Bow Wow Wow

Bow Wow Wow was a 1980s New Wave band organized by Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren in 1980 whose music is described as having an "African-derived drum sound".^[1] McLaren persuaded guitarist Matthew Ashman, bassist Leigh Gorman and percussionist David Barbarossa (also known as Dave Barbe), of the then lineup of Adam & the Ants to leave Adam Ant and form a new group. After a six month long audition process, the band hired teen singer Annabella Lwin.^[1] Dave Fischel, an acquaintance of McLaren's, discovered fourteen year old Lwin while she was working at her parents' laundrette singing along to a Stevie Wonder song on the radio. The group's sound was a mix of her "girlish squeal", Balinese chants, surf instrumentals, New Romantic pop melodies, and Barbarossa's Burundi ritual music influenced tom tom drum beats. Among the regular faces at the band's early London gigs were Latin songwriter/producer Richard Daniel Roman and Boy George, then known as Lieutenant Lush. McLaren was also going to use the latter (later of Culture Club fame) as a second lead singer, but he was deemed to be "too wild" for the band^{[citation needed]}. In 1982 Bow Wow Wow had their first U.K. top 10 hit with “Go Wild in the Country.” The band's most popular hit was the New Wave staple, "I Want Candy" (originally a 1965 hit by The Strangeloves). "I Want Candy" was featured in an early music video on MTV. Bow Wow Wow's recording of "I Want Candy" continues to appear in film soundtracks and media and advertising events such as the 2005 Victoria's Secret Fashion Show. Their most notorious recording was "Sexy Eiffel Towers", a bold ode to masturbation, including excitedly heavy breathing and orgasmic moans; this was a song that went far beyond the slightly later Cyndi Lauper hit "She Bop", about similar subject matter. ^[2] The group released three full-length albums. In 1983, tensions in the group were rising. Suffering from illness and exhaustion after intense US touring, they went their separate ways.