Adam And The Ants - Kings Of The Wild Frontier
My parents had split up in 1981, so they had to sell the house. We moved to a smaller one, and my dad moved to North London. So I was just living with my mum and my brother. The first record I ever bought was Joe Dolce, 'Shadapp You Face'. Then the second one I bought was a 7" of 'Antmusic'. My brother bought the Kings Of The Wild Frontier album and I put it on tape and I would listen to it all the time. By then I had my own tape player. I was about eight or nine. I'd tape all his records and listen to them in my room and listen to the radio too. We didn't have ghetto blasters then. I wanted to be Adam Ant and dress up like him and I would... I couldn't dress up like him but I would draw his jacket on paper and put the paper on myself. It was quite weird. I did that with Star Wars stuff as well. I bought magazines like Smash Hits and the Adam Ant fan club magazines and knock-off things in the newsagents, which weren't official. I would draw loads of pictures of him.

There was no one else like him at that point. It seemed slightly psychotic in retrospect. The videos were a big, big part of it because you could sort of see them moving. So I'd watch Top Of The Pops at that time and try and see if he was on. I was really into the guitar noises on some of the tracks that were really high, like a synthesiser. That made a big impression, but probably not on my subsequent music. I was pretty into his vocals really. No one else was singing like him. Sort of yelping, yeah, the English voice... a lot of voices in the early eighties were English voices and I think I stopped listening to music a bit in the mid to late-eighties when stuff seemed to me to become a bit more American-sounding.