Last Updated on October 18, 2025 by Christian Adams
Black Sunshine Media was founded on the pursuit and exposure of lesser-known artists and bands and their work. Sharing new sounds is our passion. We love turning people onto stuff they might have missed. In this post, we’ll look at two albums from bands that deserve another shot: Blue Sunshine by The Glove (1983) and Dirk Wears White Sox by Adam & the Ants (1979).
The Glove
As a household name, Robert Smith is on par with Quentin Tarantino and Jackson Pollock. We know Smith from his work in The Cure, a legendary cameo on South Park, and recently, as a warrior against extortionate concert ticket prices. Millennials and Gen X are more likely to know about Robert Smith than Mick Jagger, too.
Diehard Cure fans will know that Smith played guitar in Siouxsie and the Banshees for a period in the early 1980s. He appeared on the 1983 live album, Nocturne, and the studio effort, Hyaena (1983). Fewer people know that Smith and Siouxsie bassist Steve Severin formed a bizarre psych-pop band, The Glove, during this time. The band existed just long enough to record one obscure classic, Blue Sunshine (1983).
The band’s name refers to the enormous flying glove in The Beatles’ animated movie Yellow Submarine (1968), and the album’s title refers to the 1960s lo-fi-horror film Blue Sunshine, whose psychotic murder plot involves people who took the fictional “Blue Sunshine” variety of LSD.
Since Smith was contractually prohibited from singing with another band, former dancer Jeanette Landray (then-girlfriend of Siouxsie drummer Budgie) was recruited as the lead singer.
Smith sings on two songs, “Mr. Alphabet Says” and “Perfect Murder,” and the results are astounding. Blue Sunshine sounds like a mash-up of The Human League covering Yellow Submarine in its entirety.
The Making of Blue Sunshine According to Robert Smith
“Steve and I decided to make a record as some kind of art experiment. Although we had a great time making it, it was completely debilitating and aged me about ten years. I think it was due to us bringing out the worst in each other—the most excessive ideas.
We spent 12 weeks in the studio but actually recorded for about five days. The rest of the time was spent having an endless party to which we invited a succession of people. It was like a station—once they got really out of it, they’d be moved on and the next batch brought in.
In between all this we’d record a piece of piano or drum. After that period with Steve, I was physically incapable of cleaning my teeth. The whole thing was unreal—a dream—and not something I’m likely to repeat in a hurry.
Most of the time I’m a professional idiot. I really don’t care about what other people think, which can be a bad thing.”1
Adam & the Ants
Unlike Robert Smith and The Cure, very few people born after 1990 have heard of Adam & the Ants unless their Generation X parents are still blasting their 1980s new wave jams in the minivan. For the older crowd, most of you should remember Adam Ant, the solo artist, for the guilty-pleasure pop hit of 1983, “Goody Two Shoes.”
And maybe a few of you owned an Adam & the Ants album on CBS Records, Kings of the Wild Frontier (1980) or Prince Charming (1981). But it’s a 1,000,000-to-1 odds that you’ve ever heard of their first album, Dirk Wears White Sox, released on Do-It Records in 1979. How can I be so confident in the odds against you? Record sales and streaming numbers don’t lie.
The Genius of Dirk Wears White Sox According to Me
Dirk Wears White Sox bears almost zero artistic resemblance to the Burundi beat-slash-gay pirate schtick of the band’s CBS years. The album was made with an early lineup of A&TA, which disbanded after the album was released. Guitarist Matthew Ashman and drummer David Barbarossa went on to form Bow Wow Wow. Many of the songs, notably “Cleopatra” and “Never Trust a Man (With Egg on his Face)”, remained a part of Adam Ant’s live repertoire throughout his career. The “Dirk” of the title refers to classic British film icon Dirk Bogarde.
Matthew Ashman is one of the most underrated guitarists of late 70s–early 80s post-punk and pop music. Dirk Wears White Sox deserves a listen for Ashman’s guitar work alone. He joined A&TA in June 1978 and stayed for a year and a half; during which time the Ants toured the U.K. twice, visited Belgium, Germany, and Italy, and released the singles “Young Parisians” and “Zerox” and the album.
Dirk is an eccentric blend of post-punk and glam with themes of alienation, sex, and violence. The lyrics can be pretentious and arty at times, but the raw energy and edgy innovation in song structure hold it together.
At the height of his popularity in the mid-1980s, Adam Ant bought back the rights to the album for a reissue on Epic Records in 1983. In 1995, Sony Music U.K. released a hybrid version for CD, restoring the cover art, original mixes, and the previously dropped tracks but retaining the additions and running order of the reissue. Epic chose to keep the remixed version for CD release in the U.S.
Fans of The Cure, Adam Ant, and post-punk music in general would be doing themselves a great disservice by not giving Blue Sunshine and Dirk Wears White Sox, at the very least, a cursory listen, if for nothing other than to see and hear what I keep rattling on about.
