Pop and rockInterviewBow Wow Wow haven't lost their bite
Craig McLeanMalcolm McLaren's I Want Candy stars are touring the UK this month. Craig McLean meets Leigh Gorman and Annabella Lwin, 30 years after they first burst on to the new wave sceneBow Wow Wow remember the beginning. Of course they do – they almost died. And they remember the end, not least because the band are still arguing about it 30 years on. And in between, Malcolm McLaren's post-Sex Pistols project stirred a good old British sex controversy. If your singer is a 14-year-old girl, and she's naked on the cover of your first proper album, even by the noisesome standards of punk's provocateur-in-chief, people will get their bondage trousers and pirate shirts in a twist.
"For our first shows we had a six-week Saturday residency booked in the Starlight rollerdisco [in Hammersmith, west London]," remembers bass player Leigh Gorman. Annabella Lwin was to perform on a box in the middle of the rink, "with all these hardcore Sex Pistols fans skating round," remembers the band's half-English, half-Burmese frontwoman.
"But when we got there on the first day," continues Gorman, "there were loads of blue sparks coming from underneath the drum kit. They'd had a flood and the boiler was shorting out in the basement and making the whole stage live. And Malcolm says, 'I'm not putting my boys up on that stage!' So it made me think, 'God, he's not a complete bastard! He doesn't actually want us to die!'"
That was 1980. Bow Wow Wow were created after McLaren persuaded Gorman, guitarist Matthew Ashman and drummer Dave Barbarossa to ditch their apparently hopeless first singer – a then-unknown Adam Ant – and work with an adolescent girl discovered in a Hampstead dry cleaners. The febrile foursome were an experimental riot of African polyrhythms and Vivienne Westwood-created buccaneer-meets-Native American fashion.
"They're not a band of greatness," said McLaren in 1982, "but they are capable of producing good pop records … [They] were innovative through my own personal inspiration and they were given a lot of ideas on a plate."
A hit single or two later (Go Wild in the Country and I Want Candy), they were on the way out. Is it true that Gorman, Ashman and Barbarossa sacked Lwin because they fancied having a go with a third, more, well, male singer?
Gorman: "No."
Lwin: "Yes it is. I'm not denying that story."
Gorman: "I'm denying it! I wasn't any part of that. I was in hospital with glandular fever, so I didn't know what was going on!"
Lwin: "You didn't know you were forming a new band and making new music?"
Gorman: "No, I didn't, I didn't."
Lwin purses her lips, unimpressed. "I read it in the NME. Then I got a call from my accountant, telling me I had no money and I wasn't receiving any more." But "within two weeks" she'd been offered a solo record deal. "What's a girl to do? I was 17 and had a mortgage to pay. And I was engaged. That went south very quickly afterwards," she sniffs. "But life throws these curveballs at you, and you have to either lie down and take it – or get up and shake it."
In 2012, Bow Bow Bow are shaking it all over again. This month, Lwin and Gorman, backed by two young musicians (Ashman, who had diabetes, died in 1995), are touring Britain. They've been doing the odd show in the US – I Want Candy was a big hit there – for a few years, but this is the first full(ish) UK resurrection shuffle.
I meet them in a hotel in Hollywood. Gorman has been based in Los Angeles since the band's 1998 US reunion tour. Is Lwin here too? She inhales before declaring, "This is something I really shouldn't discuss … But I've been sort of working in America, you know, for a period on and off. And, um, I'm also in the UK, and also in other places. So wherever the work is, I am."
Are there sensitive US work visa concerns here?
"Ah, no. It's just that I don't think that's relevant to touring, talking about band stuff."
Right you are. While greying Gorman, 50, is all Essex-geezer affability, Lwin is, initially at least, a rather spiky interviewee. A colourful riot of Ed Hardy hoodie, leggings, furry boots, leather hat, and mascara disappearing up the side of her head, she admits to what we might call presentational concerns. She won't tell me how old she is (she is, I think, still only 45) and has worries about her weight, "'cause I've got this real problem right now with how I look, I'm not very happy …"
"She looks fine," chips in Gorman reassuringly.
"'…'cause obviously being a little older, I wear a lot of makeup …"
While she warms up eventually, you can see why Sofia Coppola cited Lwin as an influence on her depiction of Marie Antoinette in the director's 2006 biopic. Bow Wow Wow had three songs on the soundtrack, and the idea of a young princess running riot through the establishment is not dissimilar to iconic Lwin's controversial position in the new wave court.
What, after all these years, can she tell us about the cover of See Jungle! See Jungle! Go Join Your Gang, Yeah, City All Over! Go Ape Crazy? The sleeve art for Bow Wow Wow's 1981 album, shot one windy, freezing morning at Box Hill in Surrey, was based on Manet's Le Déjeneur Sur L'Herbe. But any post-punk homage to the father of impressionism was lost in the hoo-ha surrounding Lwin's nudity.
"Yeah, that was a shock for my mother," the singer says wryly, skirting round the fact that her mum's outrage actually led to a Scotland Yard investigation into allegations of exploitation of a minor for immoral purposes. McLaren, of course, wouldn't have had it any other way. He had instructed the three boys in Bow Bow Bow to reveal the image to Lwin's mother by taking it round to her house and "slamming it on the kitchen table".
"Malcolm told us it would be a great idea," recalls Gorman, "and how proud Annabella's mother would be. And of course like idiots, we fell for it. And her mother reacted as you might expect. And Malcolm hid behind a wall round the back. And he goes, 'I knew that would happen.' And I thought, 'you bastard, you set us up.' But," he shrugs, "that's the kind of thing he would do. Just 'cause he had the devilment in him."
Andy Earl's image, he adds, now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. "It was art," nods Lwin, blithely unconcerned that her teenage self is forever immortalised in the all-together in one of the nation's most august cultural institutions.
"It's quite a compliment," she smiles.
Bow Wow Wow start their UK tour in Southampton on Thursday 19 April.
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