FEATURE:
Groovelines
Adam and the Ants - Prince Charming
___________
THIS might be the first time…
that I have included Adam and the Ants on my blog. If I have, I definitely do not feature them often enough! I want to spotlight Prince Charming for this Groovelines. Undoubtedly one of the best-loved songs, it was released in September 1981. Written by Adam Ant and Marco Pirroni, and featuring on the Prince Charming album, it was Adam and the Ants' second number-one single (after Stand and Deliver earlier in the year) in a row. It was the fifth-biggest hit of 1981. I love Adam and the Ants and, between this song and Stand and Deliver (which is from the same album), it is impossible to dislike them! I have been listening to songs like Prince Charming since I was a child in the 1980s. I think the music still sounds so fresh and exciting! Nothing like Adam and the Ants exists today. There will be debate among fans as to which of their songs is best though, for me, Prince Charming is the standout song. Its sense of flamboyance, drama and excitement is electric! I want to bring in a couple of features which discuss the legacy and importance of Prince Charming. In a Classic Pop article from earlier in the year, producer Merrick/Chris Hughes (who produced the Prince Charming album and drummed under the Merrick moniker) reflected on a very special time for the band:
“Although the Ants split shortly after touring Prince Charming, by 1981 they were the biggest deal in town. Everything Adam Ant had dreamed of when turning his band from the arty punks of 1979’s Dirk Wears White Sox into proper pop stars had been achieved at an incredible speed.
If it’s hard to imagine a similar career progression now, it was just as unlikely in 1981. Even David Bowie needed a few years before and after Space Oddity to get it together.
For Chris, it was the intense bond between Adam and his writing partner/co-conspirator Marco Pirroni that propelled them onto the nation’s bedroom walls.
“Adam and Marco’s belief that the Ants would happen was very powerful and prevalent,” recalls Chris from his home studio near Bath. “They were like Mick‘n’Keith, those two. They were unbreakable and totally held up each other’s opinion. Adam and Marco were so tight you couldn’t pick either of them off, and their forward motion was unstoppable. It was ‘Yeah, I want this and I’m going to get this’ all the time.”
The unbeatable singles Stand And Deliver and Prince Charming were exactly what was needed to seal the Ants’ regal period as perfect colourful pop stars. Chris, albeit under his nickname, was cemented in 80s folklore in the chorus of Ant Rap”.
It must have been amazing being in Adam and the Ants and producing an album like Prince Charming. The thrill and catchiness of the title track is insatiable. It is a shame that the band would split so soon after Prince Charming was released. I look back at the very best music from the late-1970s/early-‘80s and Adam and the Ants ruled. 1980’s Kings of the Wild Frontier must go down as one of the best albums ever! One could still hear a real spark on 1981’s Prince Charming.
I am going to round things off soon enough. I want to source Louder Than War. They revisited the Prince Charming album back in February. They remarked how Prince Charming was different from Kings of the Wild Frontier:
“On release, Prince Charming was a big hit slamming into the charts at number 2 but compared the astonishing success of the number one for months of the Kings Of The Wild Frontier album it felt like a flat success, the reviews were lukewarm and the band’s younger fan base were starting to move on to less interesting pop pastures. There was still enough petrol in the tank though to propel the band’s to two preceding single releases and album cuts to massive number hits with Prince Charming and Stand And Deliver but the album has spent years being looked on as a disappointment.
The pop genius of Adam was still there though and years later like a team of archeologists discovering a golden city under the ruins of a rubbled ancient settlement decades later we find an album that is as bizarre, brilliant and beautiful as Kings.
Prince Charming has moved on from Kings whilst retaining some of its hallmarks. It’s full of odd rhythms, strange songs and a perfect art-house pop that needs to be celebrated and makes it one of the great lost albums of the period despite its then big chart status.
We have already the staggering moment when Adam And the Ants went from underground freaks to mainstream Antmania and it was always going to be difficult to replicate that shock of the new value.
It’s still quite staggering how such a strange band managed to turn themselves into pure pop with a thrilling dark undertow, sex and an art school obliqueness. That whiff of cordite danger is what makes the greatest of great pop and Adam understood that and that fine line between the weird and the toppermost of the poppermost has stood his music in good stead for decades.
The narrative is now set in stone…his debut Dirk album was a monochromatic cult oddity beloved by his kung fu slippered Ant fans and the remnants of the freak fierce punk scene who gathered around the band after the Sex Pistols imploded.
Adam was the sound of the early punk squats and the freak scenes up and down the UK – those strange post-punk dark disco songs of sex and violence and post-modernism were perfect for the time. His breakthrough album Kings Of The Wild Frontier was a glorious technicolor masterpiece that was the gateway album for a whole new generation of fans.
In that early eighties pomp Adam, like Bowie, was the gateway artist who opened the doors for all kind of underground artists, musicians and authors that Adam was referencing. Goth would never have been as big with Adam or even industrial and even Britpop and beyond with many of the later generations of musicians retaining a huge affection for him. Dealing his fantastical pop and an esoteric culture hinterland he took his fans on a trip. Kings was huge and it glorious Burundi pop was carved into shape by his band of merry like the wonderful Marco and into one of the great British pop records.
Where do you go from there? Prince Charming was the swift follow-up after the brief regal reign of the banD and is yet another gem that needs revisiting. If it lacks those thrilling Burundi drums of songs like Kings Of The Wild Frontier and Dog Eat Dog off the preceding album it was because it had moved on into yet another brave and exotically strange collection of rhythmical pop perfection”.
I will finish off here. Forty years after this remarkable song came out, Prince Charming has lost none of its dandy swagger! It is a song that has influenced so many artists. Bands like Nine Inch Nails are inspired by Adam and the Ants. I feel the impact and relevance of songs like Prince Charming will reverberate for decades to come. If you have not played this song in a while and need a lift, what better time than to spin…
PHOTO CREDIT: Scope Features
THE remarkable Prince Charming?!