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And Finally Beef Of The Week
CMU Beef Of The Week #18: Adam Ant vs God (and Portsmouth)
By Andy Malt | Published on Saturday 15 May 2010
Adam Ant played a charity gig in Portsmouth this week. It didn’t really go as planned. While on a two week holiday in the town, he had agreed to play a show which had been organised to raise money for starving Filipino children. But he was, erm, let’s say disappointed to discover that the Oasis Centre, where it took place, is actually a Pentecostal church.
Still, there were starving children to be saved, so the show went ahead despite Adam’s personal feelings. Maybe “despite” isn’t the word. He opened his set with The Rolling Stones’ ‘Sympathy For The Devil’ and then spent the rest of the gig swearing at the audience, informing any Christians in the room that they weren’t welcome (this was most of the audience) and teaching the lyrics of ‘My Generation’ by The Who to a four year old.
He apparently managed to stretch his performance out to half an hour, despite the fact he’d very much lost the audience from the beginning, at one point responding to booing by saying: “I’m a punk rocker. I don’t do Christian. You can fuck off to the church”.
At around 11pm, organisers brought the show to an end, at which point an on-stage fight broke out between Ant’s twin nieces Alex and Naomi Hewston, who had been singing with their uncle, and the son of the show’s promoter. Frankly, at just a fiver to get in, it sounds like an amazing night out.
Confronted at his hotel the next day by local newspaper The News, Ant said: “I’m a bit upset. I liked [Portsmouth] but I don’t like this place any more. When I get back to London I’m telling everyone this place is worse than Birmingham or Manchester. I came here to see [HMS] Victory and [HMS] Warrior because I’m proud to be English. I didn’t come here for this. I won’t talk to any locals any more because they are all gangsters”.
There is video from the show here. It contains a lot of bleeping.
This Beef Of The Week comes from this edition of the CMU Weekly. Subscribe to the CMU Weekly here.
