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Like A Bird ANTONY of ANTONY & THE JOHNSONS tells ANTHONY CAREW how he earned the respect of Boy George and Lou Reed. The focus should be on him, Antony. The 34 year-old transgender torchsinger from New York - whose name is Antony Hegarty, though he much prefers the iconic singular - blessed with a multi-octave warble and irrepressible vibrato; his voice is a blessed instrument, his confessed performative intent to make people cry. But writing about him, these days, means referring to other famous humans. Antony's so endlessly quotable about other folk he only adds to this; saying being kissed by Chan Marshall "feels like having diamonds going through your face", or that seeing Diamanda Galas play he "literally felt (his) asshole getting ripped out". And there's the fact that Steve Buscemi cast him in his filmic ode to prison-love, Animal Factory, and that Lou Reed and Loni Anderson have made his career their cause celebre and that Reed turns up as a guest on the second Antony album, I Am A Bird Now, alongside Rufus Wainwright, Devendra Banhart and Boy George. "I like to create tableaus and bringing in other people's voices helped to create new meaning, and create different contexts for songs to be experienced in; and to create more dimensions and more richness," says the songsmith, of their presence. Going through the process of making his album - issued after his eponymous debut - Antony discovered "that it took a village to make it", with the significance of the particularly-camp guest-spot roundup going far beyond cheap hip hop-ish crossover marketing. Take, for example, Boy George. "He was the first person I saw in the world that I thought looked like a reflection of me," Antony offers. "I remember getting that first Culture Club record and just staring at the cover and going 'wow, that's me!'. I think that was when I really decided that I was going to be a singer, because it just seemed reasonable that that would be what someone like me would do." Coming face to face, then, with his initial inspiration, was something that was "pretty cathartic" for Antony. "There we were, 20 years later, and he was singing this song that I'd written and the lyrics were 'you are my sister, and I love you'! I wrote the song originally for my real sister, but, of course, with George singing it, it brings in a whole other dimension to what the song could be about. I just remember being in the studio playing the piano and he was there, peering out from his fedora with all of his Leigh Bowery make-up on - because he was doing a production of Taboo on Broadway at the time - and his eyes were like laser-beams, they were so blue. He was really singing his heart out, really giving everything he had and you could feel it, the whole room was so electric." Having relocated from Sussex to California when he was 11, Antony found refuge in surface-mail copies of Smash Hits and a trio of acts from England: Culture Club, Depeche Mode and Soft Cell; learning their songs by ear and playing them in his room on a Casio keyboard. When he was 12, he fell in love with Marc Almond's albums as Marc and the Mambas, which he sees as being the greatest infuence on his life; something that even manifests on this new album, on one of its standout songs. "The title for Fistful of Love is actually from a Marc Almond song, a Soft Cell song from the last Soft Cell record, This Last Night... in Sodom. It's called L'Esqualita and that's the name of a Latin trannie bar in New York that was quite infamous. One line in the song says: 'A fistful of love/with Raoul Kowalski'; and it goes on and on. I also used to read a lot by this writer whose name was James Purdy. He had this one book that I was particularly fascinated by, called Eustace Chisholm And The Works, and it was really a dark book, chronicling this really destructive relationship." An old-fashioned, Motown-ish number about 'getting the shit kicked out of you and loving every minute of it', Fistful of Love was a song that Antony was "embarrassed to do for a long time". In fact, "there's a few songs on the record that, initially, I felt sort of ashamed of," he confesses. "But then, I ended up thinking that it might be an interesting thing to explore, that if I could get beyond those initial feelings, there might be something underneath that that was valuable. I stopped thinking about (Fistful of Love) in a grandoise way and started singing about it in a natural way; like you'd have a relationship with your dad, or whatever, like sometimes shit is hard, but you still love that person." That's the song that finds Lou Reed guesting, both with spoken-word vocals and and wanky lead-guitar. Antony first encountered Reed through Hal Willner (the New York impresario behind the recent Leonard Cohen tribute-shows at the Sydney Opera House, of which both Antony and Reed were a part), who thought he'd be an interesting element to add to the project that Reed was working on, a musical translation of Edgar Allan Poe's poem The Raven. First, though, he had to impress Lou. "I was told that if he didn't like what I did in the studio, he might just walk into the back-room and I'd be asked to leave on the spot. So, y'know, you really wanted him to like you and it turned out that he really liked what I did and it came to pass that we became, actually, really good friends and he's been a tremendous ambassador for me," Antony recalls. "He started coming to my concerts and one night when he was coming to the show, I sung his song Candy Says for him as sort of a surprise and it came to pass that that was the song I did a lot on The Raven tour a lot." In an artistic full-circle to rival the Boy George guest-spot, the cover of I Am A Bird Now features a picture of Candy Darling, the subject of that Velvet Underground song, taken by Antony's "favourite artist", Peter Hujar. All of these elements - the Reed collaborations, the other guest-spots, the cover-art - where things that "just rained down at the same time", the addition of such elements "changing it really dramatically, changing it to be what it's ended up being." It was through these additions that, strangely, Antony got to achieve something truly personal and wholly intimate; this 'village' of camp talent bringing his painfully-personal songs of transgender transformation to life, their celebrity bringing Antony's astonishing voice to greater popular light. They're nice names to have on a record, sure, but the only name you need really remember is a single, singular name.
I Am A Bird Now is available on Spunk through Interia.
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