Music

In the summer of 1980, Annabella – born just 14-and-a-half years earlier in Rangoon to an English mother and a Burmese father – was working there for £8.50 a day. She would have preferred a job in a local patisserie but her mother wouldn’t let her ‘because I thought she had such nice skin and a nice little figure and if you eat too many cakes you get fat’.

Drummer Dave Barbarossa, bassist Leigh Gorman and guitarist Matthew Ashman had been Adam’s original Ants when Malcolm McLaren had tried unsuccessfully to fashion a future for their musical and sartorial piracy. When, at McLaren’s suggestion, they ousted Adam from his own group, they found themselves in need of a new singer. Feature continues

Unsurprisingly, McLaren claims the glory. Inspired by a man playing tapes on a ghetto blaster in a Wood Green burger bar, he’d written a song called ‘C30, C60, C90, Go!’ and thought he’d found its singer when he saw Annabella at work. In reality it was his friend and associate Dave Fisher who spotted her when he collected his dry cleaning, happily singing along to Stevie Wonder’s ‘I Wish’ on the radio. At an audition the following week, the precocious teenager proved herself to be perfect and, for once, McLaren wasn’t exaggerating when he said: ‘One look and I knew she was the face of the ’80s.’

Bow Wow Wow’s path to hits such as ‘Go Wild In The Country’ and ‘I Want Candy’ wasn’t an easy one. EMI dropped them after deciding their debut single promoted home taping, the scourge that was ‘killing music’ at the time. However, the most stubborn stain was Annabella’s mother – who had already witnessed her being prised out of school and singing risqué lyrics – on discovering her underage daughter’s ‘nice little figure’ naked on the cover of the band’s 1981 album ‘See Jungle! See Jungle! Go Join Your Gang Yeah! City All Over, Go Ape Crazy!’ (an homage to Manet’s ‘Le Déjeuner Sur L’Herbe’) she contacted the police and the papers and Bow Wow Wow’s notoriety was ironed on.

‘Girl Bites Dog: Your Digital Pet’ is available for download from August 28. Two of Bow Wow Wow’s tracks, remixed by Kevin Shields, appear on the soundtrack to Sofia Coppola’s ‘Marie Antoinette’.