Two aggressive blasts on a synthesiser are followed by a disorienting, ambient swirl. Under a sweet melody, a crunching beat precedes a vocal that mixes outrage with hysteria, spewing out a stream of consciousness: “Fourteen-year-old boy rapes 80-year-old man/ Tickets to the Met, sweetcorn from the can/ Baby’s in the whitest house playing with his toys/ Earthquakes, forest fires, hot Brazilian boys/ 67 yoghurt flavours, which one do you want?'
Then the pace slows right down: “As I enjoyed distraction, she just slipped away/ It didn’t seem to matter/ How much she had prayed/ They took her in an ambulance and that is where she died/ And still unto this very day I don’t think I have cried.” Then the crunching beat returns and we’re back off down the rabbit hole: “A new shooting, fresh for breakfast/ This one’s in Florida, not in Texas/ Manchurian candidate, cute subconscious trigger/ Have you seen the remake, I have to watch my figure…”
“Metamorphosis” is the lead song from John Grant’s new album, Love is Magic. Heard at extreme volume in a small London studio and in Grant’s company, it’s hugely impressive: a vertiginous mix of the personal and the general.
The song’s springboard was the death of Grant’s mother: “She died in 1995,” he says simply. “It was a very tumultuous time, in the middle of dealing with ‘the sexual thing’. She never didn't love me but she wasn't very happy about that. I was really self-absorbed and getting into the drinking and partying so I could express my gay self. That’s what it took, lots of alcohol and drugs in order to feel comfortable enough to be me. I felt freed by her death, in a way, and I felt guilty about that.
“I think you should talk about stuff like that directly,” he says. “In the song, I talk about how her face is just a suggestion in the dream, and the brain is trying to figure out what the person would look like now, mixed with your memory of them. It comes up just as a blur, in the dream. I think that’s probably something millions of people must experience.”
Perhaps it’s not surprising that it’s taken 23 years for Grant to channel this life-changing event into a complex, powerful song. Most of his work — as evidenced by his three solo albums to date — is to do with process: examining and naming his deep feelings of alienation as a gay man growing up in small-town America and then, having internalised the disapproving message he received about his sexuality into self-hatred, trying comprehensively to destroy himself over a decade’s worth of heavy drinking, cocaine abuse and unsafe sex.
On record and in real life, Grant refuses to filter himself. But the harrowing feelings and events he recounts are transformed by his native intelligence and sharp sense of humour: “I like dealing with absurdity — black humour and sarcasm — mixed with everyday life. The way you perceive things, nobody else can perceive them that way.” Just as his albums have increasingly blended cutting-edge electronica into his love of soft rock, his confessional lyrics, delivered in a baleful baritone, have become increasingly blurred with self-mockery and attention to the world outside.
Grant has blossomed into one of the most original artists in contemporary music, each of his records addressing his demons, yet avoiding solipsism with unsparing, self-lacerating wit. What marked out his 2010 debut, Queen of Denmark, alongside its touching melodies, was the emotional honesty about his struggles with depression, low self-esteem, addiction and homophobia. It was uncompromisingly, unselfconsciously gay in a way that felt brand new. For a depressive with substance abuse issues, a prescription for anti-anxiety medicine and a string of disastrous past relationships to draw on, Grant’s music could be uproariously funny.
There have been critical plaudits — a Brit Award nomination, pole placings in “Best of the Year” album lists, across-the-board genuflection from the music press — and various pop collaborators: Robbie Williams, Kylie Minogue, Elbow, a revamp of “Sweet Painted Lady” from Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. Yet he remains a cult concern, a draw at the Green Man and Edinburgh festivals and the kind of singer who is asked to perform the songs of Scott Walker alongside Jarvis Cocker, Richard Hawley and Susanne Sundfør at the Late Night Proms, for BBC Radio 6 Music.
That’s perhaps only right for someone whose most memorable songs include “Sigourney Weaver” (“I feel just like Winona Ryder/ In that movie about vampires/ And she couldn’t get that accent right/ Neither could that other guy”) and “GMF” (“Half of the time I think I’m in some movie/ I play the underdog, of course/ I wonder who they’ll get to play me/ Maybe they could dig up Richard Burton’s corpse.” The chorus goes, “But I am the greatest motherfucker/ That you’re ever gonna meet/ From the top of my head/ Down to the tips of the toes on my feet”).
Still, his fan base has expanded with each album — charting in the UK at 59, 16 and five respectively. His two most recent records, 2013’s Pale Green Ghosts and 2015’s Grey Tickles, Black Pressure, were inspired by his move to Reykjavik in 2011, and Icelandic electronic experimentalists GusGus are among the albums’ collaborators. No doubt success has taken its time, and one may have expected to find Grant blindsided by turning 50 this year. Instead, he seems more content and focused than ever before. As he says, “There’s definitely a psychological process going on. Acceptance of the self, but not going over into smug cunt territory. I go to meetings and I go to therapy. I’ve been sober for... if I make it to 1 August, that will be 14 years. Still trying to let go of the past. It's frustrating, not wanting to project the past on to present surroundings. That’s the goal, every day.”
Love is Magic continues the upward momentum, that rising curve of artistic fulfilment meeting public acclaim. The hurts of the past are ever present but he now sounds like someone with the confidence to face down his demons. “I enjoy connecting with people and talking to people,” he says. “I think if somebody is always willing to meet you halfway and there is some self-awareness on their part about what they’re going through, then I can communicate with them.”
Though he has moved away from conventional balladry into a more electronic and complex musical palette, his lyrics have cut-up raw confessionals with a more general sense of disgust and fury: at the state of consciousness and the world near the end of the second decade of the 21st century. “Metamorphosis” and the other new songs that I hear — “Tempest”, “Is He Strange”, “Diet Gum” and “The Common Snipe” — could have only been made in 2018: it’s the sense of someone creating order out of chaos, and using black humour to deal with pain and confusion.
Just as Grant can flip from the confessional to the sarcastic, he can turn from self-laceration to fury, from bombardment to tender emotion, in the space of one line. The ground is always shifting under your feet. In a way, he sets himself up as an example of how disadvantage can be turned around and used as a positive inspiration; a feeling explored in songs that celebrate troubled heroines like those played by Geraldine Page and Sigourney Weaver. It’s this sense of becoming, or rather of overcoming, that makes him so compelling.
I meet Grant on a sunny spring morning in the area that writer Colin MacInnes called Napoli: that curious triangle of London between north Ladbroke Grove, Harrow Road and the main railway line into Paddington. Transformed from the dangerous slum depicted in MacInnes' novel Absolute Beginners, it nevertheless remains an interzone: half-empty, liminal. Grant is alone — no press agent, nothing but himself. He is ebullient and outgoing on initial contact, a great big bear of a man in sunglasses, woolly hat, full beard and a T-shirt depicting the 1962 science-fiction movie, The Brain that Wouldn’t Die.
As we move from the studio up Kensal Road to lunch at a local café, the relaxed mood continues. Over falafels and salad, Grant is an enthusiastic interviewee: proficient in several languages, the conversation flipping from the delights of Eighties electronic pop to owls to various pertinent gay issues. For all his documented bouts of self-doubt and depression, he is excellent company: alert, alive, engaged with the world and prepared to be surprised.
He was born in summer 1968, into a strict religious family in Michigan. When Grant was 12, his father got a job at the aerospace company Lockheed Martin and the family moved to Colorado.
“I feel like I knew I was gay really early,” he says. “Somewhere between five and 10. I remember seeing Guyana Tragedy: the Story of Jim Jones [a TV movie about the Peoples Temple, an upstart religious movement led by “mad messiah” Jim Jones, that came to an abrupt end with a mass suicide in Jonestown] with Powers Boothe playing Jim Jones, and I got upset by it, and my dad noticed that, and what was upsetting me was that Powers Boothe was having sex with males in his congregation, and that was a turn-on for me. It bothered me because I knew that was a problem. I would have let my dad think at that time that it was the mass death that was bothering me.”
In a teetotal, Methodist household, where swearing was met with corporal punishment, homosexuality didn’t feel like much of an option. “I’ve always felt like [my family] would much prefer me to be a drug addict than a homosexual,” Grant once said. “Like that would be a much more attractive option than being a fucking pervert.”
“I remember a guy threatening me that he was going to tell everybody what I was doing with his cousin, who was my neighbour, and he and I were always fiddling around with each other’s bits,” Grant tells me today. “The church was huge in our lives, at that time. So, your soul was at risk and also your reputation in the community, which had nothing to do with religion. There was a whole group who hated you because you were a faggot, and had nothing to do with religion. And at home, it was simply not an option, because it was an abomination. Which was a big word back then.”
Early in our conversation, I mention a lyric in the song “Magma Arrives”, from Grey Tickles, Black Pressure, which relates hot lava to a “shame that runs so deep” — a disturbingly accurate description of crippling self-hatred. “That’s my favourite track,” he says, “and nobody ever says anything about it. For years I would avoid any situation where I would turn red in front of people. People would stare and ask me what was wrong. ‘Look how red he is! What is wrong with him?’”
“The song,” he says, “is a story about a boy who makes a pact with a devil. The demon’s name is Magma and he is the demon of shame. He is dispatched to deal with the child who doesn’t know that when you get the three wishes, each one comes with a horrible side effect. This one is having your insides replaced with hot lava. It’s horrific, like PTSD. Nobody believes me when I say, everywhere I went when I was young, for the first 20 years, people would glance at me, then do a double take, and then whisper to their friends, and then the attack. The verbal attack.”
Even the music he liked marked him out at high school, Abba and Devo: “fag music. After Abba and Supertramp and Journey and Kiss, I got really into new wave, as we called it, new romantic stuff, Visage and Blancmange and New Order. Cabaret Voltaire and Yello and Depeche Mode,” which is where his relationship with dance music, obvious on his later records, truly began. “I got really into the 4AD [record label] scene, Dead Can Dance became huge for me, Cocteau Twins, Throwing Muses. [Theatrical German singer] Nina Hagen was my number one back then. [Her 1982 debut album] Nunsexmonkrock is my favourite record of all time.”
The conservative Midwest, Grant says, made being gay catastrophic to his self-worth: “I struggled with my sexuality from 13 to about 26 or 27,” he says. “Then I got on antidepressants and finally stopped feeling the anxiety that I’d been feeling, that was ruining my life. Depression and anxiety that made it difficult to stand in line at the grocery store, or sit in class. I couldn’t sit in class, so I dropped out of college.
“I got so tired of being laughed at,” he continues. “People looking at me with disgust in their eyes and expressing that out loud. I became so hyper-aware of myself that I couldn’t sit or stand in public without having severe panic attacks — and that ruled my life for 10 years. It was horrifying. And if you say it out loud, you know, you’re just a weak cunt. Too weak to stand up for yourself. And that simply isn’t accurate. If you believe that you’re getting what you deserve, of course you’re not going to stand up for yourself, because you agree with them.”
The next phase of Grant’s life is better documented. His stint as singer/keyboardist with Denver indie band The Czars was sabotaged by an intense immersion in sex, drugs and hedonism which turned into self-obliteration. After a decade of positive reviews but poor sales the band imploded. Eventually, Grant decided to join Alcoholics Anonymous. He moved to New York, quit music and became a hospital interpreter.
“When you give up all your toys, the coke, the destructive sex habits, all this stuff that you’ve been filling your time with, then you’ve got to learn how to live again,” he says. “I think you do have to be involved in some sort of programme, you can’t just quit all that and not put anything in its place.” Indeed, after he was diagnosed as HIV-positive in 2011, Grant found himself replacing substances with sex. “If I can’t go out and do fat rails [of coke] off the bathroom floor at a club, I want to at least have my sex, because sex is natural,” he told Dorian Lynskey in The Observer in 2013. “Nobody’s going to deny me that, right? But that’s just cheating. I was out there fucking for a purpose, to hurt myself, to punish myself for not being good enough.”
It was with some reluctance that Grant was pulled back into music in 2010 by the Texan folk-rock band Midlake, who he’d worked with when he was in The Czars, and who had continued to believe in him. They produced Queen of Denmark, which became a word-of-mouth sensation. That record was literate and confessional, its melodic rock masking a sequence of astonishing lyrics that mixed explicit gay tenderness — a song to his partner was called “TC and Honeybear” — with deep alienation (“Sigourney Weaver”) and scalding rage (“Jesus Hates Faggots” — “The arrogance it takes to walk around in the world the way you do/ It turns my brain to jelly every time/ The rage and fear I’m feeling have begun to make me sick/ And I think that I might be about to commit a crime”).
This range of sweet and sour, deep and dark emotions set against appealing melodies is what characterises Grant as a major talent. On “Glacier”, from Pale Green Ghosts, you can hear the emotions frozen by fear and self-hatred crack into righteous anger. Grant passes through the shock of people saying things “that sting and leave you wincing” to the refrain: “Don’t you pay them fuckers as they say no never mind/ They don’t give two shits about you/ It’s the blind leading the blind/ What they want is commonly/ Referred to as a theocracy”.
“Glacier” is “the sound of glaciers calving,” says Grant, “melting and cracking and falling off. It’s about expressing your personality, which changes from moment to moment, and I’m allowing myself to express that in the music. That’s what everyday life is like. You can be in the peace and quiet of the studio and it has a particular vibe, and then you go out into the street and you see people attacking each other, or having lunch, and that I think is what the album is like, too. In and out of all of those different places. And that’s reality, for me.”
This complex approach deepened on 2015’s Grey Tickles, Black Pressure. With its opening lyrics — “I did not think I was the one being addressed in haemorrhoid commercials on the TV set” — the album’s title song adds an element of half-comic, half-deadly serious absurdity to the mix. Grant turns the discovery of his HIV-positive status into lacerating lines such as: “I can’t believe I missed New York during the Seventies/ I could have gotten a head start in the world of disease/ I’m sure I would have contracted every single solitary thing.”
“Snug Slacks” introduces one of my favourite Grant modes: the half-sung, half-recited, heavily treated Angry Avenger voice — directed at a favourite target, the gay narcissist. “I’m a bit terrified by the new gays, who hate ‘self-loathing gays’ as they call them,” he says. “Everybody just loves the shit out of themselves. I’m quite disgusted by it. I think I hated myself for loving a lot of men, as well. The beautiful ones who had this free ticket to the party of life. But that narcissism has become an accepted norm.
“A perfect example is when I was in the lift at the Ace Hotel in London. I was standing there with a mirror behind me, with a friend, we were taking up that whole area. This guy got in, who was taller than me, looked like a model, and he was just loving himself in the mirror, just doing all this posing. He didn’t acknowledge us, I don’t think he even saw us. He just carried on doing his thing in the mirror, and I just thought, ‘You vile cunt.’
“Seriously, I think that is disgusting. I mean, I do shit like that, but not when anybody’s watching me. I get that weird look on my face when I look in a mirror, just like anyone else, you know that pout. But to be totally unaware of your surroundings, or not caring. Just thinking, ‘somebody as beautiful as me deserves to be looked at, by me’. I’m shocked by that.”
Each one of Grant’s solo albums has marked a stage in his life: Queen of Denmark was the first liberation from his unhappy band experience, the finding of his voice; Pale Green Ghosts coincided with the discovery he is HIV-positive. Grey Tickles, Black Pressure, its title taken from the Icelandic term for a midlife crisis and the Turkish description of a nightmare, was written in the first glow of a new love affair which, as he informs me in a matter-of-fact manner, has now ended.
This is the subtext of Love is Magic but you wouldn’t hear it in the element of play and delight in sound that suffuses the album. It sounds as if it was fun to make, and Grant enthuses about the process. “I was working with a guy named Benge who did a lot of the programming as well. Helping me find the sounds that I was looking for. I did a lot of the album at his studio in Cornwall, he’s like this master sound designer. It was just the two of us.
“Then I brought in Paul Alexander, the bass player from Midlake, who was with me on the first record, to help with backing vocals. I didn't want to rely on my own backing vocals, because sometimes I give up before I find the most interesting harmony. So, I made it with Paul and Benge, and it was probably the happiest time of my entire life, apart from riding rollercoasters as a child. It was incredibly fun. I didn’t want it to end. It was a huge part of the record, my friendship with Benge and Paul, being with people that you just click with so amazingly.”
The emotional core of the record is in two synth-drenched ballads that document Grant’s “relationship break-up”. “Is He Strange” celebrates the feeling “It’s just good to know that/ You can love while you are letting go”. As Grant points out, “the line in the song is, ‘Just because it’s great, doesn’t mean it will stick, he’s not some flower you can pick’. I really wanted it to continue but he couldn’t do it. So I let him go, and continued to respect him and love him during that process. Why would you ever be mean to somebody you cared about? We’re still friends, we talk, a lot. I never saw the point, but I do now.
“It’s a huge step forward for me,” he says. “You were never mean to them but you were wounded, a wounded animal and you want to lash out, make them feel some of the pain you were feeling. And abandonment and all that shit. I still don’t understand... the lifestyle got in the way, a lot. And my addiction issues, because I still deal with that, a lot. There was always respect and kindness there, right the way through. I was never cruel to him. I was upset that it was over but I behaved myself in a way that I can be quite proud of.”
Echoing Grant’s love of nature and birds in particular, “The Common Snipe” is another break-up song: featuring swampy synth sounds, it celebrates “a reflection of his beauty which made my head swim”. As Grant says, “it’s about seeing him, in a field, seeing something that he loves. I was seeing him enjoy the sound of the common snipe, which does something quite remarkable — it has a beautiful song that isn’t made in its throat, but by its tail feathers.’’
The song climaxes with deeply echoed taped voices: you can’t quite hear the words or make out the language. “That’s what the music is about, too, just everyday life,” says Grant. “And all the effects that go on afterwards, the echoes and reverbs, that’s everyday life. Someone might say, that’s effects, that’s not real, but if you happen to be walking through a tunnel, you may very well hear voices that sound exactly like that. That’s why I bring up perception.”
This prolonged struggle towards self-worth — the ability to love yourself enough to be able to love someone else — is celebrated in the new album’s title track. Riding on a slow, stately beat and a sweet pop melody with Beach Boys’ harmonies, “Love is Magic” celebrates the transformative possibilities of connection: “Love is magic, whether you like it or not/ It isn’t so tragic, it’s just a line that you’ve bought/ When the door opens up for you, don’t resist, just walk on through.”
“I don’t like the whole gay party thing,” Grant says. “Gay men are forced into a corner a bit, they tend to portray the lifestyle as a party that’s never ending, because people have always said it doesn’t work, you can’t do that. Because then people will say, ‘Aha, I told you it doesn’t work’. The whole chemsex thing — I don’t think there’s any way I would have made it out of that. My body just wouldn’t take it. You’ve seen people who can do just pounds and pounds of coke, or crystal meth, and they still function and go to their jobs. I couldn’t function.
“The question is, ‘Do I want to experience intimacy with somebody?’ And the longer you play the game of throwing people away and fucking whatever you can get your hands on, there’s a horrible side effect, which is not being able to experience intimacy with anybody. And I want to be able to do that. Or at least to be able to seriously consider the question of whether that is what I want.”
We wind up by going for a walk in nearby Kensal Green Cemetery. The various 19th-century mausoleums are covered in fresh spring greenery and the ground is a carpet of flowers. Hidden from the bustle outside by a high wall, it’s an unexpected oasis that Grant is completely unaware of, although he has spent the past few weeks finishing his album nearby. His delight is infectious. As we walk towards the vacant, early-Victorian Anglican Chapel with its classical pillars, framed by greenery, he is taken back to the Deep South.
I ask him where he is living and what his plans are: “My home is in Reykjavik. I’ve spent about two weeks there this year. I can see myself moving on but the language might keep me there. I speak it and I wouldn't want to lose it. It’s a great one to have under your belt, because it’s so difficult and complicated and fascinating, the idiomatic phrases. If you want to say to someone that you want to go for a quick nap, the phrase refers to the pause that an Arctic tern makes just before it dives into the water: ‘I’m going to have this little Arctic tern pause.’”
John Grant’s talent is to take elements from gay life and make them accessible to a wider audience. His love of melody and soft rock is the classic gateway drug, drawing the listener in. “It’s just about being a human in a specific context, in everyday life. That’s what the songs are about. So, to a lot of people it’s going to be totally irrelevant but I do find that a lot of people who don’t seem to have anything to do with what I’m talking about still relate to the music, because everybody’s going through the same thing. Whether you’re gay or straight or whatever.
“It does seem to resonate, which I like, because I want to connect to lots of different types of people. The real trip is learning how to stay vulnerable. That’s important, and that’s what I don’t want to lose. The toughness, you can carry a weapon, whatever, but I want to stay vulnerable, which is different from the years of trying to murder that, destroy it, in order to survive. But that was the wrong way to go about it.
“I’m very aware I have a much easier existence than 90 per cent of the planet. But we do have problems and there are things about our society that are really insidious, that can get into your head and destroy you from within. So you do have to protect yourself, but we do have problems, and... don’t you get tired of everybody thinking they’re so mysterious and inscrutable? No, we’re all just going through the same shit,” he says.
“That’s what I think is important to remember.”
Love is Magic (Bella Union) is out on 12 October.
John Grant is appearing in conversation at Esquire Townhouse on Friday 12 October. You can buy tickets here.
