The true grit of John Grant

When approaching to interview a band or artist, the desired aim is often to break down the barrier between artist and human, between person and persona, to excavate and reveal a personality and pick and scratch at the brain that shaped the musical output of their alias. Often this is a fraught, exhausting and occasionally futile exercise because many artists build safety walls to protect themselves. They create characters, wear masks and operate from the screened-off comfort of mystery and darkness. Others, like John Grant, bulldoze down that wall, merging and solidifying the human being and the artist as an indistinguishable one. Neither one is ‘right’ or ‘better’ but merely a means to be more reflective and indicative of the artist at work, a truer representation – and there is no truer representation of John Grant than the truth itself.

A year after the success of ‘Pale Green Ghosts’, an album scattered with fluttering electronics and gut-wrenching moments as frequently as it was with lyrical frankness, tenderness and scorched bile, it was a breakthrough album that superseded Grant’s supposed breakthrough album, his 2010 debut, ‘Queen of Denmark’. Grant finished highly, often top, in the end of year 2013 accolades and even ended up with a Brit Award nomination for International Male Solo Artist, squaring up against Bruno Mars, Eminem, Drake and Justin Timberlake. In 2014, his 46^th year on the planet, Grant finds himself receiving his highest level of praise, success and achievement no doubt with more on the way. However, the road to success for Grant has not so much been a rocky one, but – from a personal and mental journey – one more akin to a trip along the Gaza strip.

For the last two years Reykjavik, Iceland, has been home to Grant after he fell in love with the Capital when working on ‘Pale Green Ghosts’ with Gus Gus’ Biggi Veira. There is a feeling of serenity to Reykjavik that makes it easy to see why somebody would settle here. The sea air is crisp and fresh and it gently whips through the city streets, landing deep into your lungs; the towering mountain skyline, coated with snow, glistens and twinkles under the shimmering spring sun and it is a constant source of beauty and magnitude every time it meets your gaze. The people are endlessly kind, gentle and helpful, something that seems to permeate within the culture and general attitudes here – whilst walking the streets the evening before meeting Grant I stumble across a bar (a themed Big Lebowski bar no less) and in capital bold black letters on the front of the door it reads: ‘If you are racist, sexist, homophobic or an asshole, don’t come in.’

I meet Grant for lunch and we settle down for a big bowl of sustenance. “I’ll be human once I eat this,” he tells me, still somewhat tired after a few busy days, some of which were spent in Paris playing as part of a Rough Trade Record Store Day event. After lunch, we head back to his place, taking a detour past a local bakery. We then walk past a giant pond filled with ducks and swans and Grant recalls how, the previous evening, he saw three swans on the water, at sunset, perform an almost synchronised swimming-like series of motions under the rich changing colour of the sun, moving gracefully atop the gently rippling and sparkling water. “It was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen in my life,” he says, clearly enamoured by his surroundings.

We enter his basement apartment, a neat, cosy and welcoming place filled mostly with books, records and musical equipment. On the wall are homages to the music of his formative and defining years via mounted album covers from the likes of Devo, Missing Persons, Nina Hagen and Yello. We flick through books together, gush over a shared love of Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire and obscure documentaries and we listen to Carter Tutti remixing Chris and Cosey which, through his infinitely superior speaker system to mine, sounds like pure, untainted, glorious bliss.

He brews up some fresh coffee, plates up the traditional Icelandic desserts we picked up from the bakery (one of which is called grandma’s snail) lights a candle and we sit down in his kitchen for what becomes a three hour interview, plunging deep into the life of a man who’s been through more than most.

“This is the first place I’ve had to call home since 2008,” he says, looking around his place contentedly. “Iceland is the first place that I’ve been to – maybe that’s why I feel so comfortable here – where I didn’t feel like I was treated any differently.” Grant is openly gay and I mention the bar sign I’d seen the previous evening. “Yeah, and that’s like a mainstream sports bar that you’d see in the States, you know? It’s not some weird little artsy fartsy hole-in-the-wall. But yeah, this is the first place where men literally did not see me differently after knowing about my sexuality. They didn’t turn away from me in the showers at the swimming pools.”

Issues surrounding Grant’s sexuality have long plagued him. Growing up in a strictly religious home where even swearing was considered a serious sin, he ended up having a lifetime’s worth of homophobia instilled in him before he could even fully come out as a gay man. It was these “traumatising” years that set the ball rolling for a substantial period of mental anguish, confusion and self-inflicted shame that followed. He recalls the period with unease. “I’m just thinking back to the high school stuff,” he says. “I just wish I could have gotten out of that state of fear I was in – if everybody knew [I was gay] then my parents would find out. I remember being attacked at my house one night physically, one guy was waiting for me to get home and I remember pissing my jeans because I was so surprised by the attack and I remember going into the house, humiliated, and unable to say a single word about it because I knew it would raise questions about why this person was attacking me and it would become my problem. So, I just remember walking upstairs and going to bed and that was such a humiliating experience for me because I should have been able to talk to somebody; I should have been able to say something to my parents but I was too ashamed and I knew that I couldn’t afford to have my parents ask any questions.”

Grant left high school and moved to Germany where he would live for six years studying German and Russian, but an escape from his home soil would not alleviate the issues he was having. “In Germany my depression really started to blossom with anxiety and horrible panic disorder. I had a hard time sitting in a classroom without freaking out. My depression and anxiety were worsening by the day and getting more pronounced and there was no way that I was going to be able to stand up in front of people and interpret. I couldn’t concentrate on the studies because I was so terrified to be around people – I don’t think I’ve ever really expressed it like that before, I always talk in interviews about how I went back to the States because my mother got sick with cancer – and to some extent it’s true – but part of it is also because I was tired of being terrified and tired of being around the stress of people who were doing well at their studies and I was struggling with mental issues.”

His time in Germany did hold one important milestone however; he sang in public for the first time.

“I was encouraged. I wasn’t laughed at. I was super drunk but that was the only way for me to do it. I felt super uncomfortable but there was also a rush, people really took me seriously when I was singing – more than they did in any other context, it seemed like.”

Grant returned home to the States where his Mother’s lung cancer diagnosis was worse than first thought. “She died within the year,” he says. “That’s when I was given this anti-depressant for the first time called ‘Paxil’ which I’m still taking twenty years later and that changed everything for me back then. I became social and I immediately went into power drinking. My mum had died and I just went into boozing, I was finally coming out, I was twenty-five or twenty-six and coming out for the first time.”

In 1994 he would form the Czars, a group who experienced some critical success but fairly minor commercial success. The band lasted a decade, finally disbanding in 2004, but it’s not a period that Grant looks back on favourably.

“I worked in restaurants and record shops because that’s all I could get. The band was doing well on the local scene but man I was just so terrified, I was scared all the time – there was a lot of shame because I was gay, I couldn’t get over that. I could not get past that. That’s what had been instilled in me. People would call me faggot all the time and it was made clear to me that I would go to hell if I indulged in that lifestyle, that ‘choice’. I guess I heard that for so long that when I was free of those environments I was unable to get away from it inside my head. So, the Czars period is a particularly painful one for me because that’s me at my most awkward, even after I’d been able to come out I still wasn’t doing anything because I still couldn’t accept myself. So, I saw that as a failure.”

Sadly, ‘failure’ is a reoccurring word Grant uses to describe himself during various stages in his life. At times the urge to get up and give him a hug and assure him he is not is hard to shake. Self-loathing has, and largely still is, something he’s battled with enormously. “I saw myself as a huge failure during that entire period [the Czars] and it took huge amounts of alcohol for me to get on stage and do that,” he says.

By this point booze was a major factor in his life and soon the drugs would come too. “When the depression and anxiety was happening in Germany, it was easy because they had really strong beer and you could have it non-stop everywhere and everyone was doing it, so I got really into drinking in Germany and when I came back to the states I had access to a car, I wasn’t living in a little village anymore; there were gay clubs that I could go to. So that was the first time I got let loose and I felt comfortable with myself to some extent – with copious amounts of alcohol. Then it wasn’t until the 2000s probably that I started to get into cocaine; that was very quick. I mean, I never had the money to have a constant habit but it got to the point where as soon as I would smell beer it was like ‘okay, where are we going to get coke from?’ and then the horror of another sunrise without sleep. It got to the point where it was like, ‘oh god, it’s happening again’ and again and again and again. I went to the emergency room several times with heart stuff going on. That was quite scary and then I started smoking crack. Not because I wanted to but because that’s what people had and I started to notice that I really liked that too.”

After several years like this something snapped. An encounter with crack cocaine, sex and two men (one with Aids and the other with syphilis) led to him clean up. “I’ve talked about this many times before – and there is still some shame connected to it – but if I hadn’t got syphilis by going to the clinic to get it treated… it was pretty humiliating because I didn’t know that I had syphilis and I’d had it for such a long time that all these spots were all over my body which don’t occur until a second or third stage of syphilis when it’s starting to get really into your system. Then they brought in all of the student doctors to look at me because it was such an advanced stage that they would never get the opportunity to observe it. That was sort of humiliating, it was like something out of a Woody Allen movie – ‘do you mind if we bring in the entire team of students to observe you because we’ve never seen anything like you before’. So, that was the day I decided to start going to AA.”

This proved both a useful and successful step for Grant.

“AA was great because I got a lot of perspective,” he says. “I heard about people who had it a lot worse than me. That helped me through a lot of that time, just hearing what other people had been through. I found them very helpful and I still do… besides, I wasn’t a good drunk, I wasn’t particularly interesting. I was just rotting on the inside, silently.

“To be frank, I don’t know what the fuck my problem was. We can look at all the facts and say that it’s a perfect cocktail of you not ever being able to have any self-esteem because you were always told it wasn’t okay for you to be who you were from the earliest times but still there’s people who go through that and come out okay. So it’s sad when I think about it, it feels fucking sad, it’s pathetic because it’s just more of the same, it’s me continuing to put myself down now for not being able to get past all of those things when I was younger. Like, why didn’t you stand up for yourself or fight back? But I guess it makes sense if you feel like you weren’t even considered to be a human being… It seems like in retrospect that nobody was as hard on me as I was, at least not after a certain point. My parents, the church and people at school got me started; they got me started with the zero self-esteem and I took it to great new heights punishing myself continuously for not being a real man or being able to really do anything.”

Leaving behind his music, booze and drugs Grant moved to New York, he says to “get away from constantly being faced with my own failure. There was so many great things going on in the world of music and I thought ‘you’re not part of this’.”

It took several years and many attempts from Texan band and friends Midlake to coerce him back into music. This finally came in 2010 with the release of ‘Queen of Denmark’, a 1970s AOR-indebted record filled with sandpaper-dry humour, acerbic takedowns and plenty of personal pain and torment. It was a surprise success story, which led to an even greater success story in 2013’s ‘Pale Green Ghosts’. However, somewhat typical to Grant’s luck, it would appear, there had to be a stumbling block. Between albums Grant was diagnosed as being HIV Positive. In representative form, true to his newfound commitment to completely being himself and not being ashamed of it, he announced it on stage at a show with Hercules and Love Affair at Meltdown festival in 2012. Being so open, both personally and musically, is in many ways rooted in a need to overturn so many years spent living in shame and keeping things held in or hidden.

“There is a part of me that enjoys talking openly about myself because of all the hiding I’ve done,” he says. “So, it’s fun for me to talk openly. A lot of people say, ‘oh, don’t you feel like you’ve made yourself overly vulnerable?’ Like, to what? You going to blackmail me with my HIV status? How’s that work? What you going to do? I don’t really see the downside. I just feel like if there are people who don’t want to have anything to do with you because of who you are and because of your status and things like that then I guess this is a great way of getting those people out of the way before I even have to encounter them.”

However, as someone who is living through a life-changing diagnosis, the public discourse can also act to benefit Grant too. “There’s a lot of selfish motivation here, too,” he says, “because I’m looking to make contact with people who have gone further than me. Like, one of my great friends, Holly Johnson from Frankie Goes to Hollywood, he was diagnosed back when things weren’t so good and was on his death bed to some extent, not doing very well at all, and he made it through that and came through that nightmare and made a life for himself in spite of that and helps the youngsters like me, of which I am slowly not a member of that club any more! But I’m looking for connections with people too and I’m finding a lot of them. Sometimes I wish I could be one of those guys that hides and doesn’t wear his heart on his sleeve but that just isn’t me.”

Grant continues in relation to this and how it is again an extension of eradicating the old him.

“That was one of the things I was trying to destroy with the alcohol and the drugs – I didn’t want to be sensitive, I wanted to be a strong man like I was supposed to be, who didn’t show emotion. Sometimes it’s a pain in the ass, like I don’t want to be an emotional cunt, I want to be one of those people who is very measured and reserved when it comes to emotion, but that’s just not who I am and it’s good that I am who I am, as much of a pain in the ass as it can be sometimes.