XTC Vs. Adam Ant: A Fight With No Winner
On Taste, Time, and Not Choosing Sides
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Confession.
I know exactly one song by the band XTC. It’s called Dear God, and it’s also probably one of their most well-known songs.
Conversely, I also know exactly one song by Adam Ant: Goodie Two-Shoes. If you’ve been alive anytime between 1982 and today, you’ve almost certainly heard Goodie Two-Shoes; whether you wanted to or not.
Both songs are excellent examples of their respective corners of rock history: Beatle-based pop versus New Romantic flair. And truly, there is no right or wrong answer as to which one is “better.”
Before picking up Factory Showroom, I had already heard of XTC. I wouldn’t have been able to name a song then, but the band existed somewhere in my teenage mental filing cabinet. Adam Ant did too, though mostly as an image and a chorus rather than a catalog.
This song was also my first exposure to the band name Bow Wow Wow, which felt less like discovering a band and more like discovering a new piece of pop-culture connective tissue.
I Don’t Belong to Either Side
Before I go any further, a quick note of expectations: if you’re hoping for a deeply personal chronicle of my lifelong devotion to XTC, Adam Ant, or Adam and the Ants, this isn’t that post. If that kind of deep-dive fandom is what you’re after, I’d genuinely recommend these excellent pieces, and then come back here:
“December Album Reviews: Bloody Red Baron” from S.W. Lauden’s Remember The Lightning
“Please Be Upstanding for the Wonderous Music of XTC” and “XTC Part 2: Dear God They're Brilliant!” a two part series from John Taylor’s Time To Play B-Sides
A Rivalry Staged for Effect
On its surface, XTC vs. Adam Ant is exactly what it claims to be: an imaginary rivalry between two English rock acts. A battle for chart position, cultural relevance, and a permanent footnote in music history.
Below the surface, though, the song is… still that. But said louder, smarter, and with more guitars.
It stages a fight it has no intention of resolving. Every time one side seems to win, the other resurfaces. The charts flip. Time marches on. Nobody gets the final word.
Form Versus Content, in Stereo
Musically, the song earns its place as a centerpiece of Factory Showroom. The album opens with S-E-X-X-Y, a track that throws nearly everything at the wall: electric guitars, bass, strings, drums, congas, synths, horns; everything. It’s dense, ornate, and unmistakably deliberate.
The songs that follow pull pieces of that sound apart and rearrange them, but XTC vs. Adam Ant feels like a deliberate check-in. A reminder. A moment where the album says, Hey, remember the musical themes of this album you’re listening to?
Around the forty-six-second mark, John Linnell introduces a keyboard tone that always makes me think of the flute-like Mellotron in Strawberry Fields Forever. It’s the sound Paul McCartney plays just before everything dissolves.
Whether intentional or not, it feels like a quiet, meta nod to the song’s own lyric: Beatle-based pop slipping into the mix, right on cue.
This is also another track where Eric Schermerhorn gets to stretch out on lead guitar. Fluid, fast, and borderline excessive in the best way. If the song is about form versus content, the solo feels like a knowing wink: sometimes form is the point.
A Fight With No Personal Stakes
And here’s where I admit something that feels almost heretical for this project of mine.
I don’t have a deeper personal subplot for this song in my life. No formative memory. No emotional landmine. No moment where it suddenly explained my life to me.
It’s just… a stone, cold, banger of a song.
And more than that, it’s necessary. It anchors Factory Showroom. It reinforces the album’s themes. It keeps the whole thing feeling intentional rather than merely collected.
Not every song needs to be a mirror or a time capsule. Some songs exist to hold ideas in tension and to refuse resolution. XTC Vs. Adam Ant insists that form and content, spectacle and substance, intellect and instinct don’t cancel each other out.
They coexist.
There is no right or wrong.
What’s a music rivalry you eventually stopped caring about and what changed?
You’re reading one of my Factory Showroom essays. An album full of oddball beauty, quiet heartbreak, and some of the band’s most elegant songwriting.
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It reminds me of "the day Marvin Gaye and Phil Ochs got married" in that it sounds like neither artist it name-checks.
But last week I saw a newsblurb about some legal issue between the Federal Trade Commission and Amazon. The headline used the government body's acronym and I automatically sung in my head "FTC vs. Ama-ZON" and can't seem to banish that from my mind lately.
I always had a problem with this song, even though I do love the screaming guitars. I think it had to do with the fact that I was a big fan of both XTC and Adam Ant (and the Ants) and thought the lyrics didn't capture anything true about either band's sound. Maybe there's something more to it that I would find clever if I were privy to the backstory. But like you say (and they say), there is no right or wrong. It feels like a melody in search of a point. But if there is no right or wrong, why bother posing the question?
One of my favorite songs that pairs two bands against each other is the great song by Metric, "Gimme Sympathy." It has the great lyric:
Gimme sympathy
After all of this is gone
Who'd you rather be?
The Beatles or The Rolling Stones?
https://youtu.be/LqldwoDXHKg?si=vQBhnpstsunfzlv9