Eighties new wave star Adam Ant was arrested for suspicion of criminal damage in London on Wednesday for allegedly hurling rocks through a neighbor?s windows. Ant, 49, whose real name is Stuart Leslie Goddard, was arrested and then booked at the Central London police station on Wednesday morning, according to a Scotland Yard spokesperson.
The spokesperson said a 49-year-old man was questioned and released on bail, although Ant was not named, per British police protocol. He was ordered to report back in July for a hearing.
Following his bail, Ant was transported to a secure hospital psychiatric ward, according to British media reports. The Sun newspaper quoted a neighbor of Ant?s in Primrose Hill as saying that the singer “lost it” and was “out of control,” while other reports had the singer shouting unintelligibly about children and scrawling messages on a kitchen towel. Before his arrest, he allegedly ran into the local Curly Dog Café, dropped his pants and went to the cafe’s basement saying he needed a rest.
The outburst comes a year and a half after the “Goody Two Shoes” singer ran amok at a London pub following taunts from locals about his cowboy outfit. Ant pleaded guilty in October to participating in the January 2002 pub brawl (termed “affray” in England), during which the singer threatened to shoot the patrons who taunted him with his father?s WWII-era starter pistol. He also tossed a car alternator through the window of the pub, hitting and injuring a local musician.
The singer was placed under a 12-month community rehabilitation order and entered a psychiatric hospital in October after a judge determined that he?d suffered a temporary episode of mental illness.
In March of last year, the London Daily Telegraph reported that Ant had been plagued by depression for more than 25 years, beginning with an alleged attempt to commit suicide with an overdose of pills in his early 20s. After his efforts to reinvent himself as a solo crooner and actor in the United States failed, the Telegraph reported that Ant checked himself into a psychiatric clinic in Miami in 1994.
Ant sold more than 15 million records as part of Adam and the Ants, the pirate-themed early ’80s group which spawned such hits as “Prince Charming” and “Stand and Deliver.”
