Being blessed, if that’s the word, with a singing voice somewhere between a tracheotomised toad and a crow with a 40-a-day Woodbines habit, your reporter is always fascinated by vocalists capable of expressing intense emotion in a manner so pure and natural it suggests supreme lack of effort (usually an elaborate smoke and mirrors trick that belies long hours of graft and practise).
On hearing such mastery, I’m usually gripped with the compulsion to grab such singers by the lapels and demand that they explain how they came to possess such a gift, and if they appreciate it, and furthermore if the venting of inner turmoil in such an artful fashion (as opposed to whupping the crap out of a piñata) grants them a calmer inner life and keeps the ulcers from getting aggravated.
In 2005 Antony Hegarty ascended to the ranks of those rare creatures, and with his band of jazz-savvy virtuosos, The Johnsons, translated critical kudos into Mercury-winning prestige into coffee table cred with his second full length album I Am A Bird Now, currently neck and neck with Arcade Fire in the year-end polls.
Hegarty’s voice has garnered some pretty heavyweight comparisons – Nina Simone and Jimmy Scott to name just two – and it’s a measure of the boy’s talent and range that he hasn’t capsized under the weight of hyperbole.
But his approach, if not actual timbre, suggests a wider and wilder universe that might also include Mary Margaret O’Hara, Julee Cruise, Elvis at his eeriest, Marc Almond, Boy George and the Buckleys, father and son. (Hegarty has cited This Mortal Coil’s version of Tim’s ‘Song To The Siren’ as being his vocal holy grail, and it shows).
But he also betrays deep blues and gospel roots. Sometimes he sounds like an old black woman trapped in a white boy’s body, sometimes a theremin whose circuitry’s been infected by a particularly heartbroken ghost.
Like much of the paying public, I first heard that voice on Lou Reed’s sprawling, often magnificent homage to Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven. That double set contained an austere, lunar version of ‘Perfect Day’ that seemed to alter the molecular structure of any room it played in. The Lou connection made perfect sense, especially if you factor in the Johnsons’ first album, a mightily impressive cross-pollination of Ferry-esque lounge lizardry, Berlin burlesque and after hours torch-ure. Antony is nothing if not a Transformer man. Born in the southern English town of Chichester, he spent most of his childhood moving around California, but like so many beautiful freaks, found his voice in New York, working late night drag and cabaret shows, recreating Isabella Rossellini’s Dorothy Vallens character from Blue Velvet. (He also covered ‘Mysteries Of Love’, the David Lynch/Angelo Badalamenti composition sung by Julee Cruise on her exquisite Floating Into The Night.) It was here that he recast himself as torch song trilogist and transgressive angel in America.
I Am A Bird Now contrasts tales of cross gender longing (‘For Today I Am A Boy’) with slow-burning soul testimonials and abusive lover confessionals like ‘Fistful Of Love’ (which could be Rossellini breathing ‘hurt me’ while wearing a pearl necklace of bruises as a reminder of Frank Booth’s choke-hold). There’s a desolate blues called ‘Spiralling’ and a curtain-closing Kleenex special called ‘Bird Girl’, less the poor cursed creature revenged upon by Tod Browning’s Freaks so much as ugly-duckling bleat blossoming into swan song.
Hegarty’s songs speak of the things that haunt us all, men, women and children, flesh and ghost, but as these things go, seem most often and eloquently expressed by drag queens and ageing dandies, Lynch divas and Tennessee Williams devotees, androgynes and inbetweenies, ladyboys and urban cowboys and western geishas and those who hold as their patrons faded 40s starlets and Billie Holiday and Weimar drag acts.
A tourist’s impression of tragic queenery maybe? Perhaps, but the feelings feel real enough. Antony’s best known song ‘Hope There’s Someone’ expresses the most desolate dread of expiring alone and in vain in some desperate institutionalised rooming-house of the heart, surrounded not by friends and beloveds but dribbling bewildered strangers billeted in similar ante chambers. But it also carries within its stillness the softly spoken hope that even if such fates befall us, we might just summon up the grace to bear them. More than any song this year, it argued both sides of Beckett’s ‘Can’t go on/I’ll go on’ resolution gloved in a paradox. Or as Hegarty put it in an earlier song: “The horror is gone/It’s become the darkness”.
Amen.