Bow Wow Wow

Bow Wow Wow was Malcolm McLaren's first big project after the Sex Pistols imploded, and the erstwhile media manipulator made sure his new band bounded onto the scene with a whole gaggle of gimmicks. The first was Annabella Lwin, a 14-year-old Burmese immigrant McLaren found working in a laundry and decided to remake into a postpunk goddess. Then there was what used to be Adam's Ants, the trio of Matthew Ashman (guitar), Leroy Gorman (bass), and Dave Barbarossa (drums), whom McLaren introduced to African music -- specifically, the sound of Burundi tribal drumming -- then induced to dump Adam and follow him.

But it was the product that ultimately pulled the package together. Bow Wow Wow's cassette-only first single, a home-taping anthem called "C-30, C-60, C-90 Go!," had little going for it musically -- a basic Burundi-beat groove topped with a chant-along vocal -- but made quite a stink when it hit the charts smack in the middle of the British Phonograph Industry's "Home Taping Is Killing Music" campaign. No surprise, then, that the group's cassette-only first and now out-of-print album, Your Cassette Pet, was almost pure provocation, filled with such nudge-wink nasties as "Uomo Sex al Apache" (say it real fast) and "Sexy Eiffel Towers" (a tribute to the famous Gallic phallic symbol). But between the Bow Wow boys' vigorous rhythm work and Annabella's charmingly hammy vocals, even the likes of "Louis Quatorze" -- in which Annabella breathily recounts her ravishings by the beastly Louis -- seems more silly than scandalous.

Much the same can be said for the impossibly titled See Jungle! See Jungle! [etc.] which introduced the group to this country. But American pop radio proved less than enamored of McLaren's recastings of Rousseau ("Go Wild in the Country") and McLuhan (["I'm a] T.V. Savage"), so RCA turned the Bows over to a proven hitmaker: Kenny Laguna, who converted the band's Burundi beat into a jazzy Bo Diddley groove and gave it a near-hit with a remake of the Strangeloves'"I Want Candy." The out-of-print Last of the Mohicans includes the single and three others, but since all four tracks also appear on I Want Candy, the only real reason to seek it out is its cover photo, which finds an unclothed Annabella posed with the rest of the band in McLaren's last art-school joke: a re-creation of Manet's Dejeuner.

I Want Candy did well enough to encourage Capitol to issue 12 Original Recordings, an LP edition of Your Cassette Pet and the band's first British singles. But Candy's lack of material -- half its tracks are remakes of earlier recordings -- and spiritless performances marked the beginning of the end for the band. By the time the McLaren-less group got around to cutting the slick, empty When the Going Gets Tough, smart listeners knew to keep going. (J.D. CONSIDINE)

From 2004's The New Rolling Stone Album Guide