Marco on Kings and Press Darlings

Today we have Marco's comments on Kings of the Wild Frontier and Press Darlings- enjoy!

Kings was played regularly right throughout your touring career with Adam, and was drummed up spectacularly with the 2 drummers on the wonderful tour. There are 2 versions of it- how much of a headache was it to record?

It took ages as we didnt really know what it was supposed to be, it has no real chourus or even very much music at all. Adam talked about it for ages and I listened, desperately trying to find a way into this idea and still have it be commerical. At one point we were thinking of working with John Kongas who had done Tokoloshe Man and "Hes gonna step on you again" which were records we both really liked. Adam also wanted to work with the drummers of "ipi tombei", I wished we had done, that would have been completely unexpected but we already had two drummers and the logistics were daunting. Now it would be easy but we had no experience in recording anything except in the standard way at that time.

What is it with Adam and Sausages- in version one on Antbox he has a middle line about "all that grunty and groany business isn't worth a sausage"- Ii hope he always meant to remove that line!??

Actually no he didn't, I loved that line, but the last part was too long and something had to go.

The video looks very cool even now and the song always sounds great when you play it loud and I have to admit it's one of my favourite Ants singles and many an Ant fan's too.

Press Darlings was played a bit too during 1980 and 81- the recorded version sounds pretty much as the Ants played in during 79. What were your thoughts about that as a song? Who chose to do it?

I thought it was ok, Adam wanted to do it as his comeback at the press but I thought it was giving them too much creedence and really who cares what they thought? Adam always wanted to be loved and I wanted to be hated (which did cause some problems) but we did it anyway. I thought the intro was a bit lackluste so I added that Elected/ dream home heartache/out of the blue type chord sequence on the front. But we never played it very well, it needed that staccatto attack that the old Ants had, we were too "wall of sound" to do that.

It had an Alice Cooper bit added too sometimes- Schools Out- who's idea to do that?

Probably mine, I always liked puting references to other songs in things, it was also was coz Alice was coming to a show in LA and we wanted to crawl to him coz we loved him. Lovely guy tho, really funny. It's weird when the people you idolized as a kid know your name and say Hello, and you just chat about muso things - "How longs the tour?", "Who's doing your sound?", "Here's my number lets do lunch", its still weird.

Tell me something I might not know about Kings.

It had a vocal intro that went "kings of the wild frontieeeeeer" or something, but it was rubbish and we elbowed it and wrote a new one.