Ant’s Got High Hopes : Rock: After making a splash in the ‘80s, the British singer has been all but invisible from music. Now he’s back with new material, and will be appearing at the Coach House three nights this week.

One of the Ten Commandments of rock is that the trendiest of the trendy often are doomed to irrelevance the soonest. This rubric has made swift anachronisms of many hipper-than-thou acts, self-consciously cutting edge in their respective eras but rendered little more than curious, giggle-inducing footnotes in rock ‘n’ roll history. Cases in point from the recent past: Sigue Sigue Sputnik, Berlin, Falco, Kajagoogoo.

And, on a bigger scale, Adam Ant.

Ant (nee Stuart Goddard) spearheaded the so-called “New Romantic” movement of the early ‘80s, fronting the visually garish group Adam and the Ants. Among the biggest names of the early MTV era, Ant has been all but invisible from music lately, concentrating most of his energy on an acting career.

However, he’s back. He’ll be at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano tonight, Thursday and Friday, performing mostly new material.

“ ‘New Romantic’ was a term coined by a guy called Richard James Burgess,” Ant recalls. “He was working with Spandau Ballet, producing their records. I suppose if you were New Romantic, you were English, you wore weird clothes and you were very effete. It was pure pop at a time when music got very hard, sort of menacing.”

Adam and the Ants dressed in outlandish, pirate-inspired fashions; wore loud, colorful greasepaint on their faces and played with a percussion-heavy, Bo Diddley-esque beat. The tribal ramifications of their look and sound captivated many a teen-age girl of the day, particularly in fad-susceptible England. Such Ant singles as “Dog Eat Dog,” “Antmusic” and “Young Parisians” were smash hits in the U.K., and similar success in the United States was anticipated by the rock press.

But the “Ant Invasion” met with a considerably cooler response on these shores. The backlash was particularly fierce among hard-core punks (for instance, the group Black Flag adopted the motto “Black Flag Kills Ants” around 1981).

“In England, you’re a very big fish in a small pond,” Ant, 38, now realizes. “Then we came over here in a very infantile stage, and there was a lot of resistance to us, especially from the industry, which remains very conservative to this day. Looking the way we did--BOOM! People thought, ‘Where did that come from?’ It wasn’t very subtle.”

In 1982, Ant left the band, toned down his look a bit, added flourishes of rockabilly and R & B to his sound, and enjoyed the biggest success of his career. “Goody Two Shoes,” his initial release on his own, topped the British charts and reached number 12 in the United States.

The following year brought another career highlight, an appearance on the much-ballyhooed “Motown 25th Anniversary” television special alongside a host of R & B legends (Michael Jackson, Diana Ross, the Temptations, et al) whom Ant considered “personal heroes.”

“The theme of the show was supposed to be ‘past, present and forever,’ and I was supposed to be the forever part,” Ant says, chuckling. “To come offstage and be greeted by the likes of Marvin Gaye and Smokey Robinson hugging you and congratulating you is just incredible. I’ve always had a very warm response to my music from the Motown people and from the black community in general, and it’s been very flattering to me. You wouldn’t associate that kind of three-minute pop--sort of English, bratty, swanky stuff--as appealing to anyone outside of London.”

His musical career climaxed when he opened the U.K. segment of “Live Aid” at Wembley Stadium in London in the summer of ’85. Ironically, it was then, he asserts, that he decided to get out of the music business for awhile.

“I’ve always felt it best to leave something while you’re at a peak. Adam and the Ants, as far as I’m concerned, I switched off at its peak. Live Aid I thought was another peak as a performer. Onstage at Wembley, I thought it would be a good time to get out. I took time off to get serious about doing something else.”

He took up acting and has played mostly small parts on television and in films. Most recently, he appeared in an episode of “Northern Exposure” on TV; co-produced (with ex-Doors drummer John Densmore) a play in Los Angeles called “Be Bop A Lula,” and played the lead in a horror/comedy film which he says most likely will be sold to HBO.

He thinks “acting is more confining than singing. You’ve go to be a lot more focused. But they’re both performing. They’re both playing pretend, really. Songs are stories as well.”

He anticipates that his next album will be released this summer. “Some of it is quite hard, dance-based music. And actually, the vocals are a bit medieval. We’ve also been working hard at incorporating acoustic guitars into this hard, dance-based stuff. It’s eclectic, as they say, hopefully.”

* Adam Ant sings tonight and Thursday at 8 p.m. and Friday at 9 p.m. at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. $25. (714) 496-8930.