Dibs

Hark back to those balmy days of 1980, when Adam and the Ants was an art-school-new-wave band helmed by Adam Ant, real name Stuart Goddard, who drew on his father’s Romany (“gypsy”) heritage when designing his own flamboyant dark-haired stage persona. He had a relationship with Jamie Lee Curtis, and the band broke up in ‘82. But its fans still abound. Lesley Scott and Lee Bowen first “met” in an Antmusic chat room. Bowen asked Scott to marry him this week in a Borders store in Glasgow, Scotland where Ant/Goddard was signing copies of his new autobiography Stand and Deliver, which details the star’s struggles with bipolar disorder. (He threw a brick through a schoolroom window as a child, then menaced some London pub patrons with a fake gun in 2002.) As reported in the Evening Post: “Lee, 35, revealed: ‘I asked [Ant] if it would be okay to pop the question while Lesley was getting her book signed and he said yes. I thought she was going to burst into tears but she managed to hold it together. It was so nice to do something like that in front of our hero.’ Luckily … Lesley said yes and the sweethearts are now busy planning their wedding, and although they haven’t set a date yet they have decided to have an Adam Ant-themed day with chart hit Prince Charming as their first dance…. Lee, an IT manager for British Gas, said: ‘The thing is if it wasn’t for Adam Ant’s music we would never have met at all. He was really nice about the whole thing. I had been thinking about asking her to marry me for a while and it seemed like the right time to do it. We are both big fans. Every November we go to the Adam Ant Convention in London…. We might get instructions on how to do the Prince Charming dance printed on our wedding invites.’” So if he’s 35 now, then in 1980 when A and the As were popular, this fan was — nine? It’s folks like him for whom the washed-up are ever grateful.