Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10

There are entertainers and there are showmen, there are the musicians and songwriters to whom artistic impression is everything and to which a brief single moment in time in their company as they strut the stage is enough to fall in love with them.

There is no doubt that Adam Ant, a darling of the British music empire, a man who broke rules and was loved for it, still has the ability to turn heads, to slay an audience with a single smile and to offer the feelings of youthful unfulfilled desire with a single bound of his incredible presence. The stage would not be anything without the man to whom personality is an overwhelming prospect and outlandish cool but a genuine request to stand in awe of.

It was an awe that the Birmingham crowd took to their hearts at the Symphony Hall as part of the celebratory feast that was the revisiting of the 1980 album Kings Of The Wild Frontier, hearts that visibly swelled, that were happy to gorge upon the feast of Ant as he and his band rolled back the clock to a time when life was simpler, more dynamic, incredibly colourful and filled with great music; this was Adam Ant in the halls of Kings, where once more he announced his royal pedigree, of pop’s darling prince.

The Symphony Hall audience may have known what to expect, an announcement of an album being performed in its entirety doesn’t lead too much guess work of what a set list may contain after all, however it is in the longing, the yearning to be amongst like minded fans who are willing to go the extra mile in their appreciation that makes the music seem like a dream into which Titania seduces Oberon and leaves him to the advances of Bottom the weaver; beauty goes hand in hand with desire as well as courage.

With songs such as Dog Eat Dog, Los Rancheros, Killer In The Home, The Magnificent Five, Beat My Guest, Stand And Deliver, Press Darlings, Viva La Rock and the superb Desperate But Not Serious all making their usual and substantial grab for headlines and plaudits it only served notice that the thought of what life doesn’t grant you, art gives graciously sprang easily to mind.

We all can’t be kings of the frontier but when a magician, when a showman offers a glimpse behind the velvet curtain, don’t just sneak a look through half closed eyes, revel in the sheer exuberance of the scene, for in Adam Ant’s night at the Birmingham Symphony Hall, that scene saw a legend at ease with himself and with a crowd who could not ask for more.

Ian D. Hall