John Grant hadn’t been having a good time. He was working as a waiter in New York, living and drinking in a rough neighbourhood, and playing a few shows on the side after The Czars had split. He’d basically given up on music, on the life that he’d pursued for years with critical success, but to little financial benefit. His musical career could have ended there, had it not been for a few fans in Denton, Texas. Midlake had heard his music, and invited the singer to support them on a handful of live dates in New York. After that, it seemed natural to return to the desert to record an album.
Those sessions produced a bitterly nostalgic album. Wistful memories of candy stores and movie stars are dragged from the past and placed next to more recent memories of intolerance, rejection, and Grants painful adolescence as a teenager growing up in an evangelically religious household that viewed homosexuality as a sin.
I wanted to change the world
But I could not even change my underwear
Woven through John Grant’s critically-acclaimed debut ‘Queen of Denmark’ (MOJO Magazine’s album of the year 2010, countless other end-of-year lists), are lines like this. ‘JC Hates Faggots’ is the kind of pop song that could only be sung along to by people who don’t understand a word of english, as the playful melody is lists all the things that Jesus hates. Everything from the mundane (people who cut in line) to the more troublingly racist examples that follow.
Since then, things have looked up. He’s toured the world in support of the album to as rapturous a reception as the album received, often touring with Midlake, and joins us as the headliner of Bella Union’s curation of the Clash Tent.
