‘Kings of the Wild Frontier’ made Adam Ant new wave royalty

If video killed the radio star, the man on the other end of the line supplied the death blow.

Adam Ant is a visual man, externally and internally, his thoughts, his music, his very being oriented by a mind’s eye that never seems to blink.

And so when he began appearing on TV screens in the late ’70s and early ’80s — dressed like a punk rock Comanche, a streak of white face paint running from cheek to cheek, gyrating madly like someone engaging in a war dance prior to a battle with understatement — it was the beginning of an era when music videos on MTV were as much a vehicle to stardom as getting a song in heavy rotation on the airwaves.

Ant was one of the first true stars of this age, a product of the incredibly fertile English punk scene of the mid-’70s who never really fit in with that crowd. He had the energy and the fearless attitude but was too artistically restless to confine himself to a single genre.

His debut with Adam and The Ants, “Dirk Wears White Sox,” is as off-kilter as its title suggests, caustic and adventurous, a record that began to establish the well-traveled bridge from punk to new wave.

Needless to say, not everyone got it.

But that all began to change with the band’s next record, 1980’s “Kings of the Wild Frontier,” a similarly diffuse and dynamic record, but also a more focused, fully realized and fierce effort. It got the band on TV, beginning with live performances on long-running British music show “Top of the Pops.”

That was a game changer.

“Suddenly, the public had a chance to make their own minds up,” Ant says. “The look was together — it was as unusual as the sound. It was eye catching and caught people’s imagination. They responded accordingly and bought it.”

What they got for their money was an album with few direct precursors. Propelled by the tribal thump of the Burundi, an intensely percussive rhythm native to the eastern Africa country it’s named after, “Kings” scrambled the post-punk rubric with heavily reverbed, rockabilly-influenced guitars and Ant’s elastic yowl soundtracking songs about pirates, Native Americans and other outsiders, including the band itself.

“You want a thrill so you come see me,” Ant boasts on “Ants Invasion,” the whole album seemingly designed to live up to those words by attempting to find some cohesion in creative chaos.

“It’s a hybrid record: It’s quite a clash of different styles, different cultural influences,” Ant says. “A lot of experimentation went on in the studio, and that’s perhaps why the album has lasted as long as it has.

“It was a very remote studio in the middle of Wales that we recorded at,” he continues. “There were no distractions so we had the chance to really immerse ourselves in it. We weren’t really trying to sound like anybody else or look like anybody else or be influenced by anybody else. At that time, we were quite confident about what we did.”

This confidence is even more palpable in the band’s visuals, which were often attributable to Ant himself, a former art-school student who initially wanted to be a graphic designer before pursuing a career in music.

“It was a better way of expressing myself through music and incorporating some of the graphic design elements into the work by designing the T-shirts and the record covers and storyboarding the videos,” he says. “If you can design it, draw out what you want, and then have it made, then it’s going to be closer to the actual heart of it than if you hire someone to do it for you.”

With “Kings,” Ant became new wave royalty, and as such, he’s commemorating the album on his current tour by playing it in its entirety for the first time.

In doing so, he’s become the musical equivalent of a method actor, inhabiting the role of a particularly outlandish character: himself.

“Every night it’s a bit like doing a play,” explains Ant, who’s staying on the road despite the recent passing of his guitarist and musical director Tom Edwards, who died of heart failure Jan. 25 at the age of 41. “You’re a cast performing a script, almost. It’s quite theatrical. It’s a different experience doing it track-for-track in its original sequence. I learn different things every night I play it.”

Read more from Jason Bracelin at reviewjournal.com. Contact him at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com and follow @JasonBracelin on Twitter.