John Grant Interviewed: “I was angry when I wrote Pale Green Ghosts”

While performing with New York disco outfit Hercules and Love Affair at London’s Meltdown Festival last summer, John Grant announced to a shocked audience that he had been diagnosed as HIV positive. After the implosion of his band The Czars, Grant had descended into a self-destructive spiral of drink and drug abuse, flirting with suicide and rampant priapism only to clean up and return as a solo artist with 2010’s acclaimed Queen of Denmark. Grant’s lyrics spoke of dysfunction and self-loathing, stemming from a guilt-ridden relationship with his own homosexuality, whereas the music was firmly rooted in 70s FM rock courtesy of sympathetic production from Tim Smith and his Midlake cohorts. For a man who seemed to operate with the weight of the world on his shoulders, this new-found success ought to have ushered in a new era of comparative tranquility – but was shattered by this staggering development.

So, it may be natural to assume that Grant’s latest album, Pale Green Ghosts, would plough a familiar furrow of baroque, undeniably adult MOR amid his trademark lyrical waltz of self-analysis. But it doesn’t. For the most part, the album positively throbs and thoroughly bristles, drenched in neon synths and seared with Grant’s remarkably sonorous and empathetic vocals. “On this album, I’m mostly influenced by the things from the 80s I love,” he says. “Cabaret Voltaire, Yello. And in terms of modern things: Apparat, Jimmy Edgar, Kavinsky, Gus Gus [Biggi Veira from the band produced the album] – they’re all important.”

Sinead O’Connor’s primal, new wave Mandinka was one of the songs Grant danced to in his mid-80s nightclubbing heyday. Twenty-four years later, O’Connor covered the title track from Grant’s last album and now appears on Pale Green Ghosts to add wonderfully spectral backing vocals to four songs. “We naturally became friends,” he admits. “I really love the human being and artist she is. Her backing vocals sound so natural; working with her is so easy, she has a great instinct about how to be, in a specific context, with her voice.”

This layering of raw emotion on a foundation of retro electronica serves to beguile the listener into the travails of Grant’s private life, although private hardly seems apposite for a man whose lyrics are shot through with disarming candour. Pale Green Ghosts is equally in thrall to the power of language as to the electronic sounds of his teenage years. A polyglot, Grant frequently dips into a parlance unfamiliar with the tropes of pop, as the scolding lyrics of Black Belt testify: ‘You are callipygian but look at the state you're in / You got really nice clothes, bet you didn't pay for those.’ But he can never cloak his often frightening frankness in linguistic obscuritanism. “I do get asked if I’m worried about being too open but it’s always a resounding ‘no’,” he admits. “I really don’t feel like I’m dealing with issues that anyone else is not dealing with. Everybody has their shit to deal with. You too can be a black sheep in your family, have a total disconnect [from your family] and feel like you don’t fit it – you don’t have to be gay as well. I really can’t imagine how else I should go about it, I’m talking about my experience as a human being.”

"Everybody has their shit to deal with" – John Grant

There’s a very clear and deliberate dichotomy at the dark heart of Pale Green Ghosts. Grant croons about suicide and the torment of heartbreak over a hi-NRG backing, a schism that is only disrupted by the presence of stately ballads It Doesn’t Matter To Him and Glacier. “I think this is my way of naturally reacting to things when I feel like I have a particularly difficult subject to deal with. It’s like a wolf in sheep’s clothing: an upbeat, positive sound delivers [unsettling] information. For example, Sensitive New Age Guy is about a dear friend’s horrible suicide. This was a difficult song for some people as they seemed to be irritated by its presence on the record and I felt like that was a triumph for me as that was how this person was perceived in everyday life, his drag persona was difficult for some to deal with so I feel like the song was a manifestation of who he was. Black Belt is a song about anger, a lot of anger, and saying horrible things to someone you really love deeply but to put it in this musical context seems to really work.”

Grant’s propensity for self-laceration in song peaks with Ernest Borgnine, ostensibly a tribute to the one-time Airwolf actor but, conversely, peppered with sly references to Grant’s health issues: ‘Now what did you expect, you spent your lifetime on your knees.’ “I just really love that there is a song called Ernest Borgnine,” he says. “I just adore him and will continue to do so. And that song is my take on Woody Allen’s Purple Rose of Cairo because it’s about somebody who is escaping their everyday life; the harsh realities in the verse and then the escape is in the chorus. And the song is like my take on escaping the realities of my diagnosis and wondering: What would one of my movie heroes do? Which is completely absurd! But, as I say in the song, I did meet him and it was a highlight of my life.”

Nevertheless, Grant’s existential and health burdens consistently threaten to overwhelm. Both Queen of Denmark and Pale Green Ghosts deal with grief, albeit in different stages. “I was angry when I wrote Pale Green Ghosts,” he reflects. “But now I feel like I’m in the stage of acceptance. Most of that is directed at myself, feeling sad and angry that I wasn’t able to have enough of a love for myself, to avoid getting into my current situation. I’ve thought a lot about how [the HIV diagnosis] came about. Two years ago, I was sober for the previous six years. And I had become sober in order to face myself and face life and have a chance to actually live my life and enjoy it. But when this happened, it was obvious that I was still indulging in other areas of my life, other behaviours were connected to the fact that I never felt like a human being because of the environment I grew up in. And it does make me angry, very angry. But in a very big way, this record is about acceptance. And that includes forgiving myself.”

And has he reached that point of forgiveness? “Yes. It’s different every day but, for the most part, I’ve accepted that I’m a very flawed human being who is trying to wake up and take part in his own life and not just let life happen to me, but it’s also me saying, ‘I would like to just feel like I deserve to be loved and have a great life. No more and no less than anybody else.’ That’s it. That’s a good start for me.”