Sex Gang Children: the rise and fall of Bow Wow Wow

Bow Wow Wow's second release, Your Cassette Pet, continued to exploit the underage-sex angle. In "Sexy Eiffel Tower, singer Annabella Lwin plays a suicidal girl about to leap from the top of Paris's most famous landmark. She gets implausibly horny in the proximity of death: 'Feel my treasure chest/Let's have sex before I die/Be my special guest'. Plunging through the air ('Falling legs around your spire') she enjoys a petit mort or two before the grand mort of hitting the ground. Annabella claimed, with apparent sincerity, that the panting sounds she expertly imitated weren't meant to be orgasm but the sound of panic.

Bow Wow Wow - Sexy Eiffel Tower 1980

"Louis Quatorze" concerns a pervy bandit-of-love who surprises Annabella with unannounced visits and ravishment at gunpoint. The music, though, almost vanquished any moral reservations: Bow Wow Wow had developed an exhilarating and unique sound, all frolicking polyrhythms, twangabilly guitar and frantic-but-funky bass. Add Annabella's girlish, euphoric vocals - especially charming on a cover of the Johnny Mercer standard "Fools Rush In" - and the results were irresistible.

Bow Wow Wow - Louis Quatorze 1980


Bow Wow Wow - Fools Rush In 1980

More striking than its contents, though, was Your Cassette Pet's radical format: a cassette-only release midway in length between an EP and an album, it retailed at only £1.99 (half the price of a traditional vinyl album) and came in a 'flip-pack' carton similar to a cigarette packet.

McLaren's contrived controversies kept backfiring. Desperate to stir up some buzz for Bow Wow Wow's debut album proper, he designed its cover as a simulation of Dejeuner sur l'Herbe, Manet's 1863 painting denounced as 'indecent' by Napoleon III for its image of a naked woman surrounded by fully clothed men. Annabella posed nude (under duress, she later revealed) but because she was still just under sixteen, her mother managed to stop the cover from being used. 

Another blow for McLaren came with the commercial failure of "Chihuahua" - simultaneously Bow Wow Wow's most seductive single to date and their manager's most blatantly cynical gambit. Mouthing McLaren's words to a wistful, Blondie-like melody, Annabella sang about being 'a rock 'n' roll puppet', confessing, 'I can't dance and I can't sing/I can't do anything' and warning, 'I'm a horrible idiot/So don't fall in love with me'. You could mount a defence of "Chihuahua" as a sly deconstruction of the pop industry's machinery of star-lust and fantasy. But if you consider McLaren's genuine anti-feminism, his real-world treatment of Annabella as meat, and the way he ventriloquized those humiliating words through Annabella's own lips, "Chihuahua" leaves a bad taste.

Bow Wow Wow - Chihuahua 1981

Finally, Bow Wow Wow scored their UK pop breakthrough in early 1982 with "Go Wild in the Country", an anti-urban fantasy featuring risqué lines about swinging naked from the trees and romping in fields 'where snakes in the grass are absolutely free'. "Go Wild" exhorted youth to spurn KFC and McDonalds and go 'hunting and fishing'.

Bow Wow Wow - Go Wild in the Country 1982

On the sultry, bossa nova-inflected "Hello Hello Daddy, I'll Sacrifice You", Annabella played the role of devouring earth-mother goddess as a coquette with a knife behind her back. The sweetly crooned lines about woman being 'more body than soul and more soul than mind' were vintage McLaren misoginy cobbled together from Lévi-Strauss, Jung and The Golden Bough.

Bow Wow Wow - Hello Hello Daddy, I'll Sacrifice You 1982

By the time Bow Wow Wow scored their second UK Top 10 hit and American breakthrough with "I Want Candy" - an exciting but vacuous remake of a sixties bubblegum tune - McLaren had pretty much ceased managing the band.

Bow Wow Wow - I Want Candy 1982

Malcolm McLaren, Bow Wow Wow and Adam & The Ants

In the summer of 1979 Virgin released Some Product: Carri On, a hastily assembled album of Pistols radio interviews, complete with a cover depicting imaginary Sex Pistols spin-off merchandise - 'Fatty Jones' chocolate bars, a 'Vicious Burger', a Sid action doll complete with coffin.

The Pistols' manager Malcolm McLaren ended up half-heartedly managing a London band called Adam & The Antz. Adam was an ex-art-school punk who'd built up a devoted cult following with mildly kinky songs like "Whip in my Valise" and "Beat My Guest".

Adam & The Antz - Whip in my Valise 1979


Adam & The Antz - Beat My Guest 1979

But the singer also had a mind of his own, and McLaren flinched from the prospect of dealing with another Johnny Rotten. Sensing that the band would be far more malleable, he connived with the Antz to sack their leader, and at the end of 1979 he gave Adam the bad news at a rehearsal.

McLaren proposed the new band, now called Bow Wow Wow, as a victory over Thatcherism. Rather than take the obvious post-punk path and bemoan mass unemployment, though, he mischievously framed the absence of work as liberation rather than affliction. Bow Wow Wow's "W.O.R.K. (N.O. Nah NO! NO! My Daddy Don't)" declared, 'Demolition of the work ethic takes us to the age of the primitive'. Going to school was pointless because its function (socializing youth for a life of labour) had been outmoded. 'T.E.K. technology is DEMOLITION of DADDY/Is A.U.T. Autonomy', goes the chorus chant, taking the Situationist fantasy of automation enabling a utopian future of perpetual play and updating it for the microchip era.

Bow Wow Wow - W.O.R.K. (N.O. Nah NO! NO! My Daddy Don't) 1981

Again, this attitude put McLaren ahead of the curve: Wham! rode exactly this carefree/careless attitude to fame a few years later, with the pro-dole "Wham Rap!" (a rewrite of "W.O.R.K.", essentially) and the sunshine anthem "Club Tropicana".

Wham! - Wham Rap! (Enjoy What You Do) 1983


Wham! - Club Tropicana 1983

McLaren penned lyrics praising cassette piracy and got the ex-Antz to write Burundi-rumbling backing music. But in July 1980, despite getting acres of press and hours of radio play, the debut single "C-30, C-60, C-90 Go!" stalled just outside the Top 30.

Bow Wow Wow - C-30, C-60, C-90 Go! 1980

In the meantime, in the winter of 1980, Adam Ant's singles "Dog Eat Dog", "Ant Music" and "Kings of the Wild Frontier" smashed their way one by one into the UK Top 10. Adam's sheer self-belief lent a weird sort of conviction to ludicrous lines like 'Don't tread on an ant/He's done nothing to you/Might come a time/When he's treading on you'.

Adam & the Ants - Dog Eat Dog 1980


Adam & the Ants - Ant Music 1980


Adam & the Ants - Kings of the Wild Frontier 1980


Adam's zenith came with "Prince Charming", his September 1981 UK chart topper, and one of the strangest hit singles ever. Its keening coyote-yowl melody resembled a Native American battle cry; the beat lurched disconcertingly, a waltz turning into an aboriginal courthship dance. For the video, Adam glides between a series of arrested poses, frozen tableaux of defiance and hauteur that weirdly anticipate 'vogueing', the New York gay underground's form of competitive dancing inspired by photo spreads in fashion mags. At the end of the video, Adam impersonates a gallery of icons - Rudolph Valentino, Alice Cooper, Clint Eastwood, Marlon Brando. Song and video both expose a certain empty circularity to Adam's neo-glam idea of reinventing yourself: imitate me as I've imitated my heroes. The chorus is oddly brittle and defensive ('Ridicule is nothing to be scared of') while the ultimate message - dressing up in fancy finery as a way of flaunting self-respect - feels distinctly trite.

Adam & the Ants - Prince Charming 1981

"Prince Charming" ultimately suggested that Adam's destiny was to run through history's wardrobe until he ran out of heroic archetypes. He'd already done highwaymen with the previous number 1 single, "Stand and Deliver".

Adam & the Ants - Stand and Deliver 1981

In the video for "Ant Rap", the next big hit from the Prince Charming album, he dressed up as a knight in shining armour.

Adam & the Ants - Ant Rap 1981

End of a revival: Madness and Dexys Midnight Runners during the '80s

A sense of place, always present in Madness's music (the cover of Absolutely, their second album, showed them outside Chalk Farm tube station) gradually intensified, climaxing with 1982's The Rise and Fall.

Here Madness shouldered past the 'new Kinks' tag and lunged for 'new Beatles' status. The front cover of the gatefold sleeve was a Magical Mystery Tour-like tableau of the band atop Parliament Hill and garbed in semi-surreal attire. 

Inside, "Our House" (another massive hit) was Madness's "Penny Lane", bittersweet nostalgia for the familiar surroundings of childhood.

Madness - Our House 1982

On "Primrose Hill" - Madness's "Strawberry Fields" - they even hired prog arranged David Bedford to write brass-band orchestration.

Madness - Primrose Hill 1982

Kevin Rowland's new 'new soul vision' was heralded in March 1982 with "The Celtic Soul Brothers", which replaced the old Dexys horn fanfares with the jaunty jangle of mandolins and boisterous folksy violins (supplied by the Emerald Express Fiddlers).

Dexys Midnight Runners - The Celtic Soul Brothers 1982

The follow-up "Come on Eileen" was a massive number 1 in the summer of 1982 - in Britain, America and around the world. Accompanied by an unexpectedly playful video, "Eileen" was an honest-to-goodness love song. Rowland archly admitted to having impure thoughts: 'You in that dress/My thoughts I confess/Verge on dirty'.

Dexys Midnight Runners - Come On Eileen 1982

Another massive hit, a cover of Van Morrison's "Jackie Wilson Said", acknowledged the heavy debts the new Dexys owed to the latter's 'Caledonian Soul' sound of Irish folk-infused R&B.

Dexys Midnight Runners - Jackie Wilson Said (I'm in Heaven When You Smile) 1982

Rowland's response to fame was the calculated career-suicide move of 1985's Don't Stand Me Down, which featured no singles, just eleven-minute songs including bizarre comic dialogues like "This Is What She's Like", rants against the English upper classes and meta-soul exercises like "The Occasional Flicker".

Dexys Midnight Runners - This Is What She's Like 1985


Dexys Midnight Runners - The Occasional Flicker 1985

On the front cover, Dexys made a final confounding image shift: they appeared wearing ties, pin-stripe suits and neatly combed hair, looking for all the world like investment bankers in a photo for a corporate prospectus. 'So clean and simple; it's a much more adult approach now', said Rowland, rationalizing what in some senses was mod logic taken to the extreme: dressing like the ruling class.

2-Tone signposted its sources and reference points with countless remakes, tribute songs and interpolations (like the 'no gimme no more pickneys' vocal lick from Lloyd Charmers' "Birth Control", borrowed on The Special's "Too Much Too Young").

Lloyd Charmers - Birth Control 1969


The Specials - Too Much Too Young 1980

Even the 2-Tone logo - a black-and-white figure representing the imaginary rude boy Walt Jabsco - was modelled on a photo of the young Peter Tosh from The Wailers.

Post-ska Specials and Fun Boy Three

In September 1980 the new post-ska Specials sound was unveiled with the double A-sided single "Stereotypes" and "International Jet Set". The former whisked together a kitschedelic meringue of movie-score and lounge-music motifs: balalaikas and Cossack choirs, mariachi trumpets and milky-sounding organ pulses, all gently propelled by the pitter of programmed drum beats. The lyrics revisited the leisure grindstone of "Nite Klub" but in a more wry and distanced fashion, caricaturing a young piss-head who 'drinks his age in pints', drives while inebriated, and ends up 'wrapped round a lamp-post on Saturday night'.

The Specials - Stereotypes 1980

"International Jet Set" was even more eerie and evocative. Laced with Casio-rumba rhythms and swirling Wurlitzer organs, it's a tale of frequent-flyer paranoia, sung by Terry Hall in a high-pitched, highly strung whinny. To Hall, barely able to keep his panic in check, a group of jovial businessmen 'Seem so absurd to me/Like well-dressed chimpazees'. His fear of flying turns out to be justified: the plane has to make an emergency landing and the captain's voice is revealed as just a recording.

The Specials - International Jet Set 1980

Dammers had fallen in love with the studio and its possibilities for endless overdubs and fine tunings in pursuit of absolute perfection (a passion that would ultimately be ruinous). But not everyone in the band cared for this new producer-dominated direction: John Bradbury and Roddy Radiation both preferred high-energy sounds (Northern Soul and rockabilly, respectively). As a result, the second album More Specials was ultimately something of a motley compromise, a ragbag of revivalisms. Only the nuclear doomsday fantasy "Man at C&A" approached the full-blown film-soundtrack/Muzak fusion Dammers achieved on both sides of the single.

The Specials - Man at C&A 1980

More Specials announced the end of the black-and-white 2-Tone aesthetic with its full-colour cover: a blurry snapshot of the band relaxing (astonishingly, some of them were even smiling).

"Do Nothing", the next single off the album, was oddly subdued and fatalistic, a downtempo rock-steady number about a stylish layabout who mooches down the High Street, 'trying to find a future'. The only ray of sunshine comes from the pair of new shoes on his feet. Yet the song seems to see right through the mod fantasy - dressing well as the best revenge over you social superiors, style as a magical solution. In a land where 'nothing ever changes', Hall sings, 'Fashion is my only culture'.

The Specials - Do Nothing 1980

Inspired equally by a trip to Kingston, Jamaica, and by witnessing the effect of Thatcher's policies on Coventry's economy and nightlife, "Ghost Town" sketched a sonic portrait of de-industrialization. The song starts with the desolate whistle of wind rustling through a deserted town. A wraith-like woodwind instrument drifts into earshot, soon joined by what sounds like a Wurlitzer playing in a long-derelict cinema. The lyrics contrast the gaiety of the good-old days (the roaring nightlife back when workers had money to burn) with the present of idle factories and boarded-up nightclubs. Near the end, "Ghost Town" cuts from Hall's exhausted sigh, 'Can't go on no more' to Staple's baleful 'People gettin' angry'. Finally, the song strips down to just bass and drums and the return of that whistling wind - so chillingly cinematic you can almost see the tumbleweeds.

The Specials - Ghost Town 1981

Two superb tracks on the flipside made the whole record a kind of concept EP: three angles on the British way of living death. Lynval Golding's "Why" addressed the racist thugs who'd attacked him outside the Moonlight Club the previous year, asking plaintively, 'Did you really want to kill me?' Then the more belligerent Staple steps forward to shout down the fascist British Movement: 'You follow like sheep inna wolf's clothes'.

The Specials - Why 1981

Wonderfully wan and listless, Terry Hall's "Friday Night, Saturday Morning" subverts The Easybeats mod classic "Friday On My Mind" with its depiction of a wage slave's dismal idea of big fun: sinking pints at the Locarno while watching other people pick each other up, then waiting at the taxi-rank in the small hours (a meat pie in his hand, one foot planted in someone else's spew) wishing 'I had lipstick on my collar instead of piss stains on my shoes'.

The Specials - Friday Night, Saturday Morning 1981


The Easybeats - Friday On My Mind 1966

After the brilliant but commercially suicidal single "The Boiler" (a harrowing rape account recited by Rhoda Dakar of The Bodysnatchers, 2-Tone's all-girl group) Dammers produced a trilogy of protest singles - "Racist Friend", "War Crimes" and "Nelson Mandela" - whose sentiments were admirable but whose sonic execution lacked almost everything that had made The Specials special.

The Specials with Rhoda Dakar - The Boiler 1982


The Specials - Racist Friend 1983


The Specials - War Crimes 1982


The Specials - Nelson Mandela 1984

Fun Boy Three, the band formed by ex-Specials Golding, Hall and Staple, meanwhile scored a series of hits that were alternatively glum (the Reagan/Thatcher-inspired "The Lunatics Have Taken Over the Asylum"; the world (affairs) weary "The More I see the Less I Believe") and jolly (two Top 5 singles in partnership with all-girl trio Bananarama).

Fun Boy Three - The Lunatics Have Taken Over the Asylum 1981


Fun Boy Three - The More I See the Less I Believe 1982


Fun Boy Three with Bananarama - It Ain't What You Do... 1982


Bananarama with Fun Boy Three - Really Saying Something 1982

Searching for the Young Soul Rebels: Dexys Midnight Runners

Searching for the Young Soul Rebels, Dexys Midnight Runners debut album, starts with the sound of a radio dial being turned, someone scouring the airwaves for the next working-class-saviour band. There's a burst of the Pistols' "Holidays in the Sun" and a blare of The Specials' "Rat Race" before frontman Kevin Rowland blurts, 'For God's sake, burn it down!' and Dexys launch into their first song.

Dexys Midnight Runners -  Burn It Down 1980

"Geno", Dexys first number 1 single, was pure meta-pop: a homage to sixties mod hero Geno Washington. Rowland's older brother had taken him to see Washington when he was only eleven. Rowland reminisces about the inspirational force of this first gig of his life, comparing Washington to the mod's pills of choice: 'That man was my bombers, my Dexys, my high'.

Dexys Midnight Runners - Geno 1980

The follow-up single, "There, There My Dear" went even further into the land of meta-pop: it's a vitriolic riposte to a sceptic (seemingly a real person, and most likely either a trend-hopping music journalist or a pretentious musician) who had the temerity not to 'welcome the new soul vision'. "There, There" also contains the classic class-war couplet, 'The only way to change things/Is to shoot men who arrange things'.

Dexys Midnight Runners - There, There My Dear 1980

"I Couldn't Help It If I Tried" recounts Rowland's attempt to organize a strike only to be let down by his workmates.

Dexys Midnight Runners - I Couldn't Help It If I Tried 1980

"Dance Stance" savaged people who tell jokes about stupid Irishmen but don't know about Oscar Wilde, Samuel Beckett, Brendan Behan and the rest.

Dexys Midnight Runners - Dance Stance 1979

The cover of Searching showed a photo of a Belfast Catholic boy carrying his belongings after being driven from his neighbourhood during the sectarian clearances of 1969. Half-Irish, Rowland explained, 'I wanted a picture of unrest. It could have been from anywhere but I was secretly glad that it was from Ireland'.