Ridicule is nothing to be scared of

Continuing my trip back through the 1981 album charts.

13/12/81 : Prince Charming - Adam & The Ants

I really like their main singles, but I've never listened to a single A&TA album - I think my concern is that the quality of the non-singles somewhat tails off, but I guess we'll see.

Well, "Stand And Deliver" and the title track stand out a mile in comparison to the other tracks on this album - they both have a strong theme and rhythms and hang together well. Everything else (including "Ant Rap" which was also a single) is just a mess, with weird instruments, sounds and beats thrown into the mix with no obvious aim or attention to detail. All in all, it's a most peculiar album which I imagine resulted in quite a bit of head-scratching from those that purchased it. 

We're at #5 in the charts this week on their sixth week of a 21 week run, with it having peaked at #2 for its first three weeks - it spent the first ten weeks in the top five, so I guess it was just unlucky in the albums it came up against. The rest of the top five were ABBA (a new entry), Queen, The Human League and Chart Hits '82, with the next highest new entry being We Are Most Amused (#62). This was a most curious compilation of the best of British comedy, including sketches from (amongst many others) The Goons, Not The Nine O'Clock News, Benny Hill, Mike Harding and Barry Humphries (very British!) - it's an eclectic mix, but I can see it would give me quite a few chuckles (and if that sentence feels very familiar, it was originally in yesterday's post because I got my weeks confused!).

Wikipedia tells us this is their third and final album - and that's pretty much all it has to say on the matter! So I took the opportunity to dive into the singles entries and learned several fascinating facts, I can tell you! The "Stand And Deliver" tells us that the video was strongly influenced by the Monty Python Dennis Moore sketch (well, they both feature highwaymen, I guess), the track has been covered by No Doubt (it's really not good) and, saving the most bizarre for last, in '03 Adam re-recorded the track as "Save The Gorilla" to raise aware of the endangered mountain gorilla - funnily enough, lawyers got involved and blocked the release (phew!).

Looking at "Prince Charming", a most bizarre story emerges because Rolf Harris claimed it was a rip-off of his '65 hit "War Canoe" - and if you listen to it, then you have to agree he has a point. He alleged, a large sum of royalties came his way as a result - however, due to his large collection of ethnic music, Adam was able to point out that Rolf had initially just ripped off an Aboriginal Australian song and was just completely trying it on (who would have guessed that Rolf turned out to be a wrong'un?). Back to the album, the critics were not kind to it mostly saying it was style over substance - which I guess is true if you like the "style" involved, but I don't. Commercially, it did pretty well in a few places, getting to #7 in Australia and #5 in The Netherlands, but only #94 in the US (and even that feels generous). 

discogs.com tells us you can pick up a version of this for a mere couple of quid, but if you want a version signed by Adam then it's going to set you back £130 - but it's a bit of a cheat because he signed it in '25. I'm glad I finally listened to this, but I'll not be rushing back to it - apparently Kings Of The Wild Frontier is better and we're certainly going to get to meet that before long because it spent TWELVE weeks at #1 this year!

20/12/81 - A pretty decent album