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Adam Ant (pictured), the British pop star who rose to fame in the Eighties, has been hospitalized in Great Britain after an offensive outburst during a concert, according to the Daily Mail.
Ant - whose real name is Stuart Goddard - interrupted a charity performance to unleash a "tirade of abuse" against Christians and began screaming obscenities, the paper says.
That, combined with other recent erratic acts, was enough to land Ant in the hospital under Britain's Mental Health Act.
The 55-year-old musician, according to The Music Fix (TMF) website, announced to his fans that he was in the hospital and asked that they send him postcards.
“Please don’t come down here as it may upset the staff who have been really pleasant,” said Ant’s message. “I am having a well earned rest at Her Majesty’s Pleasure and am painting and continuing being an art student. I have a great view and am considering gigs later in the year.”
The Antmusic singer has a history of depression and, according to an Adam & The Ants website, had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Ant had announced that he planned to go back on the road for his daughter and only child, Lily, who is 12.
But at a recent concert to raise funds for charity, Ant invited a four-year-old boy up to the stage and started teaching him the words to The Who’s song, "My Generation."
When frustrated fans began leaving, he started shouting obscenities at them and ended up being booed off the stage.
Ant had been hospitalized in September 2003 following a neighbor dispute, and in 2002, escaped a jail sentence on the grounds of mental illness after he brandished an imitation pistol at customers at a North London pub.
When announcing his comeback recently, the singer said he’d learned to live with bipolar disorder and that he was on the road again for Lily, who he called his “reason for living.”
“I’ve had this lifelong battle against manic depression but I’ve had to overcome it for her sake,” he said. “Times got bad. I lost my mind. But I’m back.”
Beth Haller, Ph.D., is Co-Director of the Global Alliance for Disability in Media and Entertainment (www.gadim.org). A former print journalist, she is a member of the Advisory Board for the National Center on Disability and Journalism (https://ncdj.org/). Haller is Professor Emerita in the Department of Mass Communication at Towson University in Maryland, USA. Haller is co-editor of the 2020 "Routledge Companion to Disability and Media" (with Gerard Goggin of University of Sydney & Katie Ellis of Curtin University, Australia). She is author of "Representing Disability in an Ableist World: Essays on Mass Media" (Advocado Press, 2010) and the author/editor of Byline of Hope: Collected Newspaper and Magazine Writing of Helen Keller (Advocado Press, 2015). She has been researching disability representation in mass media for 30+ years. She is adjunct faculty in the Disability Studies programs at the City University of New York (CUNY) and the University of Texas-Arlington.
From The NY Daily News:
