Stand and Deliver!!

I asked Marco about Stand and Deliver, the single that went to number one and really put the Ants at the top of the world. Marco is in italics.

Stand and Deliver: Who wrote what? How was it written?

Adam Ant/Marco Pirroni
It was written one morning in kensington

The demo sounds like the complete song minus drums- was that the first demo or were there more before that?

Only demo we did

Who drums on it, is it Terry and Merrick or just Merrick or just Terry?

It's a LINN drum machine set on a preset (I meant the single but nevermind hehe!)

(Side question- did both Merrick and Terry drum on every song on Kings and PC albums?)

No Chris mostly did the basic rhythm stuff and Terry did the overdubs

It's Adam on bass isn't it, not Gary or the departed Kevin?

No it's Adam

Stand and Deliver went to number one- tell me how you felt when that happened.

Devastated! our cred blown for ever!

Beat My Guest- did you ever hear the old Ants play it?

Dunno I must have done I suppose, it wasn't one of my favs

Who's idea to slow it down?

We had never heard the original so we didn't know it was slowed down

Who played bass on Beat My Guest?

Kevin Money (that well known spelling mistake)

Was it another of your favourite Ant songs?

Not really, Adam wanted to do it and we all thought it came out pretty good

The Ants now were starting to get much bigger fame wise- how did that make you feel?

I never really had time to think about it, but it all seemed natural to me,
my phone book got bigger as we needed to employ more people, then these people needed assitants and so on.
But at that time I just wanted more and more, if Roxy Music had personal caterers and valets then we wanted them,
we thought bigger is better which it was at the time, but later it got so big that we were slaves of our own creation, so it was time to stop.
But basically I loved it, but I wouldn't do it again.

Did Adam come to you with the complete song idea or did he just say "It's called Stand and Deliver, how should it go?"

I had taped a film called "Where's Jack' staring Tommy Steele of the telly coz I knew it would spark off some ideas in Adam's head, although I'm sure he'd seen it before,
and a few days later, he started talking about an idea for a video which later turned out to be the exact opening scene to the Stand vid.

'Genius or idiot" was a phrase we both used when either of us came up with something that was totally stupid but utterly brilliant.

Although its nothing like the film I can see how Adam took the basic feel and "pop'ized them;
he went to make a cup of tea (we still made our own tea in those days) and by the time he came back I had the gallopy 4 chord sequence,
but I didn't know if it was a verse or a chorus, and we started to organize it and about an hour later it was done except for the refined final lyrics and the come all ye faithful guitar solo which came about coz I tried to think of something that wouldn't fit at all.

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