The 1981 album Prince Charming would be the second and last album for Adam Ant’s short-lived second act band. By the end of 1982 Adam Ant would drop the Ants and become a solo artist. He’d still work closely with his writing partner Marco Pironni, but the rest of the Ants wouldn’t be sticking around for the solo years. ‘Prince Charming’ is a bit rushed and largely flawed. It’s missing the quality of songs from the previous album and outside the singles ‘Prince Charming,’ ‘Ant Rap,’ and ‘Stand and Deliver,’ the album is a mess that feels like a series of outtakes tacked onto the singles to make a full-length when they are really more like b-sides. Most of the songs on the album have these great intros but then never seem to go anywhere. I rarely ever put this record on, and when I do, I remember why. I think the singles are so strong it continues to make the cut every time I cull my record collection. Usually I put this on after listening to either Kings of the Wild Frontier or Friend or Foe, then quickly think, “oh no what have I done again?” The album goes wrong by losing the full-band vocal choruses, chants, and yells as well as the double drumming that made ‘Kings of the Wild Frontier’ such a thrill.
The production has a higher budget and you can hear a lot of the major label trying to clean up the wildness and looseness, pushing everything into the red sonic end from Kings of the Wild Frontier and and aiming for more mass appeal. The guitars are still a hybrid of surf, western, and rockabilly, and the track ‘Five Guns West’ might be one of the first cow-punk songs, but the punkier distorted guitars and aggressive bass lines are long gone.
There’s not much more to say about this one outside of a funny story from around 2011 or so. There used to be this online music sharing social platform called Turntable.fm where you could create a room, invite people to join, and there would be three people up on a virtual stage DJing. Each person played a song, then the next person, and so on, and if everyone in the room was into what you were playing, you’d get voted/liked track by track and you’d be able to play another track as long as the room was into it, if not you’d get bumped and go into the crowd until the next DJ got voted off and you were up next or working your way back up the queue. You could use tracks from your personal library on your computer or tracks from the platform library. There were also very popular rooms that were just basic genres like hip-hop, classic metal, post-punk, etc. I found one of my favorite things to do was to wait out the queue and work my way up through the hip-hop room and then drop ‘Ant Rap‘ or ‘Wham Rap‘ and see how long it took to get booted. If these made it through I’d also see if I could pull off Erasure’s ‘Take a Chance on Me’ which has a rap section, R.E.M.’s ‘Radio Song,‘ Sonic Youth’s ‘Kool Thing,’ Sinead O’Connor’s ‘Lay Your Hands on Me,‘ and the list goes on. I guess I was trolling to some degree. Maybe Adam Ant was doing the same with this record.
