John Grant interview – “It feels like the US is in free-fall mode”
Grant combines the personal and the political in spectacular style
“America is fucked!” exclaims John Grant, unapologetically.
We’ve asked the singer, songwriter and producer to sum up the lyrical theme that binds together the songs on his latest album The Art of the Lie, and he quickly comes up with these three words.
It’s a rainy afternoon in Iceland, where American-born Grant has been resident for many years now, but as he joins us from a room in his home, it’s his homeland that’s very much on his mind.
“I usually know what it’s going to be about before I start,” and this time it’s “a lot of thinking about where you come from. Conditioning, old ties.. your outlook on the world. Coming to a realisation of who you are, where you’ve been and where you’re going. As I see things breaking down more and more in the United States it makes me think about where I came from and where I grew up.”
He describes Doanld Trump’s behaviour during his trial over charges of falsifying business records – which had just concluded when we spoke – as “just pathetic”.
When we suggest it was closer to that of a petulant five-year-old than a global statesman, he continues: “There are so many people out there that that resonates with. They think that’s a show of strength. And that’s all you need to know about the States.
“Obviously it’s an incredible place but there is this overarching idea of what is important in life and what is important in the United States is business. Business and God, which have been fused together. “
Grant’s own upbringing, in a strict Methodist family where he was unable to express his own growing realisation that he was gay, having been told from an early age that homosexuals were “going to hell”, remain at odds with America’s love affair with religion.
“This album is in part about the lies people espouse and the brokenness it breeds and how we are warped and deformed by these lies”, he says in the accompanying notes to the album. “For example, the Christian Nationalist movement has formed an alliance with White Supremacist groups and together they have taken over the Republican party and see LGBTQ+ people and non-whites as genetically and even mentally inferior and believe all undesirables must be forced either to convert to Christianity and adhere to the teachings of the Bible as interpreted by them or they must be removed in order that purity be restored to ‘their’ nation.
“They now believe Democracy is not the way to achieve these goals. Any sort of pretence of tolerance that may have seemed to develop over the past several decades has all but vanished. It feels like the U.S. in is free-fall mode.”
As for the chances of Trump returning to the White House, Grant reckons: “There’s no way you can say it’s impossible. In fact, at this stage, you could even say that it’s likely, because the Democrat side is so fractured and Biden has angered the young people,” referring to the crackdown on university demonstations against the war in Gaza.
Those who’ve followed Grant’s shift from guitar and then piano-based songs into the world of electronic production, will have plenty to enjoy here. 2018’s Love Is Magic marked a significant stylistic switch up with its production by analogue synth master Benge and the partnership has continued, with two exceptional albums under the banner Creep Show created by the pair along with Stephen Mallinder of Cabaret Voltaire fame and Tim Winter of Tunng.
The Art of the Lie may have been overseen by a different producer – Ivor Guest – but it’s a direction that’s in evidence right from the album’s opener, the Cameo-channelling electrofunk ‘All That School For Nothing’, right through to the P-funk banger ‘It’s A Bitch’.
“I just start to feel that it’s time to do something else,” he tells us, when asked to describe how the process begins to take shape, “so then I look at my notes. I always have little pieces of music around. Lines, phrases, verses and choruses, thoughts I’ve written down. I sort of know what I’m going to do, but there are always a lot of holes to fill in. Some songs take a lot longer than others to show up. I just keep working at it until they show up.”
It was a meeting in London between Grant and producer and composer Guest at Grace Jones’ South Bank show, the finale of her Meltdown Festival in June 2022, would prove pivotal. They began discussing two records Guest had worked on, Grace Jones’ ‘Hurricane’ and ‘Prohibition’ for Brigitte Fontaine. Grant declared his love for not only the artists but also those specific albums. He simply suggested to Guest that he should do his next record and Guest expressed his interest on the spot.
“We became friends just talking about music over the next couple of months,” Grant says, and the arrangement became set in stone.
Eschewing the current trend for virtual working, Guest and he set up in the studio in person, first in Reykjavík, then at Hoxa HQ in West Hampstead and then Matrix in Parsons Green in West London, which Grant found “beautiful”.
“I write the songs,” he says, when we enquire how the workload was split. “I do a lot of programming and drums and synths, play the piano sometimes… Although I’m a little bit tired of the piano right now. Ivor was there for the whole thing directing me and making sure we were making a cohesive whole.”
Just because Grant’s trademark piano playing may be thin on the ground, that doesn’t mean that the album is missing his other trademark, namely the high drama showcases for his emotionally charged vocal talent. Tracing the album’s twin obsession, with family ties, ‘Father’ is layered with Vocoder-style effects but remains intimate and confessional, while ‘Mother and Son’ plays acoustic strumming off against haunted Mellowtron-type eeriness, again highly candid. Not holding back on Grant’s thoughts on his upbringing. ‘Daddy’, meanwhile, fizzes with simple, soaring synths – elsewhere, he names the ‘Bladerunner’ soundtrack by Vangelis as a major influence – but bursts into a massive, tearjerking chorus.
The album reaches its undoubted climax with a track that ties both strands firmly together. ‘The Child Catcher’ is named after one of cinema’s most terrifying baddies, who uses sweets to tempt children out of hiding – and into captivity – from the children’s film ‘Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’.
Grant uses this nightmarish vision as a metaphor for the sugar trade, that catches young souls before they’re even born and enslaves them in a lifelong addiction and early death, symptomatic of America’s still childlike outlook. The song talks of addiction being forged through the blood of the pregnant mother, and all done with cynical money making above all else, in mind. “The perfect time / To take control of minds,” he sings, “A recent scientific study finds / Is in the womb.”
He likens the creepiness of the situation to that moment in a horror movie where the evil has to show its hand to the victim before it’s allowed to move in for the kill. The vampire, for instance. can only get to work once he’s been invited across the threshold by the victim.
“It’s basically a metaphor for big business,” he says, “in this case, sugar. You have millions of people dying of sugar-related illness every year. And I’m guessing the people selling the sugar are in bed with the people selling the remedy to it, too.
“There this scene in ‘Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’ when he shows up with his cart full of candy. He coaxes the children in and he pulls a string and then all the candy and the ribbons fall away and they’re just locked inside this prison. It’s the perfect metaphor, because they spend billions on advertising and research, making sure they get into young children’s minds. It just ties in with the idea of The Art Of The Lie – this idea of America as a moral beacon for the world.”
Ben Willmott