Dec 14

Bow Wow Wow

BOW WOW WOW

 
Bow Wow Wow  are an English 1980’s new wave band, created by Malcolm McLaren to promote his and business partner Vivienne Westwood’s New Romantic fashion lines.  The group's music is described as having an “African-derived drum sound”.  McLaren persuaded guitarist Matthew Ashman, bassist Leigh Gorman and drummer David Barbarossa (also known as Dave Barbe), of the then line-up of Adam and the Ants to leave the founder of the band Adam Ant and form a new group.  After a six-month-long audition process for a lead singer, the band enlisted Annabella Lwin.  (More from Wikipedia)
 
 
Malcolm McLaren – the musical entrepreneur best known for managing Sex Pistols – assembled the musicians in the band Adam and the Ants (after Adam Ant became a solo artist and also escaped with the band name) with a teenaged Anglo-Burmese singer dubbed Annabella Lwin.  (She was discovered by McLaren while singing in the dry cleaners where she worked part-time).  As Bow Wow Wow, they recorded the old Strangeloves song “I Want Candy”; coupled with an early MTV video, this song became a worldwide hit in 1982.  Before that, Bow Wow Wow popularized or parodied music pirating (which was then in its infancy) with a notorious cassette-only release called C-30, C-60, C-90, Go! where one side of the cassette was left blank (presumably for recording music from the radio or other sources).  I have several albums by this band – which has been a longtime favorite – and do not think of them as a one-hit wonder at all.  The band reformed in the 1990’s and has released a few more albums. 
 
(May 2012)
 
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It is not unprecedented for the front man of a rock band to adopt that name as his new surname.  When the British new wave band Adam and the Ants was formed in 1977 (originally called simply the Ants), the chief songwriter and lead singer was known to the world as “Adam” – he was born Stuart Leslie Goddard.  Although Goddard had apparently taken the name Adam Ant before forming the band, I don’t remember anyone calling him that until he started his solo career.  Of course that left Adam Ant’s former bandmates in the Ants in the lurch; however, Malcolm McLaren – best known as the manager of the Sex Pistols – recruited them to back a barely pubescent Anglo-Burmese singer that he later discovered named Annabella Lwin (that’s not her real name either as I recall, though I can’t seem to find the info online anymore).  The resulting band Bow Wow Wow is one of my favorites from the early 1980’s. 

 

(August 2013)

 

Last edited: March 22, 2021