The album that most inspired “the pre-punk scene in London”, according to Adam Ant
The brains behind Adam and the Ants, London-born Stuart Leslie Goddard first came up with the idea of his second persona while watching the Sex Pistols perform an opening set at St Martin’s School of Art in 1975.
“After seeing the Pistols, I wanted to do something different, be someone else, but couldn’t work out what and [whom],” he notes in his autobiography. “I really knew I wanted to be Adam, because Adam was the first man. Ant, I chose because, if there’s a nuclear explosion, the ants will survive.”
Heavily inspired by the London punk scene, Adam Ant would go on to score ten UK top hits with his band, becoming “the first and only pop star” that Blur’s Damon Albarn wanted to be. Rising to prominence at the back end of the 1970s, Ant’s band witnessed the sudden decline of the punk movement, previously dominated by the likes of the Buzzcocks.
Instead, dedicated to the new wave revolution, Adam and The Ants helped to usher in the era of New Order, Duran Duran and The Cure, all the while remembering their punk luminaries. While Ant’s memorialisation of the genre is perhaps most noticeable through his physical appearance – need I mention his highwayman costume in ‘Stand and Deliver’ – the artist, to this day, credits punk albums, and those that came just before it, as the LPs that helped change his life.
Speaking to Goldmine in 2024, Ant described Lou Reed’s iconic release Transformer as “the most commonly listened to album by the pre-punk scene in London” thanks to “Reed’s marvellous stories of New York’s underground characters and life”, alongside the record’s iconic ‘Walk on the Wild Side’.
Pre-punk music, often called proto-punk, first emerged in the 1960s with tracks such as The Kinks’ ‘You Really Got Me’, renowned for being one of the first songs to use electric guitar distortion – a technique that would later be a fundamental aspect of the punk sound. Other bands like The Who later took this rawness, crafting the mod anthem ‘My Generation’, which John Reed later said foreshadowed the “cerebral mix of musical ferocity and rebellious posture” associated with punk.
In terms of Ant’s parallel between Transformer and the pre-punk genre, however, his argument is certainly well-evidenced. The Velvet Underground, Reed’s New York-based band, with its avant-garde take on rock and lyricism that tackled subjects like addiction very few people were willing to fucking touch, has been heavily linked with the early punk movement. According to Greg Kot, “The roots of underground and experimental music, indie and alternative, punk, post-punk and art-punk, all snake back to the four Velvet Underground studio albums.”
These four studio albums are, unmistakably, came straight from the opaque landscapes of Reed’s mind. So, as the band’s lead singer, primary songwriter and guitarist, it comes as no surprise that his solo work emulated The Velvet Underground’s distinctive sound that is almost goddamn impossible to replicate, lyrics and musical direction. After all, Transformer includes at least four pieces that he wrote while in the band. ‘Andy’s Chest’ was first recorded by the VU in 1969, as was a demo of ‘Satellite of Love’. ‘New York Television Conversation’ and ‘Goodnight Ladies’ were also played by the band during their summer residency at Max’s Kansas City.
Nevertheless, it is Reed’s most successful song, ‘Take a Walk on the Wild Side’, that best illustrates the album’s influence on the London punk movement. Touching on controversial topics from sexuality, gender identity and drug use, with lyrics such as “shaved her legs and then he was she”, the track has gone down in history as a “ballad of misfits and oddballs” – a description that is probably best suited to the likes of Johnny Rotten and Siouxsie Sioux.
