Here is an extract from Adam Ant's brilliant new autobiography Stand and Deliver. Click on the audio link to the right to hear an extract from the audio book, in which Adam recounts his first bad episode of hypomania and his feelins on the death of his father.
Ant on early family life
‘My nights were spent sleeping first in my parents’ bed, and then on a folding Z-bed in the kitchen, to which I’d be carried to after Dad got home. Dad never got home before the pubs closed. That was the golden rule. Together with the rule that he ruled. I’ll never forget the sound of his footsteps crossing the yard below. That low, boozy cough as he approached the stairs. These sounds would wake me up like a terrible alarm clock. Then I’d have to pretend I was asleep, because I knew what followed would be awful, and I wanted no part of it.’
Ant on the punk movement
‘Punk was the way we thought we could change things. We wanted to shock Britain out of its small-minded, cosy complacency. The music was deliberately loud and simple in direct contrast to the overproduced, far too clever musical rubbish coming from the mega-rich rock stars who had nothing in common with us. We didn’t want twenty-minute drum solos or pathetic, self-obsessed rubbish offered up as lyrics.
Punk fashion was all about sex, revealing and trashy in direct contrast to the smart casual dress of the day. Because everyone wore flared trousers, punks wore straight-legged trousers. Because men and boys still wore ties, punks wore ties, but studded them with safety pins and wore them more like a noose than a necktie. Because men and women wore their hair neat and styled, punks wore theirs deliberately messy, badly cut and brightly coloured. Because sex was still an activity that took place in private in Britain, between two (married) people, punks acted provocatively and perversely.
When you dressed the way we did, there was no hiding from the moronic beer-bellied boot boys who thought that we were their natural enemies and that they had to attack us whenever they could.’
Ant on the Sex Pistols
‘When the Pistols kicked Glen Matlock out, the music went out of the window. Glen is an excellent bass player and provided some raw backing vocals too. Then in walked Sid, the perfect Sex Pistol, who eventually stole the scene with his Rock n’ Roll Suicide act.’
Ant on fidelity
‘But in the flesh I couldn’t be faithful to anyone (whatever that meant). I had to have sex with new, different women whenever I could. The sex distracted me, kept me kind of sane.’
Ant on stalking
‘I stopped opening the outer door to her, but on a couple of occasions she managed to get into the entrance hall of the house by ringing other doorbells. The first time it happened I opened the door and she tried to get into the flat saying, ‘I’m here, just as you asked.’ She told me that the antenna I’d had planted in her head was working, that she could hear me talking to her, calling her to come and see me.’
Ant on depression
‘If I wasn’t such a coward, I told myself, I would get it out, load it and blow my brains out. But I couldn’t. Instead, I left the house when the call of the gun became too loud and too insistent. Some mornings I’d drive, shaking, anywhere – to a coffee shop or a parking lot by the ocean. Once there I’d just sit and cry my eyes out for I didn’t know how long.’
‘Just after Christmas, feeling that my life was as bad as it had ever been and that I had nothing to live for, after three days of deep depression I crushed thirty paracetamol in my coffee grinder, mixed it with orange juice and attempted to drink the horrible white foaming brew. Within seconds I was throwing up in my toilet and crying my eyes out.’
Ant on children
‘When my daughter, Lily, was born in the spring of 1998, I was there to see her emerge and had the privilege of cutting the umbilical cord. I was also the first person to hold her, and it felt absolutely wonderful. As she looked into my eyes that first time, I felt that I had become a man at last. Lily became my reason to live and the one true love in my life.’
Ant on bipolar disorder
‘I have been able to look forward and find clarity in dealing with the events that have taken place in my life and understand how to manage my condition. I am reclaiming my life from bipolar illness. I know now what the warning signs are, and when I am in danger of feeling depressed or manic I can, with help, manage to avoid both states. I am in recovery.’
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