In 1981, at the height of his fame, Adam Ant brandished two antique pistols as he robbed the horse-drawn coach of an upper-crust couple in the music video for his single “Stand and Deliver.” In his baroque highwayman costume, he cut a dashing figure, but wound up on a scaffold with a noose around his neck.
Twenty years later, the singer born Stuart Leslie Goddard would pull out another prop pistol.
This time he aimed it at an irate group of Camden boozers who were chasing him after he threw a car alternator through the window of the Prince of Wales pub.
He wound up committed to a sanitorium.
In England, the case caused a sensation, especially because it was followed by further outrageous behavior, including an incident in which he attacked a neighbor’s house with a shovel and fled to a nearby coffee house. There he took off his pants and tried to sleep on the floor.
It was hardly the rocker’s first bout of mental illness. He had been anorexic as a teenager and tried to commit suicide when he was 21. It wasn’t until 1995, though, that he found out what had been turning his life upside down for decades: bipolar disorder.
Ant wasn’t surprised that it had taken doctors so long to figure out why he led such a chaotic life.
“If you look at the symptoms of bipolar disorder, in all seriousness, the actual alarm signals are practically my job description — promiscuity, spending money lavishly and wearing weird clothes,” he recently told UK newspaper The Telegraph.
“It’s very hard to get that across to a psychiatrist, who’ll say, ‘Why are you wearing a leather jacket with studs?’ ‘I don’t know. I’m a rocker!’ ”
After nearly two decades since the release of his last album, the 58-year-old Ant has finally released an extravagantly titled comeback album, “Adam Ant is the Blueblack Hassar in Marrying the Gunner’s Daughter,” earlier this year. He’ll be performing his new material, and plenty of past hits, such as “Goody Two Shoes” and “Antmusic,” at Irving Plaza on Friday and Saturday.
A complex and ambitious effort, the album has flashes of brilliance, but it overwhelmed many with its length and scope.
“I’ve given the fans one track for every year I’ve been away, which seems reasonable,” he tells The Post of the 17-song opus.
But for his still-loyal fans and lovers of challenging music in general, just the fact that Ant is back writing, recording and performing at all is a relief. After all, this is a star who was once so famous, he used to hang out with Michael Jackson’s llama in the early ’80s.
Yeah. MJ’s llama.
Back when songs such as “Prince Charming” and “Strip” had Ant in heavy rotation on MTV, even the King of Pop wanted to get an inside look into the Londoner’s unusual world.
“I remember I got a phone call from him once,” says Ant.
“He said, ‘Hello, this is Michael Jackson, I want to talk to Adam Ant.’ I thought it was our drummer messing around so I told him to f – – k off. Then I got another phone call, from Quincy Jones, saying it actually was Michael Jackson. So then I spoke to him and he wanted to know where I got that jacket I was wearing on the [“Prince Charming”] album cover!”
It didn’t stop there, either.
Even with Jacko on the verge of becoming the world’s biggest pop star following the release of “Thriller,” he still had time to spend with his equally eccentric pal.
At the taping of the Motown 25th Anniversary TV special in 1983, Ant says he “was about 10 feet away when Michael did the moonwalk for the first time. I had to follow him [to sing the Supremes’ “Where Did Our Love Go”], which was quite a challenge! I remember being summoned to meet him and his brothers after the show. Later on, I was invited up to his house to meet the whole family. That was quite an experience.
“Michael showed me around — he had a llama and a few snakes. All the sisters were in the kitchen with his mother. For the most part, though, Michael was very quiet.”
These days, Ant’s own personal battles are by no means over.
His touring schedule is now far more regimented than it was at the height of “Antmania,” and the free-flowing sex and alcohol of those years has also been minimized.
But the singer is in much better health than he has been for a long time. His candidness about his condition has also raised awareness about mental health, especially in Great Britain, where such issues are still often swept under the carpet.
“In the US, I think people are more open about that sort of thing than in the UK,” he says. “I noticed recently that Bruce Springsteen was talking about his struggles with depression. I would never have dreamed that someone with so much power would have to deal with that. But it’s something you should never be ashamed of.”