Kings of the Wild Frontier (1980)

Kings of the Wild Frontier is the second studio album by the English new wave band Adam and the Ants. It was released on 7 November 1980 by CBS Records in the UK and Epic Records internationally. The album was the best-selling album in the UK in 1981 (and the 48th best seller in 1980) and won Best British Album at the 1982 Brit Awards.

Background and recording

Following the release of Adam and the Ants' debut, Dirk Wears White Sox, former Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren persuaded drummer David Barbarossa (also known as Dave Barbe), bassist Leigh Gorman and guitarist Matthew Ashman to leave the band to form a new group he was managing, Bow Wow Wow. Gorman's predecessor as bassist, Andy Warren, had departed shortly after recording the album to join former Ants guitarist Lester Square in The Monochrome Set. Adam Ant put together a new line up of Ants that included Marco Pirroni on guitar, Kevin Mooney on bass and two drummers, Terry Lee Miall and Chris Hughes (formerly of Dalek I Love You), who used the name "Merrick". Pirroni also became Ant's new song writing partner.

Release and commercial performance

Kings of the Wild Frontier reached No. 1 in the UK Album Chart and spawned three hit singles: "Kings of the Wild Frontier", which was released in July and reached No. 2 in the UK Singles Chart; "Dog Eat Dog", which reached No. 4; and "Antmusic", released in December and reaching No. 2, as well as No. 1 in Australia for five weeks.

Initial UK copies of the album featured a different version of "Antmusic" that started with a fade-in, but after the song became a hit the subsequent pressings used the 7" single mix with the familiar drumstick intro. The US version of the album dropped "Making History" in favour of two tracks penned by Ant prior to teaming up with Marco Pirroni, "(You're So) Physical" and "Press Darlings".

The album was remastered and reissued in 2004 with several bonus tracks.

A multi-disc "Super Deluxe Edition" was released 20 May 2016. It includes a DVD of the long out-of-print Ants in Japan concert video and a CD of a 1981 concert from Chicago. This edition scraped a single week in the UK Album Chart in its own right at number 69 and is considered to be a separate chart hit from the original album (rather than a 67th week for the album as a whole) Ant performed the entire album live on tour in the UK that year, and in the United States, Australia and New Zealand in 2017.

Cover

Photographer Peter Ashworth wrote, "On 5 August 1980, prior to his first slot on Top of the Pops, Adam Ant got the band together in a small rehearsal room in Brixton to create a video test. Shooting stills from the monitor screen during the band performance produced some powerful images. Two days later a repeat shoot from the video recording, in a blacked-out studio, produced the sleeve image..."

Reception

Reviewing the US edition for The Village Voice in March 1981, Robert Christgau judged the album as a response to British punk rock nihilism: "The music, needless to say, is rock and roll, a clever pop-punk amalgam boasting two drummers, lots of chanting, and numerous B-movie hooks. Especially given Adam's art-schooled vocals, I find that the hooks grate, but that may just mean that when it comes to futuristic warriors I prefer Sandinistas."

In his retrospective review, Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic called it "one of the great defining albums of its time. There's simply nothing else like it, nothing else that has the same bravado, the same swagger, the same gleeful self-aggrandizement and sense of camp. This walked a brilliant line between campiness and art-house chutzpah, and it arrived at precisely the right time – at the forefront of new wave". Trouser Press cites it as the album where Adam Ant "found his groove".

Legacy

Kings of the Wild Frontier is credited with introducing the "Burundi beat" sound to popular music. It is included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. It is also one of twenty CDs in the Great British Albums box set released by Sony Records in 2012.

In 1992, Nine Inch Nails released a cover version of "Physical (You're So)" on the EP Broken, remade in an industrial rock style with more aggressive guitars and vocals than the original. In 2020, Rolling Stone included Kings of the Wild Frontier in their "80 Greatest albums of 1980" list.