My oh my, Annabella Lwin and Bow Wow Wow. How the memories come flooding back. Not ones I can share, naturally, but bearing in mind that most of boys in the eighties caught their first glimpse of this heavenly caramel creature on the cover of the band’s 1982 EP where she and her pitifully thin cohorts had recreated Manet’s ‘Déjeuner sur l’Herbe’ (and the 14 year old Annabella is pictured nude), you have to assume the worst, I’m afraid. And asked if the pretty 14-year-old Burmese girl grabbed our attention more than the frankly titillating tribal music she bore, I have only to remind you what most of us where doing in our bedrooms back then. And you just thought it was hair gel, eh?
Formed in London, England in 1980 by former Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren, Bow Wow Wow was perhaps the perviest manifestation of a manufactured band outside of the Sex Pistols; and this time it had tits. Young tits too. After signing the girl he’d discovered in a dry cleaners in Kilburn, north London, McLaren pushed her ahead of a line-up that included three founding members of Adam and the Ant: Matthew Ashman (guitar), Dave Barbe (drums) and Leigh Gorman (bass).
The music was instantly recognisable in a shamelessly contrived fashion; Balinese chants, Duane Eddy-style surf instrumentals, squealing, pouting teen banshee and Burundi ritual stuff – heavy on the bass riffs and heavy on the toms. It was like Adam and Ants but with a bit more class, more panting and even more percussion. And in retrospect, we should really have paid more attention to it than we did. Instead of wasting our spending money on Calvary shirts and jodhpurs we should have been listening to this: cool, fresh and impeccably performed voodoo pop of the highest order; streetwise, culturally astute and literally bursting with transgression. Which is probably why EMI have re-released this feisty, immortal gem for the equally clued-in digital generation, a collection that unites the band’s one and only full length release for EMI, 1980’s ‘Your Cassette Pet’, the follow-up cassingle, ‘C30, C60, C90, Go’ and a handful of similarly minimal, surf-tastic controversial hand-jobs like, ‘Sun, Sea and Piracy’, ‘Mile High Club’, ‘Cast Iron Arm’.
Boldest move here was putting the excellent instrumentals, ‘Bow Wow Wow’ and ‘Sex’ before the Lwin stuff – a clear, uncompromising gesture of musical intent that dwarfs the precocious hype of the wilfully controversial, ‘Sexy Eiffel Towers’ (featuring Annabella simulating orgasm) and ‘Gold He Said’ (Annabella talking about it) by a dozen or so tom-toms at least.
Classic inspired (and underaged) retro with shockingly fit bass-playing.