Four-and-a-half years ago, a clinically depressed Adam Ant wrote a lengthy letter to Time Out complaining about an off-hand remark we’d printed about his ex-girlfriend, the American actress Heather Graham. A few days later he went to the Prince of Wales pub in Kentish Town to confront a man who’d been threatening him. He got into an argument with some other men and threw a piece of car engine through the pub window before pulling out a replica pistol. He was later arrested at gunpoint by an armed response unit and sectioned under the Mental Health Act.

Now promoting his autobiography, the artist born Stuart Leslie Goddard 51 years ago seems well on the road to recovery. A face-to-face interview with him was, at the last minute, cancelled and commuted to a phoner, although he eventually agreed to a photoshoot, which showed that he had lost the weight he put on through medication (which he is still on). Over the course of a long conversation, Adam was impeccably polite, slightly vulnerable and willing to talk openly about his life in his softly spoken, endearingly boyish voice.

‘Stand and Deliver: The Autobiography’ is quite a tale about the boy from the council estate in Marylebone who took art-school punk to the top of the charts. It’s a whirlwind story of sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll, suicide attempts and deranged stalkers; it’s about his mum working as a cleaner at Paul McCartney’s house; about his early band Bazooka Joe, which featured the ‘Does My Bum Look Big In This?’ comedy actress Arabella Weir; about Bazooka Joe playing on the same bill as the Sex Pistols; about beating up Sid Vicious; about how Nancy Spungen used to smell of piss; about hanging out at a punk brothel in Buckingham frequented by MPs and lords; about being royally fucked over by Malcolm McLaren who poached his band; about his girlfriends, Amanda Donohoe, Heather Graham, Jamie Lee Curtis and Carole Caplin; about starstruck meetings with Muhammad Ali, Robert De Niro, Michael Jackson, Princess Diana and the Queen; about moving to Hollywood and battling with manic depression. He also writes at length about the events of January 2002…

Do you remember writing that letter to Time Out in 2002?

Yeah, I do. I’ve been a regular Time Out reader since the ’60s – I’ve always read the film and gig previews. I remember that particular week some guy wrote a letter in to the magazine having a go at Heather Graham, and that really infuriated me. So I wrote a long letter and sent it off. It wasn’t a good idea; I wasn’t in a good state of mind at the time and probably overreacted. And then it all blew up…

You say in the book that it felt like you were ‘in a film but had no script’. Do you remember much about that period?

Well I was suffering from hypomania. It’s all a bit of a dream state. I really didn’t know what I was doing at the time. I was very unwell, and I’ve been working on my health ever since then. When a trauma like that happens, it takes you a long time to absorb it and come to terms with it, which is what I’ve been doing ever since.

You had been diagnosed as suffering from bi-polar disorder. Were you aware of this?

Not for years. I was dimly aware of mental illness – my stepmother, my father’s second wife, had schizophrenia – but most people in my condition are unaware of what exactly is wrong with them. I would just be feeling really up one minute and down the next. You tend to withdraw into yourself and become paranoid – you build up things in your mind that aren’t there but you think they are. I was okay when I was busy; when I wasn’t working I’d get pretty bad. That’s when you’re most vulnerable.

You seem to describe punk as a dramatisation of your mental illness…

Definitely. In a way, punk could drive you mad, what with all that gobbing while you were on stage – I don’t miss that at all! But punk was also very liberating in that sense. There were no boundaries. Punk celebrated a lot of things that are associated with mental illness – self-harm, violence, identity confusion – and turned them into positive attributes. If you didn’t like your own name – if it wasn’t dramatic or glamorous enough – you could change it and become a different person. That was very liberating. After an overdose in 1976, a name change made perfect sense. It didn’t make sense to call myself Stuart any more.

Why Adam Ant?

I wasn’t shaped like David Bowie or Alice Cooper, who were my heroes. I wasn’t skinny, I was more muscular. I felt more like a Renaissance painting of Adam in the Garden of Eden. ‘The Ants’ was from The Beatles, of course. ‘Adam And The Ants’ seemed to roll off the tongue well.

You grew up on a council estate in St John’s Wood, a pretty well-off part of London…

I became aware of this class divide when I went to grammar school – suddenly you’re mixing with affluent people who live in huge houses. I wasn’t envious of them – it showed me that these worlds existed and it made me work hard to get some of what they had. And punk definitely broke down a lot of those class barriers. When I worked on Derek Jarman’s film ‘Jubilee’ I suddenly started meeting really rich people who wanted a piece of punk energy.

You talk about punk as a primarily working-class movement that was hijacked by the middle classes…

Yes, there was a definite element of class tourism. I enjoyed Julien Temple’s film ‘The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle’ – where Malcolm McLaren tells us that he invented punk and used the Pistols as his puppets – but I think it was one of Malcolm’s fantasies. Malcolm was a great catalyst, and deserves credit as an originator but, in John Rotten, he was dealing with a poet. John put everything into action. He was an electric presence, and completely authentic.

You talk about ‘my beloved London’ – much of the book is a kind of extended love letter to London…

London is very important to me. I grew up in Marylebone and spent a lot of time playing football in Regent’s Park, and hanging out in Church Street and Edgware Road. I also love Primrose Hill, Chiswick House and Ham House. I have fond memories of Hornsey Art College – I did my foundation course at Crouch End Hill and my graphics course in Bowes Road. After reading Peter Ackroyd’s biography of London, I started exploring the East End and considered moving to Spitalfields. It’s got a lot of mystery to it.

What was the first gig you ever went to?

The Roundhouse, around 1969. I saw Lol Coxhill – playing a very complex jazz fusion set – and Genesis. The highlight was seeing David Bowie turn up to do an acoustic set. He had fantastic long hair and did ‘Memory Of A Free Festival’ on a 12-string. It was amazing. I spent a lot of time at the Roundhouse for many years – I remember seeing The Ramones play there with The Flamin Groovies – and I would go when the markets were on in the great hall. I’m a big fan of London markets.

What music has saved your life?

My favourite band of all time are Roxy Music – Ferry’s lyrics were incredible – and I grew up loving Bowie, Iggy Pop, T-Rex, Alice Cooper and Mott The Hoople. While in Adam And The Ants, I’d listen to a lot of early rock ’n’ roll and rockabilly – early Elvis, Peanuts Wilson, Gene Vincent, Little Richard, Ray Campi. If you went through my collection you’d probably be surprised to find a lot of old vinyl from the ’30s and ’40s, and lots of jazz – Miles Davis, Art Blakey, Sarah Vaughan. At the moment I’m listening to a lot of Bob Marley, Morrissey, Babyshambles, Placebo, the Kaiser Chiefs and Kasabian.

What’s the best present you’ve ever been given?

I was on tour in America and some kid came up and gave me a blue nylon scarf that Elvis had once worn. Signed by Elvis, with his sweat on it. Everyone in the crew wanted to hold it, as if it was a relic of the true Cross.

What kind of books have you been reading lately?

There’s a novel called ‘A Feast Of Snakes’ by a Southern gothic writer called Harry Crews who I absolutely love. He writes beautifully. I’ve also been reading his autobiography, ‘A Childhood: The Biography Of A Place’.

When you met Michael Jackson in 1983, what did you talk about with him?

He was fascinated by my pirate jacket. He’d seen it on a video and I told him where he could hire one. And I think he did. He was also interested in the drum sounds that we used on ‘Kings Of The Wild Frontier’ – he’d get into real detail about how we miked up the tom toms. We spoke on the phone a bit. The first time he called me I thought it was one of my bandmates taking the piss. I told him to fuck off twice. It was only when Quincy Jones rang me up a minute later that I realised it really was Michael! He eventually invited me to his place near LA for the day. He was just a very charming and gracious host, but very shy. He showed me around his animals – there was no monkey at the time – and we watched the movie ‘White Heat’ in his private cinema. That was before it all went a bit crazy for him…

You seem continually starstruck by celebrities…

Always. I never lost that thrill, the sense that it was such a huge privilege to meet your heroes. I never got blasé about it.

Did you have any artistic influence from relatives?

Not really. My mother was a seamstress for Norman Hartnell, she’s very creative with embroidery. And I had a great uncle who used to paint in his old age – he used to send me his paintings and drawings, which was nice. But there were no relatives around me who influenced me to get into art. That came from school.

When did you realise you’d made it?

I woke up one morning and heard a window cleaner outside my flat singing ‘Stand And Deliver’ and changing the lyrics to something vulgar. ‘I’m the dandy highwayman that you’re too scared to mention/I’ll fill your arse with broken glass and give you a detention.’ I thought it was quite an impressive lyric.

You talk in the book about buying a Picasso to cheer yourself up after reading a bad NME review…

I bought a very small engraving by Picasso. It wasn’t that extravagant– the most extravagant piece of art I bought was a set of six screenprints by Allen Jones called ‘The Magician’s Suite’, which I bought with my first royalty cheque.

As a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?

Strangely, a dentist. I used to go to the dentist so much that it fascinated me. I think I would have made a terrible dentist, though.