The Interview: Antony Hegarty
The transgender singer of Antony and the Johnsons has the most distinctive voice in music - and a personality to match. In a rare interview on the eve of his UK tour, he tells Peter Conrad why he fled Britain as a youth, his early days on the NY ->-bleeped-<- circuit and why Obama's victory was a triumph for the feminine.
* Peter Conrad
* The Observer, Sunday 17 May 2009
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/may/17/antony-hegarty-interviewAntony Hegarty is an embodied paradox. Imagine a looming rugger thug who defines his physique as voluptuous, not tough, and behaves like a shy adolescent of indeterminate sex. Is he a futuristic being whose home is not on this earth or a throwback from some other time? Lou Reed, one of his earliest supporters, said: "When I heard him, I knew that I was in the presence of an angel." The performance artist Laurie Anderson, Reed's partner, responded with an intimidated shudder: "It's like seeing a Viking!"
And how, if we respect the binary logic of human biology, do we classify the idiosyncratic Antony? Even his own designation, transgender, hardly does justice to his mutability. One of his songs announces, not altogether happily: "Today I Am a Boy", which leaves open the possibility that he may grow up to be a woman. But another song, delivered with quavery vocal inflections and fluttering fingers, abandons lumpish humanity altogether and reports: "I Am a Bird Now
