madamstan's blog

If you go down to London today, you may be in for an Ant-shaped surprise. With plans afoot, contacts primed and advance tickets purchased "just in case" for a 'secret' club night performance from Adam Ant himself for Saturday, we headed over to Liquid Nation on Ladbroke Grove, west London on Thursday for a relaxing evening with "Family Man" Dave Barbe who we knew for definite would be appearing with his new indie electro outfit Guilty Fawn.

Now, Liquid Nation isn't that well known for its live music reputation. We know that, because it was 8.30pm on a Thursday evening and, apart from Caroline and I, the tiny crowd was mainly made up of the members of the other acts, a couple of locals and a particularly personality disordered soon-to-be-thrown out Quentin Crisp wannabe who decided to spit furiously at anyone daring to talk through the opening act. Fair enough, it was a acoustic guitar touting soloist with not much ampage, but I was greeting some old pals and original Ant fans from 'back in the day' who had arrived to show support for Dave - who by now had arrived wearing his football manager assemblage of sheepskin coat and flat cap.

Now, Sundays are usually for recuperating after the night before. In this case, it was from being up all night on the new Ant Lib Online, putting final touches to articles and interviews. A call from Caroline, Ant Lib video editor extraordinaire, awoke me from dreams of editing CSS tags: something about Adam, an auction and a hairdressers. You know that feeling when you think somebody is having you on..?

Because I live not so very far away from St John's Wood, I thought I'd better go along 'just in case'. Caroline being knee-deep in her work with a deadline looming wasn't so sure, but we both chanced what seemed more like an episode of Beadle's About and individually made our way to Passion, just off St John's Wood High Street in north west London.