Interview: Antony Hegarty

Published on Saturday 10 January 2009 13:05

SITTING alone in an empty hotel lobby, as still and noble as a Roman statue, is Antony Hegarty. At first I walk right past him, which seems ridiculous considering he is the only person in the room. And also he's Antony Hegarty. A one-off talent, a transgender torch singer who warbles like Nina Simone, a gentle giant from Chichester with a shock of black hair and a smock who Lou Reed has described as an "angel".

Today, the angel has landed in east London but so very softly, so very inconspicuously that I almost miss him.

It's morning and I'm early, but Hegarty still got here an hour before me. He blames a confused body clock, having flown in from New York the previous night. Once he loosens up he is great fun and a great talker, but at first Hegarty is incredibly timid and nervous. Despite being older than me and a strapping six footer at that, I feel an urge to look after him. He has a gentleness there in every vibration of his extraordinary singing voice, which in person is endearing and makes him seem younger than his 37 years. Later, he tells me he sees this as part of identifying as transgender, which he describes as "naturally gender variant", a kind of flux between male and female. "Often transgender kids are the most creative," he says softly. Hegarty says everything softly, even when he is effing and blinding. "Usually they're super gentle, very loving, they see things in a dazzle, and they love to dance in a circle. Really, they're jewels. The urge to extinguish them is…" He doesn't finish the sentence.

We order coffee and I tell him how much I've enjoyed listening to his third album with his band, the Johnsons. The Crying Light is Hegarty's long-awaited follow-up to the Mercury Prize winning I Am A Bird Now, nearly three years in the making, and it is every bit as remarkable. But I may as well have just told him it made my ears bleed. The expression that clouds his smooth, pallid face can only be described as total mortification. You look worried, I say. "I dunno," he replies, fingers fluttering across the table. "My hands are tied. It's out, it's done." This, however, comes from the same person who tells me that he used to write "f*** off" on his forehead and then head out in New York. "I used to really enjoy forehead as billboard," he says. I tell him he seems too sweet-natured for such bold gestures. "I was quite hard-boiled in my twenties, really punk," he counters. "It was the defensiveness of making your way through the street. I did have a bee in my bonnet. There would be a small crew of us with shaved heads and 'f*** off' on our foreheads and we'd pick up pieces of refuse in case we needed to frighten an onlooker."

I Am A Bird Now was a searching, introspective album full of sublime songs about gender confusion, love, domestic abuse and breast amputation. The more symphonic The Crying Light shows Hegarty's gaze turning outward to the natural world. "It's my own struggle to dismantle some of the alienation I inherited from my childhood," he explains. "I was raised in the Catholic tradition, in a theology that suggests paradise is elsewhere. But I'm thinking more and more that the earth is the greatest artist of all. I really feel like I was born out of the ground, that I'm made of the same stuff as this place." He talks a lot like this, but avoids pretension by being smart and slightly self-conscious with it. At one point, after speaking sound sense about the challenge parents face raising their children, particularly transgender children, he wants to know, "Do I sound completely crackers?"

Some of the songs on The Crying Light strike an elegiac tone, most obviously 'Another World', which Hegarty says he wrote "from the point of view of the girl inside me singing back to me from the future". On it he mourns, "I need another world/This one's nearly gone". Nevertheless, The Crying Light is much more love letter to the land than it is post-apocalyptic vision, and he doesn't have much truck with people who find his music a bit, well, depressing. "On the album there is a subtle hope," he insists. "Crisis is a wonderful time to grow."

Part of the reason for this insistence, I think, is that music has always had such positive associations for Hegarty. Born in West Sussex, he moved around with his family as a child, living in Amsterdam and then California before he ended up in New York. Listening to music and writing songs was his constant. When, aged 11, he saw Boy George on the cover of Culture Club's debut, Kissing To Be Clever, he saw himself. "His eyes were the most feminine river you could imagine," he says. "That's why I got into music."

He loved singing but no one thought he was any good at it. How did he sing? "At the top of my lungs, like every child," he laughs. "I went to a school where all the tone deaf kids sang at the top of their lungs and everyone wanted to be pop stars." So how did he create his remarkable voice? "I just kept singing until it became palatable. That took years. I was always informed by the singers I loved and it just evolved naturally. English people are great imitators – look at how we took on the entire history of black American music in one generation. It's kind of shameful. Maybe it's a sense of entitlement that makes us think anything we see can be ours."

Of course, he is no longer a belter. In fact, when Hegarty recorded with Bjrk she kept trying to make him turn up the volume. "I was so honoured to stand by her and sing," he recalls of their 2006 sessions in Jamaica and Iceland. "She sings so full-on. Her whole body is full of voice and the whole room was vibrating with voice. I'm quite a noodly singer and she kept shouting, 'Sing louder!' Boy George was the same. He was like, 'Enough of this noodling, sing out'. He wants me to sing like Ethel Merman."

Winning the Mercury Prize at the age of 35 was a shock, because "that's not my classic luck". Hegarty reckons his grandmother, who died the year before, got up to some funny business and fixed the votes. But winning the 20,000 prize meant moving out of his bedsit into an apartment, lots of designers chasing him "to wear something frou-frou and dress me up like the Easter bunny" and a much more mainstream audience in Europe. Beyond that he seems indifferent to, even suspicious of success. What's important is that he has been able to make music and be visible as a transgender person. "Even 10 years ago it wouldn't have been possible," he says. "Look at Boy George. As long as he didn't say it, it was all right." I tell him he seems like a happy person. "I like the story of my life," he says. "It's been quite… well, there's nothing like a nice storm to colour it in."

Hegarty always felt different, long before he could articulate it, and although it took his parents a while, they embrace him now. His perception of his body, though, remains an uphill battle. "I look in the mirror and my first thought is, 'Oh no.' But my second thought is, 'All the women in my family look like this, all the people I adore'. I remember as a kid going to a town on the west coast of Ireland where everyone looked the same as me and had the same last name. I thought, 'Oh, I don't look so unusual here. But you tend to give up after a while, especially with a transgender body. You could think god played a trick on you or you could think culture and society played a trick on you in thinking there isn't room for you. Well, there is." v

The Crying Light is out January 19 (Rough Trade) www.antonyandthejohnsons.com