Adam Ant

Adam Ant biography

Adam Ant (born Stuart Leslie Goddard, 3 November, 1954, Marylebone, London) is an English musician who gained popularity as the lead singer of New Wave/post-punk group Adam and the Ants and later as a solo artist, scoring ten UK top ten hits between 1980 and 1983, including three No.1s. Ant was also a star in America where he not only scored a string of hit singles and albums, but was once voted sexiest man in America by the viewers of MTV. He is also an actor, having appeared in over two dozen films or television episodes between 1985 and 2003.

Since 2010, Ant has undertaken a major reactivation of his musical career, performing live regularly in his hometown London and beyond, recording a new album and with two full-length UK national tours now completed

Biography

Stuart Goddard was born an only child in Marylebone. One of the themes he used in his later work - oppressed minorities - was part of his heritage; he is of Romnichal descent. His maternal grandfather, Walter Albany Smith, was a full-blooded Romani. Home was two rooms in De Walden buildings, St John's Wood. He recalls "There was no luxury, but there was always food on the table." His father, Leslie Goddard, worked as a chauffeur and his mother, Betty Kathleen Smith, was a domestic cleaner, briefly working for Paul McCartney.

His parents divorced when Goddard was seven years old, mainly on account of Les Goddard's chronic alcoholism and abusive behaviour. Goddard's first school was Robinsfield Infants School, where he created a considerable stir by throwing a brick through one of the head-teacher's Principal's office windows. In the aftermath of this incident, Goddard was placed under the supervision of teacher Joanna Saloman, who encouraged him to develop his abilities in art and whom he would later credit as the first person to show him he could be creative artistically. He continued to attend Robinsfield and subsequently gained a place at St Marylebone Grammar School where he later became a school prefect.

After taking and passing his A levels, Goddard went on to the famous Hornsey College of Art to study graphic design and for a time was a student of Peter Webb. He later dropped out of Hornsey, short of completing his B.A., to focus on a career in music.

Early career (1975-76)

The first band Goddard joined was Bazooka Joe, in which he played bass guitar. It was at a gig in November 1975 at St. Martin's College, London, that Goddard was witness to the first public performance of the Sex Pistols, who were billed as Bazooka Joe's support act. Goddard, alone of his band, was impressed by their performance and consequently left Bazooka Joe to form a group of his own called the B-Sides (which rehearsed but never gigged).

Since starting his course at Hornsey, Goddard had married fellow student Carol Mills, with whom he lived at her parents' residence in Muswell Hill. Shortly after, he developed anorexia. "I just didn't eat," he has said of this period, "I wasn't attempting to slim, I was attempting to kill myself." Eventually, Goddard took an overdose of all the pills he could find in his mother-in-law's kitchen cabinet. After having his stomach pumped, he was sent to Colney Hatch mental hospital in North London, eventually being discharged on condition of supervision by Mills. "I was totally fucked up in the head. Things went wrong and something snapped. I just became a vegetable for three months. I couldn't talk to people. I was very ill and that was part of the reason I left college."

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