80’s at 8: January 6, 2023: Adam Ant & The Clash
Tonight’s 80’s at 8 we started off in 1989 with a track that I had totally forgotten about existing. It’s from Adam Ant‘s fourth solo album Manners & Physique.
I came across it over the weekend as I was going through some of my vinyl records. This track is more of a rockier version of Adam Ant. The track is titled “Room at The Top” and it was written by Adam Ant, Prince, and Marco Pirroni who was a British guitarist and producer, Prince protégé André Cymone who was the bass guitarist for Prince’s touring band.
Adam Ant only provided vocals for the track, while Marco played guitar & bass guitar. Cymone produced the track, played keyboards & handled drum programming (or, as Manners & Physique’s liner notes put it, “everything else”). “Room at the Top”, was styled after the Minneapolis sound, as was most of the Manners & Physique album. Of which, in Ant’s words, Cymone was “one of the architects”.
After having spent most of the past five years working on his acting career, this was Adam’s first single since “Vive Le Rock” in 1985. “Room at the Top” peaked at number seventeen on the Billboard Hot 100, making it his second biggest hit in the US behind “Goody Two Shoes”.
The album is dedicated to Ann Marie Dollard, Ant’s “Dear Friend”, 1956-1988. Dollard was Ant’s acting agent who was killed in a riding accident in 2009, the album was re-released with remastered and bonus tracks. The album peaked at #19 on the UK album chart and #57 on the Billboard 200 album chart.
You can watch the music video for Room At The Top by Adam Ant here:
The second track was “Police On My Back” by The Clash. It’s from their 1980 album Sandinista which is a triple album containing 36 tracks, with 6 songs on each side.
It crosses various genres including funk, reggae, jazz, gospel, rockabilly, folk, dub, rhythm and blues, calypso, disco, and rap. For the first time, the band’s traditional songwriting credits of Strummer and Jones were replaced by a generic credit to the Clash.
The band agreed to a decrease in album royalties in order to release the 3-LP at a low price. The album Sandinista! was mostly well received, however, there was criticism towards the large size of the triple album.
Sandinista! is the lowest-charting album for the Clash in their native United Kingdom. However, the album was influential in the punk rock movement with its experimental sound and was voted best album of the year in the Pazz & Jop critics poll in The Village Voice.
In 2020, it was ranked number 323 on the Rolling Stone list of “The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time” and Slant Magazine listed the album at number 85 on its “Best Albums of the 1980s” list. The title refers to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and its catalog number, ‘FSLN1’, refers to the abbreviation of the party’s Spanish name, Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional.
Sandinista! was mostly well received, however, there was criticism towards the large size of the triple album. Sandinista! is the lowest-charting album for the Clash in their native United Kingdom. However, the album was influential in the punk rock movement with its experimental sound and was voted best album of the year in the Pazz & Jop critics poll in The Village Voice.
In 2020 it was ranked number 323 on the Rolling Stone list of “The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time” and Slant Magazine listed the album at number 85 on its “Best Albums of the 1980s” list. It was Certified Gold in the US and UK.
You can watch the video of The Clash performing Police On My Back here:
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