A guest posting by Fraser Pettigrew
Ten days after my 16th birthday, in July 1979, I went to see Adam and the Ants at Clouds Ballroom in Edinburgh with a school friend. Skilful parental persuasion had been required to get there because it was a known fact that the gig would not finish until long after the last bus that would carry me the seven miles home from the centre of the city.
Following the debacle of my attendance at The Rezillos gig the previous summer, when my parents came to pick me up and had to wait over two hours for me to emerge after 1am, they were not minded to repeat the favour. I managed to convince them that it would be much easier for me to stay at my gig-going companion’s house in Colinton, which was served by night buses, or so I claimed. Colinton was itself a good four miles from Clouds and the bus route didn’t exactly pass Drew’s door. Still a bit of work to do, but the parents, probably ill-informed, said yes.
The Clouds gig was the Ants’ only Scottish date in their ‘nationwide’ tour coinciding with the release of their second single Zerox on the independent Do It Records label. It had taken them a long time to reach even this modest milestone. They had played their first gig in May 1977, but it took until the following year for their music to make it onto vinyl, firstly via two tracks, Deutscher Girls and Plastic Surgery, on the soundtrack album of Derek Jarman’s bonkers film Jubilee, and then on the one-off Decca single Young Parisians. Their music was otherwise known through a couple of sessions for John Peel, which is undoubtedly where I’d heard some songs, including the new single.
Despite this lack of output and relatively late formation, Adam and the Ants were almost as legendary amongst punk fans as Siouxsie and the Banshees, with whom they had toured widely. Adam (Stuart Goddard to his mum and dad) was someone who could truly claim to have been there at the birth of punk rock, having played bass in the pub-rock band Bazooka Joe, headliners at a gig at St Martin’s School of Art in London in November 1975 when The Sex Pistols made their first ever live appearance. Follow that.
The Ants acquired what is known as a ‘devoted cult following’. When Drew and I arrived at Clouds we felt as though we had been cast back in time to some notional nirvana of punk, circa the Bill Grundy incident, the Anarchy tour, the Roxy and the 100 Club, with more spiked peroxide hair, mohair jumpers, safety pin earrings and bondage trousers than had been seen for many a year. There was an apparent Soo Catwoman/Jordan lookalike competition going on, and even a lad with a swastika armband to complete the time-warp.
But this was the summer of 1979, not 1977, and the support band returned us to the present moment. They were already known to Drew as TV Art, but by the time they took the stage they had renamed themselves Josef K. Rather obviously studenty we would have thought if we’d been older, but we were 16, and we’d all read Metamorphosis and The Trial as if we were the first people to discover Kafka. This Josef K evoked suitable claustrophobic angst and alienation through their scratchy, abrasive guitars and pained vocals.
This was post-punk, though the term may not even have been uttered yet. But we were already travelling along this road, ushered ahead by Wire, Joy Division and Magazine, and Bob Last’s Edinburgh-based Fast Product whose early releases captured The Mekons, Scars and Gang of Four. Josef K were firmly in that here and now but were tolerantly received by the devoted cult following of the Antpeople, lack of bondage trousers notwithstanding.
I think both Drew and I knew that going to see Adam and the Ants was already a kind of retro joke, punk as kitsch. Adam’s sex and S&M obsession in songs like Whip in my Valise, Ligature, Physical and Beat My Guest was always a kind of knowing provocation of British mid-century prudishness, from the Monty Python and Kenny Everett stable of kinky cross-dressing judges and civil servants. Not that that was a bad thing, you understand, just that it was as much comedy as sincere perversion, more naughty spanking than hardcore Venus in Furs.
Nevertheless, as the Ants’ appearance was signalled by the dimming of house lights the atmosphere took an intense turn. The PA started booming with the sound of the Missa Luba, the recording of the Mass sung in Congolese which is played over and over by Malcolm McDowell’s character in Lindsay Anderson’s iconoclastic anti-establishment film If… From where we swayed in the stage-front crush we could see Adam just off stage doing standing press-ups against the speaker stack, in some pre-performance focus ritual, his face covered in what resembled camouflage make-up like Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now (though not being released until that August it’s unlikely the film inspired it).
The Missa Luba faded out and Adam strode on, revealing an outfit of black shirt with black kilt worn over black leather trousers. Fetish gear, Scottish-stylee. Like a lot of pop bands, the Ants’ live sound was much heavier than how they came across on record. This was the band that went into the studio immediately after this tour to make Dirk Wears White Sox, and the debut album projects a lighter, more cartoonish version of Antmusic than filled Clouds that night. That’s not to ignore tracks like Physical, a slowed-down Stooges metal riff that was left off the album but finally given its moment of glory on the B-side of Dog Eat Dog a year later.
Far from being an anachronistic flashback to punk, as the Antpeople might have desired, Dirk Wears White Sox was an amusing slice of contemporary pop music. Not one for the children perhaps, but it marked Adam as an entertainer whose pivot to New Romantic dandyism on Kings of the Wild Frontier a few months hence didn’t seem as radical as it might have done, and I think the Antpeople realised that too, swapping the mohair and bondage trousers for frock coats and lace cuffs with equanimity.
The Antpeople were most satisfied by their idol’s performance, and so were we as we spilled out of the sweatbox club into the mild midsummer Edinburgh night. But for us the evening was far from over. We still had to get back to Drew’s, and it turned out that the night bus was not a prospect for some reason and thus we found ourselves schlepping westwards along Fountainbridge, trying to hail a taxi, all of which were either hired or going home for the night and didn’t want another fare. Eventually we took to waving a ten-pound note at every passing cab like some sort of bait, and after a few failures we finally hooked one.
“I like yer style, pal,” said the driver, who was heading home to Currie or Balerno and didn’t want to divert via Colinton but agreed to drop us off at the nearest suitable point. Drew chose the point somewhere on the Lanark Road and there we were in Spylaw in the small hours, still a mile or so the wrong side of the Water of Leith from Colinton. “I know a shortcut,” said Drew and led us down into the trees upstream from Colinton Dell. A perfectly legitimate route in daylight, this path took on a different aspect after dark. There were no streetlights because why the fuck would you be down there at night? The sound of the river cascading over a weir grew louder and louder, amplified by the pitch blackness as we made our way across a low bridge which Drew informed me had no parapet on either side, rendering the accuracy of our crossing a matter of some importance. We clung to each other as we shuffled across, very literally at that moment the blind leading the blind.
Mercifully we emerged into streetlight up the other bank and were soon ensconced in the granny-flat back room at Drew’s house where we could play music at discreet volume and get wired into the half-bottle of vodka that he produced from some hiding place. Rather than orange juice, the normal under-age mixer of choice, we were inexplicably compelled to mollify the neat alcohol with small bottles of Schweppes Russchian, probably the world’s most obscure and unpalatable soda water. Less ‘hints of berries, with hibiscus and carrot notes’ and more foosty old dried peaches with a hint of strychnine. Still, we necked it like it was lemonade and danced around the room, finally collapsing to The Stooges’ I Wanna Be Your Dog (more submission!) and We Will Fall, the drone of sitar-guitar and John Cale’s meandering viola as the sky lightened over Colinton.
I blame the Russchian as much as the vodka for the state of me when I woke up a few hours later. My head felt like a fucking wasps’ nest and my body was paralysed by a deathly fatigue for the remainder of the day. Somehow or other I got a lift home, where I crawled back onto my bed, insisting to my sceptically amused parents that no drink had been taken. By the miracle of youth I was fit as a fiddle the following day, and forevermore any mention of Schweppes Russchian would remind me not of my first leave-me-alone-I-want-to-die hangover, but of the midnight passage over the Water of Leith, of Adam and the Ants and Josef K, and the confluence and divergence of punk and post-punk under the sweaty lights at Clouds Ballroom.
* * *
To my considerable amazement there’s a (pretty terrible quality) bootleg recording of this whole gig on YooChoob. It opens with the DJ playing Gary Glitter and then the Missa Luba (at 3.08), with the gig proper kicking in about the 7.38 mark. To my equally considerable amazement the Ants didn’t play Physical that night.
The following are proper studio recordings however.
Adam and the Ants: Lady (B-Side of Young Parisians)
Adam and The Ants : Zerox
Adam and the Ants: Whip in My Valise
Adam and the Ants: Physical (single version, B-side of Dog Eat Dog)
Josef K: Romance (Absolute single version)
Josef K: Radio Drill Time
NB – the date of the gig was misprinted on the poster printed up to promote the gig and used at the head of today’s offering. The accurate date of 20 July 1979 can be found in the Zerox Tour Programme.
THE NEW VINYL VILLAIN 