Kitsch, camp, catchy and controversial, this was the first song to come out by Adam & The Ants. Deutscher Girls first appeared on the soundtrack of Derek Jarman’s film Jubilee. It didn’t make Stuart Goddard’s name. That would come later.

A ubiquitous figure in the early development of punk, Adam (aka Stuart Goddard) channelled Glam groups like Roxy and Sailor more than the Pistols and Clash.

I remember their gigs (I saw one of the first, supporting X-Ray Spex, when they were billed as The Ants) as chaotic, tuneless affairs, and Adam as having a rather better look (all cheekbones and black leather) than his atrocious voice.

All of which made them hard to take seriously though they had punk credibility in being managed by Jordan, who would regularly bound onstage to sing (well, scream) one song, Lou.

Their two songs in Jubilee showed both sides of them: Deutscher Girls is kitsch while Plastic Surgery is like some sort of dreadful punk parody.

Thankfully, it was the kitsch side that won in the end when Adam focused more on the dressing up, wrote some decent tunes, and found a guitarist who could actually play – Marco Pirroni replacing Johnny Bivouac, who had replaced Mark Ryan (who played on this version of Deutscher Girls) who had replaced Lester Square after just one gig.

You can hear the germs of that reinvention on this song, and on their first single, Young Parisians – an acoustic pastiche of French cabaret, albeit performed too incompetently to pass an auditon at the Moulin Rouge – while second single Zerox and especially its B-side Whip In My Valise sound today like nothing so much as the prototype for Suede.

A staple of their early live sets in 1977, Deutscher Girls is kinda camp, kinda catchy and kinda controversial, with its lyric about a girl from “Camp 49, way down on the Rihine.”

Not to mention the chorus line: “Why did you have to be so Nazi?” – changed to “nasty” when the song was re-released in 1982 (with Camp 49 changed to “lover of mine”) when Adam was a pop superstar.

The lyrics were inspired not by any far-right fantasy but by Adam’s obsession with Liliana Cavani’s controversial 1974 film The Night Porter.

In the movie Charlotte Rampling played a Nazi camp survivor involved in an erotic sado-masochistic releationship with a Nazi officer played by Dirk Bogarde (hence also the title of the Ants’ first album, Dirk Wears White Sox).

This video, featuring footage from Jubilee, features Adam in his role as ‘… and in case you were wondering, the shaven-headed ginger girl is Toyah Wilcox.