Modern Vespa

I was just listening to the Greatest Hits of Adam Ant ... and wikipedia'd him only to find he'd done some Honda Scooters advert in the 80's with Grace Jones. Apparently in the UK version of the commercial she bites his ear off.

Who are the ad wizards who came up with this one? Ugly Scooter + bizarre pseudo celebs = goldmine!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRiyuhjWXhI

Now i want a honda elite all the more for our gymkhana bike. I'm going to make it play Adam Ant songs when you drive it around.

Haha nice.

They Might Be Giants did a song entitled "XTX Vs. Adam Ant" ~ now TMBG does commercial songs... perhaps they'll come out with one for a scooter and the eccentric web will grow

I remember that one being played on MTV. I also remember the Elite ads in Rolling Stone mag featuring Lou Reed.

Honda should have persued DEVO, they would have been perfect for the Elite with their flower pot hats.

My first true scooter was a CH80 and I rode the hell out of that thing.

SURELY you must have seen this commercial, then.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbeLf_xexSo

Good god that was horrible.

You are joking, right? It's only my go-to video when I'm trying to convince somebody to buy an Elite (which I do with some frequency):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRrAuANhdvY

oh man, I remember that now, I claim senility or the interesting substances I injested in the '80s.

they had flip up lights, what more do you want in coolness?

there's a bunch of them with devo, too.

Grace Jones is hot in a she'd eat you alive kind of way.

"I'm not perfect, but I'm perfect for you!"

don't forget Lou Reed:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iK6y9_0gsEg

In Lou We Trust

I remember that Adam Ant/Grace Jones commercial very clearly, and I must have been in 5th grade at the time. The version I remember DOES have her biting his ear at the end. I've always been an Adam Ant fanatic. Kings of the Wild Frontier still ranks in my top ten all-time favorite albums. I reject most of his solo work though.

have you seen 'world gone wild'? adam ant plays the villain in a d-grade mad max rip off circa 1988. not quite bad enough to be good, but almost...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvBrnfOAdBY

No, haven't seen it. I didn't delve too much into his acting career, but I do remember seeing him as the villain is another movie at some point. I have a VHS compilation of all the Adam and the Ants music videos. I remember them being so cool as a kid. Now they just look ridiculous. Like they shot them all in one day. Some of the costumes even overlap from, "Prince Charming" into, "And Rap."

I'm tellin' ya, Kings is such a great record. It's really bizarre. I can't imagine it ever being mass-marketable. Somehow it was though.

That's basically why i was wiki'ing him. I wanted to see who his influences are, because there's just such strange vocal stuff. It's sorta Queen-ish... like if every song was a variant of Bohemian Rhapsody or something, but danceable.

I asked my buddy "do you know who influenced Adam Ant?" he replied "Cocaine"

I've seen Adam Ant a couple of times in Ct. I wasn't too impressed with him. I believe the talent behind the door in that sudo punk band was a guy they call Marky. I saw Wendy O'Williams on the same ticket. Now theres a chic who knows how to rock out a chainsaw!

LOL

Funny, I have always considered Adam & the Ants a guilty pleasure. It wasn't cool in my little punk rock circle, but I was always a fan. The original version of Dirk Wears White Sox with Day I Met God is a great record and the Burundi drumming on the later records was just brilliant.

I never enjoyed the solo stuff much, but from Dirk to the Prince Charming record I was a closet fan for sure...

I loved those Lou Reed, Adam Ant, and Grace Jones commercials back in the '80s. In fact, I came very close to buying an Elite back then, mostly inspired by those ads. Like an idiot, I ended up spending my money on a bass guitar and started a band instead. It took me another 15 years before I finally bought my first scooter.

Brendan

Hah!

I worked on the GJ spot (session musician) using a Fairlight CMI. One other one but I don't remember which.

Fun to see them again. Thanks for the memories.

GJ has a new record out now.

\\osc

When I was in London in '81, Adam Ant was the shit. Adam and the Ants were sort of Punkpop with a little Tribal and New Romantic thrown in and it worked a treat on "Kings of Wild Frontier". There was a single that they were playing too, from an earlier album, called "Young Parisians", and that was great.
I remember a particularly drunken cruise on the Thames near the end of our semester. Several of us tore that dance floor up when "Antmusic" played. Imagine the "My Generation" segment of Quadrophenia only with drunken pogo-ers... wait. I believe that was the night when we also discovered that just because it was 11:30 and the pubs were "closed", they really weren't "closed". I also recall the next morning when the boiler in the dorm cracked and we only had frickin' ICE COLD London water for our showers in the morning. I certainly looked and felt miserable in my early class the next day.

Good times!

Another Grace Jones Honda ad - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjpEPL_aqh4

Miles Davis (on an Elite 250) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1CwXz8Xidc

Jim McMahon - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cpa0lYgSWh0

Sandra Bernhardt - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wz3EAQF_Eek

I have to agree to some extent. Adam Ant's, "suck factor" increased exponentially when he stopped working with Marco Pirroni, the guitar player and co-song writer for Adam and the Ants. He was also in Siouxie and the Banshees for a while. Someone once told me he got kicked out cuz he was too fat.

I'm pretty sure he was on the straight and narrow. I read somewhere he wrote, "Goody Two Shoes" about people always giving him shit for not drinking, smoking or doing drugs.

Great idea for a Khana bike.[/quote]

An Aero 80 or 125 is even better. You can't kill 'em no matter how hard you try.

I used to like Adam and the Ants - wonder what he's up to now?

Last I heard, he lost the plot and ended up being locked up in an institution...

Yeah, didn't he go nuts and threaten someone with a gun at some point?