now and again.”
He concluded that it had been a mistake moving in with Heather Graham, just as it has been a mistake getting married all those years ago. He needed space to stay sane. By the end of 1994 it was all over between them.
His mental state was up and down in the years that followed. In Christmas 1996 he made another suicide attempt. In 1997 he met Lorraine Gibson, who did PR for Vivienne Westwood. They married and had a daughter, now eight, but when they split up he was plunged back into depression. Once again living in London, he had the misfortune to attract another stalker, which triggered another manic depressive cycle.
In January 2002, he was arrested by armed police. During a fit of hypomania he had thrown a car starter motor through the window of a pub in Camden, and then, cornered in an alley, pointed a starter pistol at the men who chased him.
“When I was arrested I was locked up and that was an awful experience,” he says. “Then I was sectioned for six months, and that was one of the worst experiences of my life, not being able to go out and have freedom. When you’ve lost your freedom, that’s when it really hits home to you. It’s a great fear for me. Having experienced it, it’s almost inexplicably awful.”
Was it in any way positive? “I think it allowed me to get a certain self-discipline, and also to straighten up and know that I wouldn’t do anything else like that when I got out. It just woke me up. It was a baptism of fire.”
It must have been fantastic to finally get out? “Yeah, it was great to be free. And going through the Old Bailey trial was a real test of strength and will.” In June 2004 he was given a conditional discharge.
What have the two years since then been like? “They have been spent writing the book. That’s been very medicinal and a great way of channelling my energy. I’ve been able to look back with some kind of hindsight into the problems and the lifestyle that led me to that point. I feel this is fresh start, and I’m able to enjoy that.”
His recovery has been aided by his girlfriend Clare, who he is happy to say that he loves. She got to know him during the bleak days of 2002 and has seen him at his worst. He doesn’t need to hide his darkness from her, and she seems to have brought him some kind of peace. “I’ve learned how to calm down, to not think that the world depends on my doing something immediately. I’ve learned that I’m just a very basic, home-loving person, and I don’t need to be on tour all the time to survive.”
That said, he has been writing songs, which he hopes to release at some point; he works on the lyrics every day, and is keen to come up with something good, but says he no longer needs the validation of being in the charts; “I’m not being judged as a number every week.” These days he is happiest walking in the countryside, going out to the theatre, or sitting at home and listening to Bob Marley, Bowie and The Beatles.
My impression is that Adam Ant is a man who is eagerly looking forward to getting on with the rest of his life. As Clare and his agent Mal come back into the room, bringing him a cup of peppermint tea, I ask how confident he is that he can stay on a psychological even-keel.
“Oh, very confident,” he replies. “I feel very calm and very in control now. I don’t feel panicky or that I have to do 20 things at the same time. I can just sit back and take it easy on myself – and not go nuts.”
Stand & Deliver is published by Sidgwick & Jackson, £18.99. On September 26, Adam Ant will be at Borders, Buchanan Street, Glasgow, 1-2pm, and at Waterstone’s, 128 Princes Street, Edinburgh, 6-7pm