Features Disc of the day
Antony & The Johnsons
Antony & The Johnsons
(World Serpent, 1997; reissued by Secretly Canadian, 2000/2004)
Before anyone was watching, La Hegarty daubed this operatic rock canvas. With Baby Dee on harp, tranny fans!
Oh to be a fly on the wall during the sessions for this album. Eight years before the chamber-pop of I Am A Bird Now began turning heads, troubling charts and tickling Mercury Prize judges, Antony Hegarty released this spellbinding nine-track opus on the tiny World Serpent label. The songs, born during his tenure in New York’s experimental theatre troupe Blacklips, still sound exquisite. One can only imagine what it must have been like to walk into a dingy Manhattan nightspot, only to be faced with this giant of a man playing unearthly piano phrases and singing about pain, despair and affection in that beautiful, tremulous voice. Unlike its successor’s bare-boned framework, Antony’s debut includes moments of sumptuous instrumentation that allows chanson-anthems such as Cripple And The Starfish and Divine to really soar. Yet somehow he still resists the bombast that could so easily have drained these songs of humanity. It is, of course, all down to that miracle of a voice. Damn those lucky insects.
Ross Bennett
Posted by Danny_Eccleston at 6:00 AM GMT 10/04/2008
Further Listening
Anthony & The Johnsons – I Am A Bird Now (Rough Trade, 2005)
Rufus Wainwright – Want One (Dreamworks, 2003)
Lou Reed – Berlin (RCA, 1973)
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