One from The Vault: Adam and the Ants: Dirk Wears White Sox

ALBUM REVIEW: Adam and the Ants' debut and why it's the most important record of my life.

Adam and the Ants: Dirk Wears White Sox

Do It Records

1979

In January 1981, I was ten years old and in the last year of primary school. Antmusic by Adam and the Ants was at number two in the UK charts, famously kept off the top spot by John Lennon’s Imagine, in the aftermath of his murder.

I don’t think there has been - or ever could be - a more momentous date in my life’s calendar. I remember buying the record from a small electronic goods shop in my local market town and returning home to play it on my Dad’s cumbersome and mechanical 1970s music centre.

It was the first record I ever bought and its effect on me was life-changing.

The moment the needle found the groove and the click of the drumstick intro tapped rhythmically out from the speakers, it was like a light went on in my head, illuminating all the possibilities and passions that had thus far gone unnoticed within me. Doors opened in my mind and I suddenly realised what was truly mine. My thing.

Up to that point I hadn’t really identified with much. I wasn’t a social kid. Tintin, the Faraway Tree, The Six Million Dollar Man and Star Wars were basically all I really cared about. I was all-to aware that I was faddish and that nothing really stuck with me. I was searching, but hadn’t found my grail. I remember it being a bit of a thing. I didn’t have a clue what I was really about.

And then, as if by magic, I discovered records and realised that these cool black discs weren’t just the vessels for Dolly Parton, Don Williams and Freddy Fender for Dad - they could be mine, too - and there was an entire universe filled with them.

And they were meaningful to me.

It was the key moment of my entire life, without exaggeration or hyperbole.

In the weeks afterwards I hungrily devoured anything I could find with more Ants on or in - singles, magazines, newspaper clippings, Kings of the Wild Frontier and, finally, Dirk Wears White Sox.

I pleaded with Mum to order it for me from John Menzies, a high street stationery retailer - which, looking back now, seems a very odd choice - I must have seen an advert for it somewhere. I certainly had no concept at the time of shops dedicated to music and records. That would have blown my tiny mind.

I’m not even sure why it had to be mail ordered, but it did, and the wait for its arrival was agonising. Everything in those days demanded that you allowed 28 days for delivery, so I can only assume it took the best part of a month to come.

That morning, the postman knocked before I left for school and it was the one and only time I was allowed to go in late. Mum let me stay behind for an hour to listen to it. I must have been driving her nuts with my excitement - she would never ever allow such a thing normally.

I can only describe my first listen to Dirk as anti-climactic. I was expecting the glorious thunder of Dog Eat Dog or the Burundi tub-thumping of Kings - but instead I was greeted by awkward funk rhythms, sparse drums and the occasional swear word, which, frankly, freaked me out a bit - the concept of being naughty on a record had never occurred to me - and hearing Adam talk about the size of God’s knob and piss-weak tea genuinely shocked my innocent mind.

Where Kings of the Wild Frontier was Panavision, Technicolor and glorious, Dirk was dark, Noir and claustrophobic.

I didn’t know what to think.

As time passed I made myself listen to it again and again. I remember having to make myself do it, fuelled by the primitive belief that there was something here to learn and appreciate. I had to understand it. I needed to familiarise myself with this thing that I found so difficult and disturbing.

And at last, after a week or so of daily play-throughs, it clicked.

It think that because it required so much investment and consideration, patience and analysis from my ten year old brain, it became so fundamental to my growth. More so than Kings, in the end. Where that was great, ripping fun - a grand Boy’s Own adventure - Dirk felt intense, mature and intellectual.

While I still love Kings of the Wild Frontier, that love is motivated by nostalgia. My adoration of Dirk Wears White Sox is contemporary - it sounds outside of time and space. It could be released today and still stand up as the almost flawless dark artistic statement that it is.

I say almost flawless because ever since those days, more than 40 years ago now, there has been one song that is occasionally skippable. Not every time I play the LP by any means, but sometimes, if I’m not really feeling its deliberately monotonous drudgery, Tabletalk can be passed over and not missed.

Everything else on the album is 100% necessary, 100% of the time. I don’t actually ever recall putting Dirk on and just playing a track or two - it’s always an album-length experience, barring the occasional sans-Tabletalk play-through. It’s occupation as an album has only just occurred to me - a differentiator to the rest of the Ants’ single-heavy oeuvre.

Cartrouble Part One begins with the tight robotic lone bass drum - heralding the over-indulgence of drum machines in pop which would culturally follow soon after its release. Then the awkward funk and minimal bass of the verses - all set up, I can see now, to emphasise the surging harmonies of the song’s “Pray for me…” refrain - which jumps from the vinyl in a juxtaposition as bold as it is infectious.

From there, we launch into more familiar and accessible territory with a connecting drum riff into Catrouble Part Two - or simply Cartrouble, if the song is being referred to in isolation as the best Antz single. Amazingly ignored on first released, only when it was reissued in the wake of “Antmania” did it reach the audience it deserved.

A peerless 45.

Keep your feet of the upholstery, Ronnie.

What a wonderful kitchen-sink depiction of suburban summer days away.

The rollicking Digital Tenderness follows with its mega riffage before we get one of the best narratives of the entire LP with Nine Plan Failed; a tale of super-soldier experimentation and the poo-pooing of authority and its pointless principles, nodding to the church, as Adam considers that he “… could never see the point of showing them you’re boss when they drag you through the city streets and nail you to a cross”.

More directly, the pope doesn’t fair well either. He apparently “… lost his four fingers when they gave this boy his hand to kiss”. It’s hysterically funny, tragic and sad at the same time. Nine Plan Failed.

The damning of religion continues with the ever controversial Day I Met God, which, along with Catholic Day (whose lyrics concerning the assassination of John F Kennedy) was omitted from the US pressing of the repackaged album, presumably for fear of causing offense to our delicate and adorable colonial cousins.

A shame, because both songs are highlights of the record - not just because of their bold lyrics, but the tunes are more conventional which gives them a real drive. They stand out from their more subdued brethren as being more punky, anthemic and - well - great. Either could have been a single. It’s hard to choose between the two.

Catholic Day probably wins, but Day I Met God is close on its heels.

Equally, there are a couple of other Dirk-era songs that I like just fine - Cleopatra and Physical (not on the LP) - but I’m always surprised they are held in as high regard as they are.

Adam’s ode to the first lady of Egypt’s fellatial skill-set kicks off side two with its bold “four to the floor” drums - a point of note here that Dave Barbe’s patterns throughout Dirk are ace. Each song has its own drum hook. Such well-crafted “serving the song” composition.

Cleopatra’s great, but, for me, not the album’s strongest moment.

That comes with the next track, the previously mentioned Catholic Day and its wondrously slidey guitars - courtesy of the ever inventive Mathew Ashman (RIP).

Next up is the sinister humour of Never Trust A Man (With Egg on his Face). Another great domestic narrative regarding alien brainwashing, a messy murder for a Marks and Spencer suit and her (apparent) suicide afterwards.

La-la.

Adam has real lyrical talent, which I think is overlooked in favour of easier points of interest; the theatre, constumery and popularity of Antmania, for instance - but take any track off Dirk and read the words - they’re all intelligent, engaging, funny and barbed. The narratives are so different that I think it’s one of the mian reasons they still stand up today, 45 years after they were recorded.

Animals and Men is concerned chiefly with the Futurist art movement. My own dedication to lyric digestion paid dividends when I was able to quote the Adam’s words in response to an art tutor when he asked the class who the Futurists were and what their manifesto was.

He was profoundly impressed. I was profoundly proud.

Thanks, Adam.

As the album heads towards its conclusion, we get the iconic swing of Family of Noise with its bizarre harmonica-led bridge that echoes the Beatles’ She Loves You. It’s still a WTF?! moment that raises a smirk.

Almost as much as the totally random sign off “In Croydon!”.

The last song of the album is a favourite, but it’s not very PC these days. Another slightly surreal tale of visiting the zoo, befriending a Chameleon, dodging a party of handicapped kids and pondering the origins of creation. Complete with tangential thoughts on hymns set to disco and how that would make religion more appealing.

Much lollage ensues.

Historically, Dirk Wears White Sox is ground zero for a few different things. Obviously there’s the ridiculous success the next lineup of the Ants enjoyed in the early 80s, as well as the birth of the New Romantics, which in lots of ways can be traced back to Dirk and Adam’s sense of style, art and presence.

More obviously, I think a lot of those Ant-fans would grow into Goths in the following years - enamoured by the same things as the New Romantics, but born from the darkness and awkwardness of Dirk. It’s a moody record that is far more responsible for pop-cultural cornerstones than I think it’ll ever be given credit for.

Much of the 80s youth culture was shaped by it. Those impressionable kids grew into free-thinking and emotional adults, who shaped their own futures in ascendence from Dirk.

I’ve got three copies of three album; my original Menzies copy, the US pressing and 2014’s white vinyl reissue.

The battered original is my favourite, of course. For all its pops, crackles, scars and sleeve wear, it means the world to me. In many ways, it’s the soundtrack to my life. It’s been with me the longest and is still up there, regardless of its emotive force - because the songs are still brilliant. It trancends nostalgia.

I think Day I Met God should be played at my funeral, just to top and tail my musical life and evolution as an independent thinker; from that door opening to this lid closing.

Bury me in White Sox.

Dirk’s always been with me and always will be.

Fact.

Adam Ant on The Interwebs