Features
Antony And The Johnsons "What d'you think of all this rubbish I'm talking?" On God, the environment and why old people can’t make bad art.
Antony Hegarty spent nearly four years working on his third album, The Crying Light, the follow-up to 2005’s Mercury Music Prize-winning I Am A Bird Now. He resurfaced last year, making a guest appearance on the superb retro disco anthem Blind by Hercules And Love Affair. If it suggested a new hedonistic mood, it was a red herring. The keening melancholy heard on I_ Am A Bird Now_ has mushroomed into an all-encompassing dread. The 37-year-old English-born, New York-based singer has shifted focus from his own transgender issues to the environment. And he doesn’t like what he sees. “Like most people I find peace when I’m by the ocean or in the countryside,” he says, sitting on the bed of a London hotel eating cauliflower cheese. “But one of the worrying things about modern society is that it sees the natural world as something to go and visit on weekends or holidays. That’s just ridiculous. It’s part of us.”
How is the new album different from I Am A Bird Now?
OK. I’ll try and do this in sound-bites for you. The new album explores my relationship with the natural and elemental world. There are also some songs about my relationship with my mother and my father and by extension my relationship to the earth as my mother. That’s an idea that I’ve been exploring more and more recently. I’m also seeking to deconstruct some of my feelings of alienation from the world around me. I’ve realised that I’m made of the same water, carbon, elements, minerals, electricity as everything else. By extension, why should my spirit be of a different constitution to anything else? But that’s what they taught me in Catholic school.
What do you mean?
In Catholic school I was taught that we have some innately different spirit content as human beings. We’re somehow separate from the rest of the world. But our civilizations are all made of the natural world. We can’t be separated from it. We can’t take a single breath or a single step without being supported and engaged by it.
When did you first become concerned about environmental issues?
I learned a lot of it from Kazuo Ohno, the Japanese butoh dancer. Butoh is characterised by quite slow movement. Oftentimes they’re reaching beyond the human form to embody other aspects of the world. They’ll seek to embody inner momentum of a rock or a salmon or a tree or a cloud or one of their ancestors. It’s always reaching beyond that local sense of self. There’s a lot of whittling things down to their essence. He’s 102-years old now. It’s very moving to see an old man moving in that way. I was really inspired by him. I was trying to look at ways to possibly translate some of his ideas into music.
Was The Crying Light an easy record to make?
No. It was arduous. I worked on it for over two years. It’s all songs I wrote between 2001 and 2007. I kind of skipped over the songs I wrote after I Am A Bird Now. I wrote that album from ’93 to ’96. Then I wrote a bunch of songs form ’96 to ’01, which I always call America. But for this album I skipped forward because it seemed timely. We’re all grappling with this sense of a changing ecology, grappling with a sense of each of our own responsibilities to this change and we’re trying to evolve through it. What d’you think of all this rubbish I’m talking?
I think that people are right to be concerned about the environment…
I think that one of the goals of patriarchal theologies is to separate people from the environment. A lot of the big religions are built on a fear of women, and fear of the feminine. There was a much more feminine sense of the spirit nature of the world before the birth of these monotheistic sky god religions. But that was systematically eradicated to make way for this new kind of relationship with the world, which was about using it as a resource, hoarding it, collecting it for wealth, getting to the top of the pile. It’s almost like the male archetype has lost control and is holding the feminine archetype hostage. I think the environmental problems facing the world are all wrapped up in misogyny and patriarchy. That’s my impression of it anyhow.
Really?
Yes. A lot of men are trained to think that they don’t have a feminine aspect. They think they have to separate from the feminine aspect as soon as they’re conscious, just like a lot of adults think they have to separate from the child aspect as soon as they become adults. It’s bullshit. All kids are born with a masculine and feminine aspect. People will always carry a child inside them until the day they die. You need to clear enough space in your heart to let that child live. You need to be a good enough person to self-parent, to hold your child but not suffocate it, because in your child is your vulnerability, it’s your expressiveness, it’s your creativeness, it’s your playfulness and mystery. The male archetype, anything he doesn’t understand or he can’t control, he wants to kill it or pretend that it doesn’t exist. If he could fall back in the service of the feminine he would be able to kneel in front of the things that he doesn’t understand and be nurtured by them and cradled by them. What do you think about that?
Er…
All this bullshit about paradise elsewhere. If you do well enough here, use all the resources here, kill enough things, hoard enough wives, you can go to paradise, a big, white blank place where there’ll be a million virgins waiting for you. Or nothing at all, most of all nothing that ever gets born or dies. If gets born or dies, it might be feminine.
Is it fair to say that your Catholic upbringing had a big impact on you?
As I’ve gotten older I’ve become more empowered as a transgender person and more able to embrace my difference. The wonderful thing about being born transgender is that you’re swimming against the tide of your own family by the time you’re five years old, so you have a particularly strong sense of your difference, especially in the face of institutions like the Catholic Church. By the time you’re nine years old they’ve condemned you to the depths of hell. You go through a long period of anger and resentment. But as you get older you can start to emerge.
Serious stuff. What do you do for fun?
Gossip. I love gossiping with my friends. But I don’t gossip in a mean way.
Do you worry about getting older?
No, I’m really looking forward to it. I’m more and more drawn to people who are a lot older than me. I love the way old people look. I think they look so good. And it doesn’t matter how bad an artist you are, by the time you’re old, you’re a good artist.
Maybe the bad ones have given up by that stage…
I just think if you do art and you’re old, it’s always good. It’s always beautiful. I just think you’ve got all that experience under your belt. Truly. What bad artist do you know who’s old?
The Crying Light is out now on Rough Trade.
- 13.02.09
- Post a comment
-
