Astral Weeks, Music From Big Pink, Funhouse, Exile On Main Street, Berlin, Deserter’s Songs, Funeral: the most enduring records seem rooted in a palpable sense of place, even if it’s an imaginal one. The actual location evoked on Antony & the Johnsons’ third full length album The Crying Light might be unclear (and Antony Hegarty’s voice often evokes Van’s admission of feeling like “nothin’ but a stranger in this world”) but it’s no less powerful for all of that.
Born in the southern English town of Chichester, of English-Irish parentage, Hegarty spent most of his childhood moving around California, but found his voice through working late night drag and cabaret shows in downtown New York, recreating Isabella Rossellini’s Dorothy Vallens character from Blue Velvet. The experience made him a formidable interpretive singer, capable of tackling Lynch/Badalamenti compositions like ‘Mysteries Of Love’, the Velvets’ ‘Candy Says’ or Leonard Cohen’s ‘If It Be Your Will’, the showstopper in Lian Lunson’s I’m Your Man documentary.
Hegarty’s choirboy vocal style evokes Nina Simone and Little Jimmy Scott, Elvis at his eeriest, Tim and Jeff Buckley (he’s cited This Mortal Coil’s version of ‘Song To The Siren’ as his vocal holy grail), but mostly he sounds like an old black lady trapped in a white boy’s body. Many of us first heard first heard that voice on an austere, lunar version of ‘Perfect Day’ from Lou Reed’s double set The Raven, but further investigation of Antony and the Johnsons’ self-titled debut revealed a range that could include Roxy-like lounge lizardry, Berlin burlesque and after hours torch song trilogies.
The ensemble’s second full-length album, 2005’s I Am A Bird Now, contrasted tales of cross-gender longing (‘For Today I Am A Boy’) with slow-burning soul testimonials and abusive lover confessionals like ‘Fistful Of Love’. Perhaps Hegarty’s best known song, ‘Hope There’s Someone’, expressed the dread of expiring alone in some institutionalized rooming-house of the heart, but it also carried within its stillness the hope that even if such a fate befalls us, we might just summon the grace to bear it. I Am A Bird Now won the 2005 Mercury Prize and tied with Arcade Fire’s debut in most of the end of year polls; it also made Antony something of an unlikely star.
“I got an apartment, a nice place to live, and my focus is on the creative now as opposed to working on other jobs, which is great,” he says when asked how the success of that album changed his life. “I live full time as an artist now, so I guess that’s been the biggest difference.”
The Crying Light is the fruit of that newfound freedom, a collection of slow, stately and surreal songs with titles like ‘Her Eyes Are Underneath The Ground’, ‘Epilepsy Is Dancing’ and ‘Aeon’, that seek to connect the ecological with the spiritual and physical. Nowhere more so than ‘Another World’ which, like Roy Orbison’s ‘It’s Over’, is a lost-love song dressed in the sackcloth of the apocalypse.
“I’ve been so despondent about the things I’ve learned about the direction we’re headed environmentally,” Hegarty says. “I guess rather than shutting down about that stuff, or going into denial and saying, ‘I can’t deal with it’, I wanted to just move through the landscape of it in my imagination, emotionally, to see if that could bring me somewhere. That was my motivation, to say in as clear and concise a language as I could how I felt when I engaged this notion of a vanishing natural world. So it’s an expression of a feeling rather than a fact.”
The Crying Light (a typically Hegarty-esque conjunction of words) often seems to seek, if not refuge from, then contrast to the hypomaniacal rush of the city. A still and holy artefact, it’s located in shady glades, planted near water.
“I don’t really know where it is in the world,” Antony says, “it’s more like a garden in my own mind. I’ve been thinking a lot that as an artist you’re always playing in the shadows of the landscape and the earth. There’s a song on the album called ‘Everglade’ that describes a sort of twinkling pastoral country stream… I guess it would be some kind of deciduous forest.”
It comes from a long tradition. Wordsworth, Hopkins, Blake and Basho used the natural world as their analogue for the metaphysical. Ecological philosophers and psychogeographers have speculated that any individual who dwells in the antennae-jamming ant colony of the city suffers simultaneous synthetic overload and natural sensory deprivation. Our receptors have, through millennia of agrarian existence, been programmed to receive education and information from other species, avian, insect, mammal and plant life. In the post-post-industrial clusterfuck of the metropolis, we’re bombarded with signals, signifiers, signs and neon memes generated by other humans – usually designed to sell us something. Consequently, the repetitive psychic strain of urban existence incurs a kind of psychological and neural inbreeding resulting from exposure to the most exploitative manifestations of human corporate culture, as opposed to the intricate fractal art of the natural environment.
“The person on the cover of my album is a Muto dancer,” Antony says, “and one of the preoccupations of Muto is to emulate or embody the atomic, or the essential, or spirit of movement of other things, whether it be a tree or a rock or a cloud or a ball of light, and in this way he’s developed a sort of creative empathy for other aspects of the world around us, and that transcends the human form. It’s not the human experience anymore, it’s this idea that we can take this leap into a creative experience that could embody the experience of any living thing, and I think that’s been a big inspiration to me in my approach to singing as well as writing this record.”
On The Crying Light, Hegarty sings not a secularist but a pastoral gospel. If Pentecostal spirituals regarded the earthly realm as a valley of woes, sorrows and poverties which must be endured in the hope of better things to come in the next life, Hegarty is intent on experiencing the Edenic in the here and now. In other words, The Crying Light is a pantheist album.
“Yeah, I would say so,” he says. “You know, I was raised as a Catholic, and I feel they kind of sought to divorce me from my environment, to make me feel like my roots were elsewhere, y’know? That the source of my spirit was some sky-god and we’re just passing through this place and it’s a sort of purgatory or a work ground where we can sort of figure out how worthy we are before we head off to heaven.
“And as I’ve gotten older and more confident in my own thinking, I’m moving more and more toward the natural world in search for a place I belong, the place from which my body was born, literally, in the way that my body’s made of my mother’s body, in the same way it could be said that my body’s made of the earth, it’s the same water and minerals and electricity and carbon. In every way I’m a child of this place and totally dependent on this place for every breath I take, and every step that I take is supported and cradled by the environment.
“But y’know, I wasn’t really raised with an awareness like that; it’s something that I’ve more come to as I’ve gotten older, especially in grappling with these issues of the changing ecology, I’ve been evolving in my awareness of my dependency on this place, as opposed to thinking that this place is just a resource, or somewhere I live out my all-important life. And some of the disconnect that I feel I’ve carried with me as a person in society today, in relation to the world, is something I would call my brokenness.”
For all the beauty and ritual of the Mass, old school Catholicism insidiously programmed children to feel like strangers in their own bodies. It attempted to control the individual by instilling at a young age a superstitious but intrinsic distrust and disgust of natural instincts, primarily the pleasure centres. Give us the boy until 12, the Jesuits said, and we’ll show you the man.
“It is so uncomfortable,” Hegarty says, “and in my mind sought to divorce me from the feminine mysterious, which for me is the way that I connect, especially as a transgender person, my nature. So I just got to a point where I… I’m in process y’know, just trying to work through some of this stuff with a sense of finding a place where I belong, reclaiming a sense of home, just to break down some of the walls that separate me from the world around me, and help me to be more present in a joyful way, a feeling way.”
Consider the following passages from Fire in the Head: Shamanism and the Celtic Spirit, by Tom Cowan, which, if nothing else, put glam rock in perspective.
“Shamans frequently encounter androgynous and bisexual beings and spirit guides in their initiation journeys. They play a key role in the drastic reorganization of categories that shatters the shaman’s old perception of reality and opens him or her to the multiple dimensions of existence. Along these same lines, gender ambiguity frequently characterizes many shamans who themselves were gay or lesbian. Homosexuality and androgyny create a liminal status that helps to legitimize the shaman as interpreter and go-between on both social and spiritual levels.
In Siberia a gay male shaman was called “a soft man being.” In Native American communities, a young man who showed an interest in women’s activities, crossdressed, and adopted feminine behaviour often became a spiritual leader or healer, his decision reinforced by encouraging dreams and vision quests. It was assumed the spirits had touched him with some special magic, power, or wisdom that would be valuable for the community. This berdache tradition among American Indians (after the term used by French explorers, meaning someone who blends the masculine and feminine) is currently being restored by contemporary gay men in the Native American community to the honored and valued position it held before Christian missionaries discredited it.”
“I think people have always crossed that divide,” Hegarty says. “Again it’s about stepping out of our experience in the day-to-day and trying to get a more expansive view of what’s going on, so I think someone who seems to embody both masculine and feminine experience, maybe they can have some additional insight. I mean, it’s difficult to say when you’re talking about principals versus reality, but I’m definitely into, especially what you said about the Native Americans, that notion of the two spirits has been a real inspiration to me. Also, in so many ways a lot of the indigenous pre-patriarchal monotheistic approaches seem quite wholesome to me. Certainly it wasn’t true of all Native Americans, that they embraced an idea about the two-spirit, but a lot of them did.”
How important is the role of the performer as shaman or healer?
“Y’know, it’s funny because I often go to music as a source of healing for myself, so it may not be the musician as much as the music. There is something magic about music, it’s a sort of creative boon, something about that wash of colour and light and the play of feeling and spirit in the air that does renew or create a wholeness again. For me, as a singer, I move towards it. So I’m probably pursuing the same thing as a listener. When I listen to someone else singing I’m always looking for that glimmer of connectivity that helps me feel more whole. There is something magic about it.”
The darkest periods of a person’s life are often characterised by a loss of appetite for art, particularly music. It’s a sure indicator of some kind of psychic malaise at work.
“I completely relate to that,” Hegarty says. “It’s like dance too. I think it’s something we all used to do a lot more of. Now we do it more as spectators, but in my grandfather’s day everyone got together on Fridays at someone’s house and everyone brought their instruments and everyone sang and danced and it was just a part of life. I think that’s just a very normal and necessary expression of our spirit and of our nature. It’s in our bones.
“(But) capitalism has sorted it out so that now we go and listen to someone. The nature of society today has made it less of an event that we can participate in, but hopefully we’ll get back to that in the years to come, and everyone feels that they can sing and dance. That’s our birthright. That’s a very normal, wholesome thing to do. Even if you’re expressing something sad, it’s so important to give it voice or form. It’s a gift that we’re given, creativity, it’s a really under-utilised tool, it offers so much reward and so much potential for, as you said, healing and transformation and comfort. There is something at the heart of each of us that just needs to feel free and express the joy of being alive.”
