Adam Adamant LIVES!

The basic idea of both Adam Ant and Adam Adamant is really the same: Adam Adamant is a man from the past being brought forward into the present and presenting a different moral code, one rather similar to Adam Ant’s Kings of the Wild Frontier image (which also represents old ideas through archaic dress and iconography). The main difference between the two is that Adam Ant’s character was from the 18th century, and drew upon early Romanticism with an emphasis on revolution, human rights, and the idea of the noble savage, while Adam Adamant is basically conservative, a symbol of a time in which certain things were considered “better.”

It is startling to realize how much the makeup and other costume elements of Adam Ant’s Kings of the Wild Frontier look seem based on the Adam Adamant character. When I first watched the series, I was amazed by the likeness, as I had not expected it to have such an obvious influence. After all, Ant has never outright admitted that he took his name from the show; it’s just something everyone has assumed. But the look, of course, is more important than the name. Although it’s rather hard to capture in screenshots, Gerald Harper’s straight nose, eye makeup, and arched eyebrows (he wore stick-on ones), are eerily similar to Ant’s Kings make-up. He also carries a baton very similar to the one Adam Ant carried during the Kings tour and publicity. Finally, in the second to last episode, Adam has cause to wear his full regimentals—a fact that greatly amuses Georgie—which obviously gave Adam Ant some wardrobe inspiration.

I was amused to discover another influence the series had: the Austin Powers films. It is rather obvious once you think about it, but since this was something I didn’t expect anyone to have watched, the connection wasn’t one I made right away. Austin Powers is also a story of morals of the past being brought forward in time to teach us about our own moral system. Like Adam Adamant, he was betrayed into being frozen in time by a woman, and the clunky fight scenes in Adam Adamant are definitely more like those of Austin Powers than anything else.

Adam Adamant Lives! has been described as being notable for its fashion, as it shows the shift from Mod to Hippie attire in the UK, a time that, fashion wise, formed the basis for glam rock. It was also a time when Edwardian fashion experienced a slight vogue; this produced the Teddy Boys subculture and the Ealing studios film Kind Hearts and Coronets. Allegedly, this fad was the result of Edwardian clothes being cheap and plentiful on the market at the time; many people who had been adults during the pre-WWI period had died and their clothes were seen as unfashionable, symbols of a time of repression and Victorian tweeness, the opposite of the modernist fashions of the 60s and their 1920s and 30s influences.

When post-glam rock, new wave, and goth bands started to look to the aesthetic that had inspired bands of the 60s, the Edwardian period was an obvious one to borrow from. In that respect, it was a highly interesting and influential time, and Adam Adamant Lives! is especially interesting because its influence is so obvious and direct on what would come later. Fashion might not seem important to some music fans, but in some cases it is the driving force behind a revaluing and reinvention of values and aesthetics formerly taken for granted.

Additional Resources:

For more on the series Adam Adamant Lives!, check out the Wikipedia entry. You can also watch clips from the show on the BBC Classic TV website. The series is available in a Region 2 5-DVD box set from Amazon.co.uk.

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