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Adam Ant Survives The Alamo
“It got a bit sticky,” he said in a Daily Telegraph interview to plug his first tour in more than 15 years.
From his swashbuckling pop star days of the early ’80s, when his hits included “Goody Two Shoes,” “Stand & Deliver” and “Prince Charming,” he’d fallen out of a favour by the ’90s and was hitting headlines for all the wrong reasons.
In 2002, he was arrested when he launched a car alternator through the window of a Camden pub and threatened the people inside with a replica pistol.
He was subsequently sectioned under the Mental Health Act, but on his release was sectioned again following another incident in which he hurled stones at his neighbours’ windows.
Only around this time did it become public knowledge that he had a history of mental illness. At 21, shortly before his rise to fame, he had attempted suicide and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, which has both driven and overshadowed his entire career.
“By then, I was in a state called hypomania. Where the batteries are down, and you’re not playing with a full deck,” Ant – real name Stuart Goddard – told the Telegraph. “I feel very grateful to be alive and well enough to make music because for a time there, it was like The Alamo,” he explained.
When Goddard came out of care he was on anti-depressants and became addicted to them.
“They stop you sleeping, so then you need a sleeper. I was given a drug prescribed for epilepsy – quite strong.
“They hand these things out like Smarties. If you read the small print of what might happen – every single thing that might happen, happened to me.
“It may be a coincidence, but from the minute I took anti-depressants, I didn’t pick up a guitar or a pen for seven years.”
Adam Ant’s UK tour features his new band The Good, The Mad & The Lovely Posse and starts at London’s Bush Hall May 9.
The 15-date run also takes in Glasgow, Sheffield, Liverpool, Newcastle Upon Tyne, Inverness, York, Huddersfield, Birmingham, Brighton, Cambridge and Portsmouth.