GUITARIST AND CO-WRITER MARCO PIRRONI DISCUSSES THE MAKING OF THE BAND’S ERA-DEFINING 1980 ALBUM, KINGS OF THE WILD FRONTIER
By Mark McStea
NEWS + NOTES
ADAM AND THE Ants released Kings of the Wild Frontier at the tail end of 1980. By the end of the following year, they’d become the biggest band across pretty much the whole world, with Kings selling 8 million copies. It seemed that only the U.S. was resistant to the waves of hysteria that “Antmania” generated.
Prior to teaming up with Adam Ant, U.K.-born guitarist and co-writer Marco Pirroni had been active on the early British punk scene, playing with Siouxsie and the Banshees at their first-ever show (with Sid Vicious on drums). He’d also been in indie bands the Models and Rema Rema, but he’d enjoyed only modest success. Meanwhile, Ant — with the original lineup of Adam and the Ants — had become a fixture on the U.K. indie live circuit and had built a cult following — but he seemed to have peaked. Pirroni agrees. “The music Adam was making was entirely different from what we came up with,” he says. “This change in direction was a deliberate move on Adam’s part to reinvent himself. He wanted to completely change everything. His band had hit a brick wall. They were doing well in terms of live audiences, but things weren’t growing. I don’t think they could have ever been a chart-topping act.”
How did the creative process work when you got together?
Virtually everything was newly created between us, except “Ants Invasion,” which he already had on hand. There were a few tribal things he’d been working on, but we didn’t use those, more the ideas behind them. He’d paid [impresario and Sex Pistols manager] Malcolm McLaren what you could almost think of as a consultancy fee, and [McLaren] suggested some concepts that Adam was hesitant to apply. But I told him that he’d paid for them, so he was at liberty to use what he wanted. Probably the only really useful thing was McLaren’s suggestion that using the idea of Burundi tribal beats could be interesting. There was an album called Warrior Drums of Burundi that was quite influential on what we came up with. So I would usually have a chord sequence, Adam would have some kind of tribal chant, and we’d go from there.
It seemed like the perfect outlet for you to channel all of your influences — Link Wray, glam rock, Mick Ronson, etc.
It definitely was. Everything I’d
