In the summer of 1983, Adam Ant travelled to Stockholm to make one of the most curious albums of his career. Recorded at ABBA’s celebrated Polar Studios, “Strip” brought together British New Romantic theatricality, pioneering digital technology and some of the most recognisable figures in Swedish pop.
Phil Collins produced and played drums on two songs. ABBA’s trusted engineer Michael B. Tretow mixed most of the album. Long-time ABBA musician Rutger Gunnarsson supplied orchestral arrangements. Most unexpectedly, Anni-Frid “Frida” Lyngstad appeared—without a credit—as the seductive female voice on the title track. The result was not simply an Adam Ant record made abroad. It was a distinctly Anglo-Swedish production, created at the moment when Stockholm was emerging as a serious international recording centre.
From tribal drums to polished pop
Strip was Adam Ant’s second solo album and his fifth studio LP if his work with Adam and the Ants is included. It followed the enormous British success of Kings of the Wild Frontier and Prince Charming, the dissolution of the Ants and Adam’s commercially successful solo debut, Friend or Foe. That first solo album had produced “Goody Two Shoes”, a major international hit which reached number one in the UK and number 12 in the United States. By 1983, Adam Ant was no longer merely a flamboyant British cult figure: he was attempting to consolidate a genuinely transatlantic pop career. For Strip, Adam and his principal musical partner Marco Pirroni moved away from the aggressive twin-drum attack and twanging guitar sound associated with the Ants. The new material was lighter, more electronic and more overtly dance-oriented. Its lyrics and visual presentation exchanged the warrior, highwayman and pirate imagery of earlier records for playful—sometimes deliberately exaggerated—sexual suggestion. Stockholm offered the technology and personnel needed for that transformation.
Inside ABBA’s Polar Studios
Polar Studios had opened in Stockholm in 1978, created by ABBA and their business associates as a world-class recording facility. Located in the former Sportpalatset complex on Sankt Eriksgatan, it became the group’s creative headquarters and was designed to compete with the finest studios in London, Los Angeles and New York. By the early 1980s, it was already attracting international artists. Led Zeppelin had recorded much of In Through the Out Door there, while Genesis used Polar for Duke. The studio therefore carried ABBA’s unmistakable association with carefully constructed pop, but it was by no means restricted to the group’s own music. Adam reportedly spent around six weeks in Stockholm. He later offered a less-than-enthusiastic comic assessment of the city’s nightlife, complaining that very little happened after dark and recalling an Ann-Margret concert as the principal diversion from the sessions. Whatever he thought of Stockholm after working hours, however, Polar gave Strip an unusually pristine and technologically advanced sound. Richard James Burgess, who produced most of the album with Adam and Pirroni, has described working at Polar with two 3M digital 32-track recorders. Digital multitrack recording was then still prohibitively expensive and relatively rare. Burgess remembered returning from the live room after recording drums and initially failing to realise that the tape was already running because there was none of the familiar hiss of analogue recording. When the drums came through the monitors, their clarity and sharp transient response astonished him. For Burgess, it was the first time recorded drums had sounded genuinely like the instrument he had just heard from behind the kit. His later account of the experience offers a valuable glimpse of Polar at the frontier of early digital production. This technology helps explain the album’s character. Strip does not possess the dense, earthy impact of Kings of the Wild Frontier. Instead, it is bright, clean and sharply delineated: drums, synthesiser parts, percussion, bass and comparatively restrained guitars occupy carefully separated spaces. That aesthetic has divided listeners ever since. To critics who preferred Adam’s punk-derived attack, it sounded overly polished. Heard as an early digital pop production, however, it becomes a fascinating document of musicians discovering a new recording language.
Richard James Burgess joins at short notice
The central producer of the Swedish sessions was Richard James Burgess, a drummer, electronic-music pioneer and founding member of Landscape, best known for the synth-pop hit “Einstein a Go-Go”. Burgess had also produced Spandau Ballet’s first two albums and helped develop the Simmons SDS-V electronic drum system. His involvement came together remarkably quickly. Burgess later recalled receiving an initially anonymous telephone call only two or three weeks before he was due to move from London to New York. When he learnt that Adam Ant was behind the offer, he postponed the move for four months. There was little conventional pre-production. Adam and Pirroni had already established their songs and overall concept, while Burgess was expected to enter the project almost immediately and help turn the material into a finished album. Burgess described Adam and Pirroni as an instinctive partnership, heavily engaged with every aspect of the production. When Burgess played drums, they assessed his performances; when they recorded their parts, he responded as producer. Far from presenting Adam as a passive pop star, Burgess’s recollections depict him as closely involved in how the record was constructed. He nevertheless believed that more preparation might have benefited the album. In a retrospective interview, he said that earlier involvement in pre-production was the one change he would have made if circumstances had allowed. He also felt the completed record contained several potential singles that CBS failed to exploit. The full Burgess interview provides one of the clearest first-hand accounts of the Stockholm project. Burgess produced eight of the album’s ten tracks alongside Adam and Pirroni, as well as playing drums, keyboards and percussion. Significantly, he did not work directly with Phil Collins: Collins had completed his contribution and departed before Burgess arrived. The album was therefore made in at least two distinct production phases, united by Polar Studios but handled by different teams.
Phil Collins takes the drums
Phil Collins’s role on Strip is often overstated. He did not produce the entire album. His work was confined to its two prospective singles, “Puss ’n Boots” and the title track, on which he also played drums and percussion. Collins worked on the songs with engineer and producer Hugh Padgham. Their partnership was already defining the sound of early-1980s pop and rock through projects involving Genesis, Collins’s solo career and other major artists. Padgham’s spacious, highly controlled drum productions—and the gated-reverb sound famously associated with Collins—had become an immediately recognisable modern signature. Adam later described Collins as a “fabulous drummer” and recalled the experience of watching him build his drum sound in the studio. Although Collins entered the project as a superstar musician and producer, his function was unusually concentrated: give the two key tracks a strong rhythmic and commercial identity. On “Puss ’n Boots”, his drumming reinforces the song’s mixture of nursery-rhyme pantomime, funk and theatrical pop. It proved the album’s most successful British single, reaching number five in November 1983 and becoming Adam Ant’s final UK Top 10 hit. “Strip” is more restrained and suggestive, driven by a supple rhythm rather than the old Antmusic charge. Collins’s performance is not an extravagant soloistic display; it is studio drumming designed to make the track breathe, move and leave space for its vocal theatre.
How Frida entered the picture
Frida’s presence was made possible by an existing Swedish connection. In 1982, Collins and Padgham had worked at Polar Studios on Frida’s first English-language solo album, Something’s Going On. Produced by Collins, it deliberately moved her towards a tougher contemporary rock and pop sound, far removed from the assumption that an ABBA singer’s solo career would simply reproduce ABBA. The sessions created a professional relationship between Collins, Padgham, Frida and the Polar team. When Adam wanted a female voice for the spoken passage in “Strip”, he asked Collins about involving one of ABBA’s singers. Collins approached Frida, who came into the studio and performed the part. Adam’s later recollection makes the encounter sound wonderfully informal. Frida arrived with her hair carefully arranged and reportedly positioned the microphone behind her so that the headphones or equipment would not disturb it. More importantly, she asked that her manager, ABBA’s formidable Stig Anderson, should not be told—otherwise, she joked, he would want payment. Whether every detail survived decades of retelling unchanged is impossible to establish, but the essential facts are clear: Frida supplied the female spoken voice and was not named on the original album. Adam publicly confirmed both her identity and the circumstances in a 2017 interview reported by Noise11. It is a small performance, but an important one. Frida does not sing a conventional duet or deploy the powerful voice heard on songs such as “Knowing Me, Knowing You”. Instead, she performs a character: controlled, intimate, slightly amused and deliberately aristocratic in tone. For years, casual listeners could hear the mysterious woman without realising that one of the most famous voices in Swedish music was hiding in plain sight.
The other ABBA figures behind Strip
Frida was not the album’s only direct connection with ABBA. Most of the record was mixed by Michael B. Tretow, the engineer whose ingenuity had been fundamental to ABBA’s studio sound. Tretow was renowned for building recordings layer by layer, experimenting with tape, doubling and processing to give ABBA’s productions an exceptional scale and clarity. His role on Strip was less dominant than on ABBA’s records, since the songs and basic production decisions belonged to Adam, Pirroni and Burgess. Even so, his presence at the mixing stage helped integrate the digitally recorded performances into a consistent album. Paris Edvinsson engineered the eight Burgess-produced tracks, while the credits also list Swedish studio assistant Anders Andersson alongside Jean-Luc Fauvel, Mark Freegard and Radu Wouk. Rutger Gunnarsson supplied the brass and string arrangements. Gunnarsson had been one of ABBA’s essential supporting musicians, playing bass on many of their recordings and arranging strings for some of their best-known work. On Strip, his contribution extended the Swedish studio lineage beyond Polar’s equipment and engineering staff into the musical arrangements themselves. The album can consequently be viewed as a meeting of two highly developed pop systems: Adam Ant and Marco Pirroni’s world of image, rhythm, humour and provocation, and the Stockholm network that had formed around ABBA’s international success.
A Swedish sound—or simply an early-digital one?
It would be too simple to claim that Polar made Adam Ant sound like ABBA. The songwriting remains unmistakably his, filled with wordplay, theatrical characters, sexual comedy and Pirroni’s melodic instincts. Nor did Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus participate in the album. Yet Sweden changed the conditions under which the music was realised. The exceptional digital facilities encouraged clean separation and precise rhythmic detail. Burgess’s electronic sensibility increased the role of keyboards and processed percussion. Tretow brought the discipline of an engineer accustomed to constructing expansive pop records. Gunnarsson supplied arrangements grounded in Stockholm’s international studio tradition. Collins and Padgham brought a powerful British production style which they had already tested at Polar with Frida. The result is neither an ABBA album nor a typical Adam Ant album. It occupies a peculiar space between British theatrical pop and Swedish studio modernism. That combination is most convincing on “Puss ’n Boots”, “Montreal” and “Navel to Neck”, while elsewhere the technology can seem to have polished away some of the danger that once made Adam so compelling. But even the album’s weaknesses reveal something about 1983: punk energy was being translated into expensive digital pop, visual stars were adapting to MTV, and Stockholm was becoming a place where international musicians came not merely for ABBA’s prestige, but for the technical culture ABBA had helped create.
After Stockholm
Released in November 1983, Strip reached number 20 in the UK and number 65 in the United States. That represented a marked decline from “Friend or Foe”, which had reached number five and number 16 respectively. Contemporary and retrospective criticism has often focused on the album’s sexual humour, glossy production and lack of the force associated with Adam’s earlier work. Classic Pop’s career survey is especially severe, although it identifies the Collins-produced “Puss ’n Boots” as the album’s outstanding moment. Burgess believed the record deserved stronger support and contained more viable singles. His view is understandable: “Montreal”, in particular, displays the kind of melodic chorus and rhythmic polish that might have worked as a follow-up release. Nevertheless, Strip arrived at a difficult point in Adam Ant’s career. The dramatic transformations that had previously appeared fearless now risked confusing listeners. Fans of the Ants’ tribal sound could find the new digital production bloodless, while the provocative campaign surrounding the album did not necessarily bring him a durable new audience. Its historical interest has grown with time. Strip captures Polar Studios during a transitional period, after ABBA’s final recordings but while its musicians, engineers and international connections remained active. It also preserves an unusual creative triangle: Adam Ant pursuing a new pop identity, Phil Collins refining the era’s dominant drum aesthetic and Frida quietly stepping to a microphone for one of the most unexpected cameos of the 1980s.
The Swedish sessions did not produce Adam Ant’s greatest commercial triumph. They produced something stranger: an imperfect but revealing record in which Britain’s most theatrical post-punk pop star entered the house that ABBA built—and briefly became part of Stockholm’s musical story.
Suggested Online Sources
Noise11.com
Djhistory.com
Adamandtheants.org
Classicpopmag.com
Adam-ant.net
Discogs.com
Stevepafford.com
