XTC vs Adam and the Ants: Who was the most successful?
There doesn’t initially appear to be much connection between stalwarts of the UK new wave, Adam and the Ants and XTC.
The latter, while exploring all manner of styles across jerky post-punk to gentle psychedelia, stayed inexorably wedded to a hopelessly English plane, staying put lyrically in a fascination with the quirks and eccentricities of their home country.
Formed in Swindon and centring the principal songwriting team of Andy Partridge and Colin Moulding, XTC, in some strange way, remained forever anchored to the humdrum suburban estate the pair grew up in, tethered to cult status despite successful singles and a string of acclaimed albums across their initial studio tenure from punk to the early 1990s.
While burnished in the punk underground, Adam and the Ants swapped biker leather for flamboyant highwayman chic, orbiting the New Romantics but eschewing the scene’s electronics for a dramatic Burndi heft of colourful pirate theatre and the frontman’s eager resurrection of Marc Bolan’s rock star preen. Gunning straight for the Smash Hits centrefold and poster slapped on every young girl’s bedroom walls, the ‘Stand and Deliver’ cohort rode an essential arm of the second British invasion that dominated the early 1980s MTV, eager with their dazzling promos ready for the video channel’s need for content.
Yet, an unabashed love for pop lay at the heart of both bands. XTC never even cared for the punk label, let alone new wave, at heart an outfit indebted to The Kinks’ Anglo-wistfulness wrapped in power pop gusto and shades of avant-garde peculiarity. But it was pop, all the same, averting punk’s evolving limitations with a minor chart-pleasing album run that would enjoy namechecked legacy among the Britpop explosion and beyond.
So too did Adam and the Ants, earnestly charting pop’s glittering course, breathing life back into the glam of their generation’s youth and enjoying an electric albeit brief spike of global stardom off the back of Kings of the Wild Frontier and Prince Charming.
So, who was the most successful?
Exact figures are hard to glean definitively, but it’s fairly certain that Adam and the Ants sold the most records out of the two, boasting as many as 1,400,000 album sales, with a respectable 500,000 in the States, according to the Best Selling Albums database.
Despite their short, sharp shock of a pop domination, the ‘Antmusic’ craze that swept across the charts was enough to thrust them as pop pillars of the day, with Adam Ant and co-songwriter Marco Pirroni also working together for a string of solo records after the band’s dissolution.
XTC’s sales are where numbers get tricky. Some sources count over 230,000 in sales, with 1982’s English Setllement offloading a respectable 60,000 alone. However, the duo became embroiled in a bitter label dispute, where Virgin Records alleged vast sums of unpaid royalties, some figures suggesting XTC may well have dragged the album over the million mark. Should the duo’s sales be verified, it could stand that XTC’s perceived cult fandom is much larger than the power pop pair’s narrative lets on.
