Three years after Antony Hegarty first seduced the world with his ethereal voice, unflinching introspection and spine-tingling songs, he's back with a new record, a new confidence and a new sense of ecological destiny. He tells all to Jim Carroll
BACK IN 2005, Antony The Johnsons released their second album, I Am A Bird Now. At the time, frontman Antony Hegarty was a fixture of New York's avant-garde music scene, someone under the wing of such figures as Lou Reed and Hal Willner, but largely unknown beyond that pale.
By the end of 2005, everything had changed for the man with the voice of an angel tucked inside the frame of a giant. That striking, incandescent album of deeply personal songs about Hegarty's transgender experiences won the Mercury Music Prize and went on to sell more than half-a-million copies worldwide.
To mark the occasion, Hegarty and the ensemble made their way triumphantly uptown to fill New York's Carnegie Hall. That show was just one of a rattle of extraordinary concerts in 2005. In venues worldwide, audiences were hushed and wowed by deep, brittle, majestic epics delivered by that voice which sounded like it was transmitting from another planet.
By all reckonings, then, 2005 was a hell of a year for the London lad with the Donegal kin who grew up in California and eventually found his spiritual home when he arrived in Manhattan in 1990. Hegarty's name has been in bold-print many times since. Collaborations with Hercules Love Affair, Bjork, Marc Almond and film-maker Charles Atlas, and various other activities, including an exhibition of his drawings in London's Isis Gallery, have kept him in the limelight.
A stunning new album, The Crying Light, means it's time for him to start talking about himself again. In past interviews, Hegarty has come across as guarded and taciturn. Today, as a wintry London day turns to dusk outside his hotel window, he is garrulous, open and happy to talk at length about whatever's up for discussion.
ON HOLIDAYS IN DONEGAL: "IT WAS THE 1970s. MY GREAT UNCLE WAS STILL LIVING IN A BRICK ROOM WITH A THATCH ROOF"
For a start, he's quite keen to expand on his Irish background, something previously just mentioned. "My father's Irish, London-Irish. He was born in England and raised by Irish people and I was very close to my grandmother who was Irish.
"All of his brothers and sisters had moved to London in the 1930s but like all Irish families, they stuck really close together. Every summer, they'd take their kids back to this two-roomed house in Donegal where 16 of them had been raised.
"This was during the 1970s and my great uncle was still living in this single brick room with a thatch roof beside a stream. There was no electricity, no toilet, no running water, so it was a bit of a shock for a child from Chichester. It's amazing to think how far we've come in just two or three generations. I'm so grateful now that I got to see it."
Echoes of this rural world have made their way into his work. "When you sing, you can sing for lots of different reasons. I love to sing for ghosts of voices from the past and I love how the voice of my family can ricochet through time and pop up here and there in my work.
"When I was doing some shows recently with the London Symphony Orchestra, I was thinking so much about my grandmother. She would just laugh her head off to see me on the stage with that orchestra and to know where I had come from.
"I often think about the kids who would have been born around the same time as she was, the turn of the century, who never made it to adulthood because of TB or consumption. I'm sure they all had dreams which were never realised. I find it so touching to think about those stories and all those dreams because they're such a part of my story. I'm just the endpoint of a long line which goes back to the beginning of time."
ON POP MUSIC: "THE WONDERFUL THING ABOUT BEING A POP SINGER IS THAT POP MUSIC IS SUPPORTED BY THE PUBLIC"
I Am A Bird Now brought Hegarty huge success and, most importantly, an audience. "I was older than many people are when success first comes their way so I could ground myself better than some. I'm not the person I was when I was 23, running around the nightclubs. I didn't have a lot of expectations and know that things can come and go.
"My success has afforded me so much opportunity and I'm so grateful for that. It has also given me an audience, people who are interested in finding out who I am, what I'm doing and what I am exploring.
"The wonderful thing about being a pop singer is that pop music is supported by the general public. If you make any money selling records, it's from the one dollar or one pound or one euro from each person at a time buying your album. Of course, the record company get to keep the rest of the money but it works like that, one dollar at a time."
ON HIS ENVIRONMENT: "I WAS RAISED TO BELIEVE NATURE WAS SOMETHING YOU ALLOWED INTO YOUR HOUSE IN THE SHAPE OF A POTTED PLANT"
Like the previous album, The Crying Light is about relationships and experiences, though this time Hegarty's focus is on external themes and worlds. "The last album was very internalised; it was about me exploring a series of relationships with myself. This album is more about my relationship with the world around me and seeks to remove this wall of alienation which was put on me as a child when I was separated from the natural world.
"As I've got older and more confident, it has become easier for me to feel more comfortable about who and what I am. My body is made of the same stuff as the rest of the world, the same water and carbon and minerals, and is as dependent on the Earth and its environment.
"It seems obvious, but like so many other people, I was raised to believe that nature was something you visited on the weekend or that we allowed into our houses in the shape of a potted plant. We believed that our destiny was totally separate to the destiny of the planet. Now, we're at a point where we can see ecology collapsing and how our future is related to everything around us.
"I now have a much healthier relationship with the world around me than I was taught to have growing up. It's frightening to realise that it's a much more dependant relationship than we thought we had."
ON INTERVIEWS: "I START PONTIFICATING ABOUT EVERYTHING. I GET SO ASHAMED OF MYSELF SOMETIMES"
Hegarty fears he might be seen as moralising from on high when he embarks on this kind of explanation. "I'm really aware that I could be seen as lecturing. I do such a good job in my work of keeping the focus on myself, and then I do an interview like this and start pontificating about everything. I get so ashamed of myself sometimes. But I'm trying to develop as an artist and if me outlining what I think about a process is useful to someone out there, then I'm very glad.
"I talked about myself before as a transgender person and I am always happy to have that discussion. It's the lens through which I see everything. But it's not the focus of this album - this is about my relationship with the world philosophically.
"When I did the album, I didn't really think about or discuss any of this; it just came naturally. The only song which was, I suppose, worked on with this theme in mind was Another World. I wanted to say something in very clear language that articulated how I felt about what was happening with ecology. Other than that, the songs just came out me as by-products of my experience. It is only in retrospect that I can circle them together and try to make an arc."
• The Crying Lightis out on Rough Trade on January 16th. Antony The Johnsons play Dublin's Vicar Street on May 31st and Belfast's Waterfront Hall on June 1st
How Antony found his sound
WHEN it came to developing his voice, Antony Hegarty took his cues from other singers. "It's what all the other animals do you learn by listening." In his case, black American singers provided the inspiration: "They're the ones who really know what's going on."
One of his first inspirations was Nina Simone. "She is one of the greatest teachers you can have as a vocalist. I totally immersed myself in her work and her approach. I really learned to sing and find my way from watching how she dealt with a song and applied her voice to her experiences. It took years and it only really came together when I started to invest more emotion in it."
Then, there was Ray Charles. "I remember when I was 18 hearing him sing "Yesterday" and it was a revelation. To hear him doing it with so much ecstatic energy was life- changing for me - it made me realise you could really raise spiritsas a singer. I thought I understood Yesterday and then he shifed the song and I went 'ah, OK!'. You can make a different investment in a song."
Hegarty also tips the cap to Little Jimmy Scott. "I saw him perform at Joe's Pub in New York ages ago and then Hal Willnerstarted talking to me about him. I saw him recently at the Iridium. He's in a wheelchair now but he sings like an angel. A gorgeous man.
"I wanted to do something special for that show at Carnegie Halland I thought if there's one thing I should do, it's to bring on someone who deserves to be on that stage. It was fantastic to have Little Jimmy there."
