Interview: Patrick Fitzgerald - 'I've got my life back'

Published on Monday 16 November 2009 18:15

THE PR for Stephenhero's new album, Apparition in the Woods, has an unenviable task.

It is, after all, a collection of bleak, sometimes harrowing piano songs, three of which are about the Holocaust, and is written, performed and self-released by a middle-aged, bespectacled doctor from Manchester who most people have never heard of. Leona Lewis it is not.

On the plus side, Apparition in the Woods is a beautiful, haunting thing, the best album of its kind since PJ Harvey's White Chalk. This may have something to do with the fact that the doctor in question is Patrick Fitzgerald, once frontman of pioneering indie band Kitchens of Distinction.

If you don't remember KOD, Fitzgerald is as philosophical about that as he is about the chances of his new album troubling the top ten.

KOD made four acclaimed albums between 1989 and 1994, echoes of which can still be heard in the work of Radiohead, Interpol, Editors, the Twilight Sad and others. Fitzgerald is too modest to credit the band with that much influence, but says: "I've been told funny tales, that the ones who have done really well sounding a bit like us, well, that wasn't as unintentional as it might have been."

KOD won many admirers for their swirling, multi-layered guitar songs, but were a classic example of a band too stubbornly individual, and not in a fashionable way, for the mainstream. A gifted lyricist, Fitzgerald wrote eloquently and candidly about his homosexuality – KOD's 1992 single Breathing Fear is one of the most haunting descriptions of homophobia I've ever heard – then was dismayed when KOD were branded an "issue band".

"It was a big problem for people like NME," he recalls. "It was uncool and didn't fit in with their idea of rock and roll."

Gay men were expected to be flamboyant or rabble-rousing; Fitzgerald was neither. "I didn't do fashion well, bad gay that I was," he laughs.

Frustrated and bitter, KOD went their separate ways in 1996, and for a while Fitzgerald wrote music for theatre and film. Then, in 2002, he decided to retrain as a doctor. "I'd been building up this career and I just thought, 'I've been here before', in this place where things might happen but it's not secure. And I wasn't patient any more."

He also knew he was about to get sick, from a failed kidney. "It's a hereditary illness so I've known since my early twenties that it was on its way." And get sick he did, enduring two years of dialysis. "There's nothing more boring than being too unwell to do anything," he says. "I said to my partner, if it was the other way round I would have left you! He is some kind of saint, I must say. All I felt was please leave, go and have a nice life because this is horrible."

But this story has a happy ending: in autumn last year Fitzgerald was offered a new kidney by an anonymous family. "It fulfils the clich of getting your life back again," he says. "It is such an extraordinary gift that you're given this chance, in the light of their loss, to live again." Earlier this year Fitzgerald and his partner, who he has been with for 15 years – and who had offered him his own kidney – got married.

All this left Fitzgerald in the curious position of being well enough to finish a new album, but too happy to write personal lyrics that would fit the sombre music he'd written when he was ill. The solution he came up with was "lyrical verite" – a technique also used on his friend David McAlmont's new album with Michael Nyman – telling the true stories of gay men enduring difficult times, from Walt Whitman and Jean Genet to concentration camp victims.

"I wanted to celebrate male relationships and I became fascinated by some odd stories," he recalls. War stories loom large, on songs such as St Pierre, based on the memoirs of a Frenchman sent to a concentration camp – where he had to watch his lover being mauled to death by dogs – and The Snow That Would Not Melt, about the train to Auschwitz.

"I don't know where this was coming from, possibly the horror of sickness," recalls Fitzgerald. "My mother (who died of cancer while Fitzgerald was ill] was Swiss and obsessed by the Second World War, and had all kinds of guilt issues, but I don't have an explanation that's very satisfactory." He does, however, think it's the best thing he's ever done.

"I've made a record I'm utterly happy with, at last, in terms of its musical content. I now have to think about where to go next." Happy songs would seem the obvious choice. Then again, Fitzgerald has never been one to do the obvious, and he should be cherished for that.

&#149 Apparition in the Woods is out now on Ragoora. www.stephenhero.co.uk