Bow Wow Wow

Your Box Set Pet: The Complete Recordings 1980-1984 Cherry red

Malcolm McLaren’s 80s shock-poppers revisited.

Post‑Pistols, Malcolm McLaren’s next idea in his global mischief‑ making masterplan involved coaxing original Ants guitarist Matthew Ashman, bassist Leigh Gorman and drummer Dave Barbarossa from their leader to form Bow Wow Wow with effervescent 14‑year‑old Annabella Lwin.

McLaren had already supplied the Burundi rhythms Ant was taking to global stardom and now provided the bubbling bedrock that the band laced with surf guitar and Annabella’s yelping sex kitten girl‑pop assaults. This sound was captured on controversy‑stoking cassette single C-30, C-60,

C-90, Go, first hit Go Wild In The

Country and 1981’s See Jungle! See Jungle! Go Join Your Gang Yeah, City All Over! Go Ape Crazy!

The LP’s original cover heist of the New Jazz Orchestra’s 1968 appropriation of Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe, featuring Annabella posing nude, courted Scotland Yard interest and got (temporarily) banned.

Although succeeding in creating his provocative pop sound for drab times, McLaren had moved on to his solo career by the time their cover of The Strangeloves’ I Want Candy went Top 10 in the summer of 1982, then touring exhaustion disintegrated the group after third album When The Going Gets Tough, The Tough Get Going.

As this set – comprising three albums, single variations, remixes and re‑recordings – attests, Bow Wow Wow were naughtily unique to their time, and could never happen now. However, even that exotic gumbo formula starts wearing a tad over three discs.

That said, this politically incorrect figment of McLaren’s fevered imagination deserves its day in the sun, with or without loincloths.