Bow Wow Wow

Far from functioning as a mere outlet for the provocations of manager Malcolm McLaren, Bow Wow Wow earned their enduring association with new wave through far more than a single cover version. The group captured the spirit of their moment via visual and sonic borrowings that spanned Mohawk hairstyles and Burundi-style drumming, lyrics that veered between suggestive and explicit, and a playfully feral energy personified by teenage vocalist Annabella Lwin. Launched in 1980, the outfit scored two U.K. Top Ten entries in 1982—“Go Wild in the Country” and a revamp of the Strangeloves’ “I Want Candy,” which later reached number 62 stateside. The band dissolved the next year, having issued just two full-length studio albums: 1981’s See Jungle! See Jungle! Go Join Your Gang Yeah, City All Over! Go Ape Crazy! and 1983’s When the Going Gets Tough, The Tough Get Going. Even so, their position in pop history was cemented well before Lwin and bassist Gorman revived the name for live performances in the decade that followed.

Malcolm McLaren assembled Bow Wow Wow in January 1980. The ex-Sex Pistols manager had been approached by Adam Ant to steer Adam and the Ants after that act’s Dirk Wears White Sox underperformed commercially. Instead McLaren conferred with the London-based Ants—guitarist Matthew Ashman, drummer David Barbarossa, and bassist Leigh Gorman—and persuaded the musicians to part ways with their frontman. Following several months of auditions involving more than two hundred vocalists, thirteen-year-old Annabella Lwin joined the trio. Talent scout David Fishel had spotted Lwin at a laundromat, and she soon cut her earliest tracks with the musicians, who adapted material from Ants rehearsal tapes and wove in African rhythms drawn from Burundi Black’s self-titled single.

The band signed a one-year EMI agreement in July 1980 and introduced themselves that same month with the music-piracy anthem “C·30 C·60 C·90 Go!,” fittingly the first single issued on cassette; it climbed to number 34 on the U.K. pop chart. By year’s end they had taped a John Peel BBC session, played their first concert, and released the eight-song Your Cassette Pet, which McLaren promoted as “a celebration of under-age sex.” The most explicit numbers on the tape, composed before the group existed by McLaren alongside Stephane Pietri and Pierre Grillet, had been conceived for a musical the latter pair described as “a kind of soft-core rock ’n’ roll musical for kids.”

Bow Wow Wow developed a reputation as a boisterous live attraction, and a February 1981 show spotlighted an additional singer whom McLaren billed as Lieutenant Lush and who later became known as Boy George. The following month the band returned to the singles chart with “W.O.R.K. (N.O. Nah, No No My Daddy Don’t),” where Barbarossa’s Stanley Clarke-inspired slap bass moved to the forefront. After the EMI contract lapsed, an RCA deal yielded the “Prince of Darkness” single, and in October the first proper album, See Jungle! See Jungle! Go Join Your Gang Yeah, City All Over! Go Ape Crazy!, appeared. Its standout track, “Go Wild in the Country,” became a U.K. Top Ten hit. The sleeve, a photographic restaging by Andy Earl of Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, drew objections from Lwin’s mother that triggered a Scotland Yard probe into the alleged exploitation of a minor; the American pressing substituted a different image. (The disputed photograph eventually appeared in London’s National Portrait Gallery.)

Early 1982 saw promotion for See Jungle! conclude with the title track peaking at number 45. That June the band’s cover of the Strangeloves’ 1965 Bo Diddley-beat hit “I Want Candy” entered the U.K. chart and secured their second Top Ten placement. Weeks afterward the same recording, featured as the lead cut on the North American EP The Last of the Mohicans, reached number 62 on the Billboard Hot 100. An opportunistic compilation also titled I Want Candy capitalized on the momentum, appearing in the U.K. and U.S. with entirely different track listings drawn mainly from prior releases. Working without McLaren, Bow Wow Wow completed their second and last proper album, When the Going Gets Tough, The Tough Get Going, which surfaced in 1983 and featured “Do You Wanna Hold Me?,” their ninth and final U.K. charting single.

Internal tensions prompted the group’s dissolution before 1983 ended. Lwin was effectively dropped from the lineup. Ashman led the remaining members into Chiefs of Relief, an act that issued a few singles and one album. Still under RCA, Lwin delivered a solo album in 1986. Two years after Ashman’s death from diabetes complications, she and Gorman reactivated Bow Wow Wow chiefly for touring purposes. Subsequent lineups incorporated transient players such as No Doubt’s Adrian Young and Novacaine’s Phil Gough. In 2006 Sofia Coppola incorporated three Bow Wow Wow tracks—including Kevin Shields remixes of “I Want Candy” and “Fools Rush In”—into the Marie Antoinette soundtrack. Gorman later reassembled a version of the band without Lwin, though she continued performing independently. Cherry Red issued the exhaustive 2018 anthology Your Box Set Pet: Complete Recordings 1980-1984.