It was a low point — a syphilis diagnosis on the day that all the student doctors were in. “Twelve or thirteen of them!” beams John Grant. “Actually, I’d gone in to get treated for alcohol addiction but the nurse noticed this rash . . . ” It was just another day in New York for the singer, who had sunk into obscurity after the breakup of his band, the Czars, in 2004 and was trying to kick alcohol, cocaine and crack all at once, while waiting tables and sleeping on people’s floors.The nurse was quite taken with her gentle, soft-spoken patient and offered to become his sponsor for Alcoholics Anonymous. In the absence of drugs and drink, Grant ramped up his addiction to unprotected gay sex. “I loved it. It was a great way to play Russian roulette,” he admits now. “I really dodged a bullet there.”
John Grant in The Times.
Fagburn isn't sure what he makes of John Grant - I quite like his album, but Grant keeps coming up with "Oh pity me please, I have been to gay hell and back" Rufus Wainwright/Judy Garland crap like this.
So you've taken drugs and had bumsex.
Big fucking deal!
I've pasted the interview in the comments section - take that Rupert Murdoch and your stupid paywall!
Posts
It was a low point — a syphilis diagnosis on the day that all the student doctors were in. “Twelve or thirteen of them!” beams John Grant. “Actually, I’d gone in to get treated for alcohol addiction but the nurse noticed this rash . . . ” It was just another day in New York for the singer, who had sunk into obscurity after the breakup of his band, the Czars, in 2004 and was trying to kick alcohol, cocaine and crack all at once, while waiting tables and sleeping on people’s floors.
ReplyDeleteThe nurse was quite taken with her gentle, soft-spoken patient and offered to become his sponsor for Alcoholics Anonymous. In the absence of drugs and drink, Grant ramped up his addiction to unprotected gay sex. “I loved it. It was a great way to play Russian roulette,” he admits now. “I really dodged a bullet there.”
John Grant may have been on a mission to self-destruct in the last few years but fame and fortune got in the way. His first solo album, Queen of Denmark, a word-of-mouth phenomenon and unanimous critics’ choice, will feature in many a “Best of 2010” list this December. Produced by the Texan rock group, Midlake, who invited Grant to live with them, it is unique — a lush, velvety backdrop of Seventies AOR reminiscent of Supertramp and the Carpenters, shot through with sardonic lyrics and consciously naïve, childlike imagery. One song, I Wanna Go To Marz, is all about the sugary delights of a sweetshop near Grant’s childhood home. Another, Chicken Bones, describes a junkie’s diet. JC Hates Fags contains the line: “Jesus, he hates faggots, son. We told you this when you were young.” It’s nostalgic, funny and disturbing — like a sweet-faced little boy in Spider-Man pyjamas lobbing profanities at you.
Here is Grant today, aged 42, curled on a sofa in the basement of his Old Street record company. He’s talking excitedly about the fairground rides in Leicester Square, the movie The Human Centipede (“In the gay community that’s a regular Saturday night!”) and how London feels “apocalyptic” compared to New York. Grant’s latest addiction is sugar: “It is all I want to eat now. My depression skyrockets and my energy levels go through the floor.” He has been forced to cut it out completely.
Unselfconscious and talking nineteen to the dozen, John Grant has a firm handle on his own addictive personality — and is utterly frustrated by it. “All I want is to enjoy having sex with a couple of groupies once in a while, like other rock stars do,” he says. “Just indulging in the fact that I might be famous enough to have some groupies!” Among his musical heroes is Freddie Mercury who, Grant claims, used to send someone out into the audience to select boys for him and bring them back after the show. “Sometimes it makes me rather furious that I can’t,” he continues, “because I just wouldn’t stop. The feeling I’m getting right now just talking about it — my chest is tightening — because I want to be unfettered by all this crap, by all this addiction. I just want to be a f***ing normal person!”
Grant grew up in Buchanan, Michigan, with his engineer father, housewife mother and three siblings. On the one hand, he spent a safe Seventies childhood watching Gilligan’s Island, eating hamburgers and listening to Abba — on the other, he felt a looming sense of dread about his homosexuality. Caught with a neighbour at the age of 6, he was told by the boy’s cousin: “I will ruin you with this information.” His parents’ quiet disappointment hurt, while his guilt was reinforced by years of Presbyterian churchgoing: “The psychological acceptance that you were going to Hell because you are sick.” Things got worse when Grant’s mother died in 1995 and the family moved to Denver. “My father married this horrible c***,” he says with relish. “She would sit there at Thanksgiving and say stuff like: ‘You must have been picked on as a child — you’re not very masculine, are you.’”
ReplyDeleteHe wraps himself round the arm of the sofa, gleefully reflecting on how much he loathed the woman (his father later divorced her). “I wanted to have sex with her youngest son, and I wanted so badly to tell her that. Right there at Thanksgiving dinner.”
Grant is a combination of raw feeling and intellectual refinement. He studied German at the University of Heidelberg (he only formed the Czars after failing to get a job as a translator) and later became fluent in Russian while working as an interpreter at a New York hospital. He is adding Swedish and Dutch to his repertoire (“The Dutch are so gorgeous!”) and everywhere he goes (he’s still of no fixed abode) he carries a heavy suitcase full of language books, tapes and CDs. It’s strange to think of a pop star memorising declension tables, but languages helped him with the rehab: “Getting clean, there comes a time when you’re making great strides but you’re not noticing it. It’s like learning a language. You’re coping in situations you would never have been able to handle before but it just translates as fatigue. You feel you’re getting worse, but you’re actually getting better.”
He regrets “cheating” during his recovery by filling the void with sexual encounters: “Sex releases all these endorphins into your brain and that’s simply another way of changing the way you feel on the spot. Like drugs, it doesn’t last unless you do it all the time. I’d wake up and need someone pretty quickly. There were two big black dudes in Denver who’d come over and smoke crack and have sex with me. And one of them had full-blown Aids . . .”
Sounds like he’s going for the wrong types of guys, I suggest. Grant’s face turns into a big pool of emotion. “Well, isn’t that the thing that makes you want to cry your f***ing eyes out some days,” he says. “I don’t know how to let people treat me properly. Groucho Marx said it: you’d never want to belong to a club that would have you as a member.”
Grant’s father recently moved back to his roots in the Ozark Mountains. Though the two are in regular contact, Grant doesn’t think his dad has listened to his debut album. “Nobody down there uses profanity,” he explains. “They wouldn’t like those words, and the male pronouns in the love songs. I wrote to my father and said: ‘I don’t know if you can imagine what it’s like, not being attracted to a woman and yet wanting to be. Sometimes I wish that I could have a wife and be all sexually attracted to her, and crazy about her tits and her vagina and everything . . . ‘ My father’s response was: ‘Yeah, we don’t understand.’ And then he preached at me for a little bit, then said: ‘Okay I’m done preaching. I love you.’”
ReplyDeleteGrant hopes to make another album with Midlake but in January, he’s off to northern Sweden with the Stockholm producer, Kleerup, to record “eerie David Lynch stuff”. He intends to sit in a log cabin, drinking hot chocolate. “The joy of having energy, and being able to function well, is going to be my new drug,” he declares. “And next year I am going to have that body. I’ll hire a trainer. I don’t know how long it’s going to last, maybe a month or two, but I want to walk into a club and watch everybody’s jaw drop . . .”
John Grant plays The Junction in Cambridge on Wednesday, and the Royal Festival Hall on Thursday
Never heard of him.
ReplyDeleteBut I'll get Queen of Denmark purely on your recommendation.
This had better be good, Fagburn...
It's okay.
ReplyDeleteIt will probably end up in various albums of the year polls, at which point I shall roundly denounce it as "over-rated".