Keeping up with the Johnsons
Antony Hegarty laughs, half-hiding his face with embarrassment behind his loose black cardigan. "I used to be a go-go dancer," he says. "People said I had nice legs." Interview by Graeme Green.
BY GRAEME GREEN
http://www.sundayherald.com/arts/arts/display.var.2478957.0.0.phpIt's an odd image, the singer-songwriter of Antony And The Johnsons giving it large on a podium surrounded by a writhing mass of ecstatic ravers. It's certainly not the first thing that springs to mind when you listen to his music. I Am A Bird Now, the album that introduced him to the wider world in 2005 and won that year's Mercury Prize, was an intensely sombre set of piano songs about loneliness, death and gender identity, all sung in Hegarty's distinctive sorrowful voice, like a world-beaten Nina Simone.
Before that, though, Hegarty was a radical, English-born, New York performance artist struggling to make ends meet - hence the dancing. "I can't say I was the most savoury go-go dancer on the block," he remembers. "I even wore a flowerpot on my head. This was at the Limelight club, a huge church on Sixth Avenue in New York before they closed it down because people were always getting killed there. In the mid-1990s, it was a techno hell-hole. But it was so futuristic, like being in Blade Runner. I really felt like it was the future."
