Bow Wow Wow - See Jungle! See Jungle! Go Join Your Gang, Yeah! City All Over! Go Ape Crazy!
#513
October 1981
Bow Wow Wow
See Jungle! See Jungle! Go Join Your Gang, Yeah! City All Over! Go Ape Crazy!
Genre: Malcolm Mclaren
4.25 out of 5
Highlights:
Jungle Boy
Chihuahua
(I’m a) T.V. Savage
Golly! Golly! Go Buddy!
(I took this one for myself)
The Listening Post group started because of a conversation that I had on my main feed about Malcolm McLaren’s Duck Rock, how I’d never heard it and how Paul Simon owed him royalties and credit for Graceland.
That album is two years away from this one but all you had to do was listen to this and know that Malcolm was on to something.
In fact, it’s obvious that Adam Ant took the sound in a fit of pique.
Old story: Adam is a post-rock punker who, with eyes on success gets Mal to manage him. Mal realizes that his vision will never come to fruition with Adam at the front. But he’s obsessed with African rhythms, especially the Burundi Beat. He stays Adam’s band, Adam hooks up with Marco Pirroni and the two of them incorporate those ideas into something brilliant and magical.
Meanwhile, Malcolm doubles down on his Machiavellian dream, finds a cute girl in a laundromat, makes her the lead singer, puts her, naked, on the cover of their first album and the world explodes in shock.
Because of all that back story and my affection for Adam and his Ants I had to get my hands on this one. I still have my vinyl copy (albeit with the American cover).
I haven’t listened to it in it’s entirety in over 20 years.
Where Adam and Marco played around with guitar tones and a multitude of styles from Burundi to Post-Punk to Sergio Leone and even pirate music, Bow Wow Wow has one lane and they stick to it. This is all percussion and David Barbarossa is the star. That isn’t say that anyone is weak, certainly not Matthew Ashman’s sparse but sparkling guitar or Gorman’s in the pocket bass (listen to “Mickey Put It Down” & “Golly Golly Go Buddy” to get a sense of what Gorman was bringing to the party). Lwin is perfect for what she’s being tasked with, yelping the snot of a 14 year old. (To be fair, BWW tries to get into Spaghetti Western with “Orang-Outan” but it’s not close to the kitsch that Adam brings.
There are many producers who are hailed as game changers and we talk about them in conversations from Mutt Lange to Steve Lillywhite to Bob Ezrin and Roy Thomas Baker and when Kim Fowley is mentioned as a Svengali, along with The Colonel no one ever talks about Malcolm Mclaren. He was abrasive and he foisted John Lydon and Sid Vicious on the world. But his impact is enormous and should be reckoned with.
This album is a perfect companion to Kings of the Wild Frontier and together they represent the part of the 80s that doesn’t get the love or amplification it deserves but it’s all right here on those two records. It falters only by being very repetitive and by the end you might be reaching for your Bananarama records to get the same sensibilities of say “Why are Babies So Wise” but without the incessant tribal drumming.
As a stand alone record it’s not available but the humble compiling staff at The Listening Post has created this playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KK2HBndkVdQ&list=PLlvn8uktX5Lun98gNSXYCk8ApSwkT5EXL
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