Antony
and the Johnsons

Antony is the founder of the alt/art-cabaret musical ensemble "Antony and the Johnsons." The beauty in Antony's work is its ability to evoke deep, intimate sentiments in listeners, without relying on direct narratives or feeling contrived. The broad scope of emotions conveyed by Antony's music and lyrics is mirrored by his own extraordinary multi-octave vocal range.

Antony calls his music a collage of "collective voices" and experiences: a tribute to the New York queer subculture of the 1960's and 80's, and a "key," or tool, for audiences to access histories alongside present, personal emotions. On tour in Paris, Antony took time to speak with Velle about role models, heroes, and localizing history through art.

Interview
with Antony

Can you comment on the band's background?

I started out in New York doing experimental, late-night theater, music performances in night clubs, and organizing different groups of people to do performances at the Pyramid Club, Jackie 60, P.S. 122, and places like that. Oftentimes my role in these shows was presenting my music, which was something I'd been pursuing all my life. In 1995 I started a group called the Johnsons. It was initially a performance group. We were doing some special kind of surrealist plays and tableaus and things in New York City at Jackie 60, and also in sort of wayward locations, like the end of the James Street Pier.

The prototype for the Johnsons was a group called the Angels of Light, started by Hibiscus from the Cockettes. The Angels of Light did sort of a freewheeling, highfalutin community theater.

I did a couple of years of different kinds of projects like that, and then I received a grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts. It was at that point (1997) that I decided to record an album. It was the first time I had ever done something comprehensive like that. So I sought out some musicians, and we made some arrangements based on keyboard arrangements that I'd been performing over the years, and we recorded that first record.

Really, that was a turning point for me because that was when I decided to start presenting concerts.

The Johnsons pretty quickly transformed into a music ensemble. Suddenly I started working with live musicians, which was the first time I had ever done that. Over the next five years I worked with several different musicians until I found an ensemble of people that really seemed to fit. The Johnsons is a pretty loose-knit organization, but the core group of musicians is Julia Kent, the cellist who also played with Rasputina for several years, and was one of the founders of Rasputina, and Maxim Moston, a violin player who I've been

working with for a few years. Julia and Max have done a lot of the string arrangements for this record. Jeff Langston plays bass on the record, and is not touring with me, but is someone who's been very important to the Johnsons. I've been working with drummer Todd Cohen since I first started doing music, and I'm working with a guitar player now whose name is Rob Moose - for the last year I've really started experimenting with guitar work and also accordion. So that's the group.

The Johnsons's name is a reference to a hero of mine named Marsha P. Johnson, who was a street activist from the mid 60's all the way through to her death in the early 90's.

Marsha P. Johnson was a street prostitute and a very visible figure on Christopher Street through the 70's and 80's, very renowned for her kindness. You know, her nickname was Saint Marsha. She was a very gregarious sort of outsider street presence and she was rumored to have thrown the first bottle in the Stonewall Riot -- I mean whether that was true or not was a bone of contention among several different queens.

But the thing she did that really impressed me in particular was in the early 70's, she started a group called STAR, Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries. It was an organization that she started with her friend Silvia Rivera,

another really important figure in the beginning of the gay civil rights movement, especially amongst the transgender contingent. With the money that Silvia and Marsha made as street prostitutes, they rented an apartment on Second Avenue and Fourth Street, I think, and they opened it up as a shelter for homeless gay youth. ...I think it was quite short lived but it was notable.

What do you bring from those days at the Pyramid Club into your work now, if anything?

Black Lips was really a collective, with different people's work represented there, and I had very specific kinds of aesthetic things that I was doing.

The work would vary from week to week depending on who wrote the show, and who was directing it. For me, you know, that impulse to arrange people in tableaus and things is sort of transferred over into the way that I approach arranging music, and even just arranging the artwork for the CD. I think my creative process has always been what I've described as accumulative. I collect a lot of different shards and pieces, and I create something that feels meaningful to me by finding relationships between them and putting them into a kind of a collage.

I'm actually holding the "I Am a Bird Now" CD and I'm interested in the way that you've taken these found objects, and even the way that it opens and sort of peels away like an onion, unraveling layer after layer.

Well, I really wanted to make something that felt like a special object. Something that was sort of a map that observes some of the themes of the record, and helps to guide people through some of the ideas of the record, or give some context. It actually got to the point where I almost didn't finish the record, and it was that point that I sort of threw the doors of it open, kind of in desperation, and asked people to help me. It was then that all these other voices joined

my own and helped to create this kind of collective voice for the record, which I think is really what ushered it into completion. I think that those voices are obviously some of the guests singing on the record, but even the artists and the people reflected in the artwork.

The main piece of the cover art is the portrait of Candy Darling in the hospital shortly before she died by Peter Hujar. When it became clear to me that the estate of Peter Hujar was willing to let me use an image, it still hadn't occurred to me that I could ask for that image. It seemed so far-fetched. But then when it finally came into focus it seemed so right, so correct.

...Peter Hujar died in the late 80's, but he's really my favorite artist in any medium and I long stared at that picture. I mean, I think it's probably one of the ten greatest photographs in the history of photography, and I could never have imagined that one day that would be the cover for my record. ...It was almost a spiritual feeling, it just felt very connected to create a relationship between that picture and a picture by my friend Josef Astor of my friend Page who in many ways is the Candy Darling of my generation in New York. She's such an amazing surrealist transsexual performance artist with great beauty, and very, very well loved. It's a portrait of her in the doctor's chair, actually taken

just a few months before she died, and she actually died at Cabrini Hospital. On the EP of The Lake is another outtake from the Candy Darling session that Peter Hujar had taken, a photo that was never published before, and had never been seen in public before. On the twelve inch you can see the full frame of the negative and it actually says the name of the hospital, Cabrini Hospital, which was also where Page died. For a New Yorker that's incredibly significant because we've all been to Cabrini Hospital a million times, and suddenly that legend of Candy Darling becomes very local and very real and I think part of what this record does.

The sources of this record do trace back to something that is very local, in a way.

When you say that there are layers of it, I think there are, and it's not necessarily necessary for people to know about one set of those layers in order to get something out of it on another level. I mean, I obviously come from a very specific kind of artists' sub-culture, and I'm very influenced by a very specific school of stuff that's happened in New York, but I think ultimately what people seem to respond to is just the general threads of feeling that run through the record.

They find their own relationships and their own meaning. In one way, I could give this sort of very specific roadmap to why it's significant to me, and describe all the artwork, but that's just a starting point really. You always hope, as an artist, that there's going to be some kind of alchemy between the work and the viewers' imagination.

You obviously have this really amazing ability as an artist and as a performer to operate in all types of sort of arenas of culture: fashion, music, art, venues that some might call "low-culture venues" and "high-culture venues" like the Whitney Biennial, and so on.

I kind of keep it simple and try to keep it open. I mean that's sort of how I approach it. I mean I'm interested in lots of different things and in my own mind I don't really think about a hierarchy for different forms for culture. But I'm very excited when I'm included in those different types of worlds, and it's an exciting opportunity to be able to traverse sort of different worlds.

Were you surprised when you were invited to participate in the Whitney Biennial?

I was really thrilled, you know, I was thrilled. Because I came from that sort of experimental performance background, it sort of set me up in a unique way as a musician because I think it affected people's perception of what I was doing. ...I asked Charlie [Charles Atlas] to do [the three-night collaborative performance at Saint Ann's Warehouse]. Charlie's one of my best friends and I asked him to do a project with me that has really blossomed into a very exciting project called Turning, and it's something that we're now in the preliminary stages of producing around the world. It's a concert with a live video portrait installation added to it.

The press release says that there are "thirteen beauties slowly turning on stage."

Yeah, one at time, for each song one portrait. And the portrait is projected onto a giant screen behind me. It's really intimate and it's quite hypnotizing. It is quite formal. It's a very strong sort of iconic idea. It's a very simple concept, but it's very striking when you see it. It's really my favorite thing I've ever done. Charlie's work in it is so beautiful and my hope is that we're going to be able to do it in London, and Sydney, and Tokyo and blah blah blah, we're going to do it in each major city next year, and then we're going to try and make a film with it.

That's something to look forward to. You're touring Europe right now, what else is on the horizon for you?

We're touring for the next two months in Europe, then a few weeks break, and then we're going to be touring in America for another month, and then back to Europe for another month. So this year's going to be mostly touring. We're also releasing "Hope There's Someone" with a single next month, with more songs on it, and also "You're My Sister."

Your music and artwork seem tinged by personal memory, but there's also a very universal and intimate melancholia or nostalgia.

In your concerts, everyone cries! What do you hope your audience takes away with them from your music?

I hope to create work that creates a dialogue and also some kind of positive repercussion in people. ...I just hope that people find something that's significant in a positive way for them. I think that as an artist that - especially when you're dealing with melancholy or sad things - that's a fear that I have to face, you know, that the last thing in the world I would want to do is depress people and it concerns me. When they say, "Oh I cried," it's like, well I just hope that it was useful. As a consumer of music, I am drawn to music that's useful in my life.

I go to music actually to help me feel better, for the most part. That's my primary relationship to music. I listen to music to make me feel better.

What do you like to listen to?

I like Otis Redding, and Elizabeth Fraser, William Basinski, CocoRosie, Donny Hathaway, and Little Jimmy Scott and Nico, but she doesn't always make me feel better. But especially people like Nina Simone. I think more than anyone I love the great soul singers. You know, for me, I'm really drawn to singers that are full of feeling and are seeking transformation. I like transformative singing, you know, singing that starts one place and ends another place.

I'm not really into that smooth sailing type thing.

I've heard you mention that you found a childhood role model in Boy George, and I think he invited you to be an understudy for the role of Lee Bowery, another inspirational person for you, in his musical Taboo.

It is true that I was at one point involved with pre-productions for the Broadway edition of Taboo and that was where I met George. And although I couldn't do that work because I was on tour with Lou Reed at the time, it was a great opportunity to strike up a friendship with him. He is someone that I deeply admired and he certainly had a profound influence on me as a kid,

and was probably the reason I decided to become a singer.

As a child I was drawn to people like Mark Owen and Boy George, people that were expressing themselves, I think music was the only form in which I saw people expressing a voice that I could relate to, something that was passionate and vibrant and not deadened and different and creative and angry, something full of feeling. ...My relationships with artists that I've admired, those artists were really like life jackets through different periods for me. They're like buoys in the sea. I really held on to the expression of those people for dear life, as sort of keys to understanding what was going on in different periods.

Especially when we moved to California [from England, in 1981] it was just like everyone had had a fucking lobotomy, it was like suburban culture was so lobotomized and [music] was like the only place that I saw anything happening, I just intuitively went to the things that seemed to reflect me.

I think as a consumer you're always just intuitively drawn toward things that only really make sense later, you know? And I have ideas now about why I went to different people, why I spent three years just immersed in the catalog of Nina Simone, when I was like 17, 18, 19, you know. I mean the rich set of keys that work offered.

I learned so much from people. I think my relationship to the world is producing art, as a response to the world and the things that I love, do you know what I mean? I think that my work is full of those relationships, and I'm interested in my relationship with the world.

Credits
 

Interviewer, Writer
Rebecca K. Uchill

Transcriber
Taryn Johnson, Intern

Editors
Erin Dionne,
Rebecca K. Uchill

Special thanks to
Antony
of Antony and the Johnsons

Further information, listening, news, etc. on Antony and the Johnson can be found at www.antonyandthejohnsons.com [External website, leaving Velle]