Songfacts®:

• In the book 1000 UK #1 Hits by Jon Kutner and Spencer Leigh, Adam Ant said: "It's just stealing people's attention. I'm a very big history fan of certainly the Georgian era and I like the flamboyance and sexuality and bawdiness of the time. I've seen films like Tom Jones and I grew up going to Saturday morning pictures and seeing all these other influences. I put them all together and Stand And Deliver was just purely grabbing people's attention and using the whole sort of classical English highwayman feel as a theme."
• The extravagant video was directed by Mike Mansfield and helped sell the song. It contained a hanging sequence that was considered too violent by some music program producers, so an edited version was issued which excluded the scene altogether. In Kutner and Leigh's book, Ant said: "The idea of the Stand And Deliver video was to create a Hollywood movie in 3 minutes."
• This was Adam and the Ants' best selling single in the UK, selling 985,000 copies.
• Ant's look in the video was based on the costume David Hemmings' character wore in the 1968 film The Charge of the Light Brigade. It was a 19th century British military look that Ant adapted. The video was a huge part of the song's success, as it gave an image to Ant's "dandy highwayman" character.