Come along with me for a moment; it’s 1983 and you’re watching MTV. A new video comes on. There are tribal drums, an old school guitar riff and horns (horns!?) making a rollicking beat like nothing you’ve heard before. The singer is dancing around, sporting leather pants and looking like a dandy highwayman (in a good way). It’s like nothing you’ve seen before. You’re 13 and you’re enthralled, to be sure.

You remember Adam Ant, don’t you? Oh, I sure do.

Back in the 80s, my first Adam Ant memory is “Goody Two Shoes” like many other girls of my generation, I’m sure. A few years later when “Strip” came out, I was smitten. Was it the roguish, messy hair? Or the pirate getup? Or those eyes that smoldered? Who am I kidding? It was the whole package.

While I was never an Adam Ant superfan, I liked the music I heard and the smolder. But when a friend mentioned that she had read Adam Ant’s autiobiography, Stand and Deliver, I knew it was one for me to check out. Unfortunately, my search for it turned up nothing as it was a British release and I couldn’t find it locally; until recently, that is, when I was finally able to score my own copy and dig into what made this man tick.

Born as Stuart Goddard, Adam Ant had a complicated life that he ultimately left behind and rebirthed himself as Adam (a not so subtle nod to the first man) before carrying on with the second half of what continued to be a complicated life.

A part of the vibrant punk music scene of the 1970s, friend of fashion icon Vivienne Westwood and Sex Pistols manager Malcolm MacDowell, his life story is filled with ups and downs and dramatic pauses; he’s honest with his failings and shortcomings, generous with the names he drops and proud of the mark he’s made on the world. He shares photos from his life and stories of his loves (which includes names like Jamie Lee Curtis and Heather Graham) and his disappointment when what he anticipated as a meteoric rise to multi-album fame fell a bit flat.

Typical of a celebrity memoir, there are tales of excess and narcissism; atypical is Ant’s approach to his story. He doesn’t make excuses, he just lays it out for the reader. It’s a refreshing angle that caused me to both admire and abhor him in turn.

This book also introduced me to many of Ant’s songs (“Antmusic,” as he calls it) that I was previously unfamiliar with. As a music lover, reading about the music scene in England and Ant’s rise during the reign of the Sex Pistols & The Clash was very interesting; I love it when I finish a book but it’s not the end, it’s just the beginning of a whole list of books and topics to explore, and this one certainly provided that.

Fan of Adam Ant or music or pop culture? This is one to read.