Drag queens and Japanese hermaphrodites

Journalists rarely apologise for their mistakes. Newspapers can get away with make huge volte-faces in what they claim to stand for, since the reading public has a tremendously short attention span. Journalists are rarely held to account for their mistakes, since what they write one week is often forgotten the next. So it’s time to make an admission: if any of you placed a bet on my prediction, made four weeks ago, about who was going to win the Mercury Music Award, then you’re unlikely to be celebrating this weekend.

I predicted that the Keiser Chiefs were going to win, a Leeds-based band playing angular, guitar-driven pop. I wasn’t alone – the group were also the bookmakers’ favourites. However, it wasn’t the Chiefs who walked home with the prize. The winner was the British born Antony Hegarty, who has lived in the USA since he was 12 years old and performs under the name ‘ Antony and the Johnsons’. "He's an American, really," said one of the Kaiser Chiefs. "It's a good album, but it's daft he's got in on a technicality.” Regardless of whether a New York resident should be allowed to win an award for British musicians, ‘I am a Bird Now’ is not a good album. It’s a wonderful album. Indeed, it’s undoubtedly one of the strangest, most unique, most beautiful records you’ll hear all year.

Antony grew up in Chichester , a city on the South coast of England , and performed as a choirboy during his youth. It’s this androgynous, almost other-worldly choirboy’s voice that makes Antony and the Johnsons’ work so hauntingly memorable. With its accompaniment of cello, piano, violin and other classical instruments, it’s could hardly be called a rock album. Most of the musicians who perform on the album come from a background of avant-garde music and musical performance - and it’s the artistic side of the group that’s been making many of the headlines. Antony , himself a striking six-foot four transvestite, is often accompanied on stage by a Japanese hermaphrodite mathematician called Julia. The Johnsons performances themselves often more resemble artistic ‘happenings’, involving costume, dance, and ‘sound collage’ as well as collaborations with other New York experimental artists.

Indeed, after the release of their first album, Antony and the Johnsons managed to attract the attention of one of contemporary music’s biggest names, Laurie Anderson. They also managed to suitably impress her husband, rock legend Lou Reed. Anderson once compared hearing Hegarty’s voice to “hearing Elvis sing for the first time.” It’s not an unfitting comparison.

Lou Reeds gravely tones actually feature on the album, as does Boy George, a huge role model and source of inspiration for the young Hegarty. It’s unsurprising, given all this, that the album is shot through with meditations on big questions like sex, gender and death. In “Hope There’s Someone,” Hegarty considers fears of dying alone, while the song “Today I Am A Boy” comes across as the musings of a sexually confused child, convinced that one day he will grow up into a woman. “My Lady Story,” perhaps the most musically and lyrically moving track on the album, manages to create a bitter-sweet collage from a number of bleak subjects, managing to memorably rhyme the word “annihilation” with “breast amputation.”

Though musically the album has nothing to do with the kitschy sound of synth-pop, the influence of the likes of gay icons like Marc Almond, Boy George and Jimmy Somerville can clearly be seen. The only difference is that while Almond et al only ever produced a rather self-consciously trashy 80s sound that is very much anchored in a particular style and period of social history, Antony and the Johnsons have created something quite timeless. Many of the other favourites to win the £20,000 Mercury Prize are very much concerned with working with the sounds that are fashionable right now whether this be punk-funk (Bloc Party) or ragga (Sri Lankan refugee rapper MIA, for example). Anthony and the Johnsons are worthy winners because they managed to create an album that you’ll still be listening to in ten years time. I only hope this last prediction stands up a little better than my last efforts to read the future…

 

© Tom Wilson / Business Magazin 2005