It was only right that, when the obits appeared for Malcolm McLaren, they acknowledged not only his skill and audacity, but also his ruthlessness and cynicism. All were to the fore when he put together Bow Wow Wow.
It’s well known that he halfinched Adam’s Ants and teamed them up with 14-year-old dry cleaning assistant Myant Myant Aye Dunn Lwin as vocalist; but, as Adam tells the story in his autobiography, he also, astonishingly, walked away with a £1,000 “consultant’s fee”. As it happened, of course, Adam had the last laugh, using Malcolm’s ideas of Burundi drums and pirate imagery to launch himself, with his new Ants, as a massive star that far eclipsed Bow Wow Wow.
This nicely-packaged set gives you the band’s debut album, plus another disc of singles and B-sides, the stand-out tracks being the plain mental Go Wild In The Country (a magnificently shrieking performance by Lwin) and their superb cover of The Strangeloves’ I Want Candy. Though it all sounds great, the songs, however, just aren’t that strong, and it’s also a shame that their first single, C30 C60 C90 Go! isn’t here.
