CHAPTER 1

 

 

#100: ANOHNI (as ANTONY AND THE JOHNSONS)

"Hope There's Someone"

from the album I Am A Bird Now

Released: September 2005

I.

WILL.

GET.

MY.

SELF.

BACK.

Friday 22 July 2005. The sky is overcast and so is the cemetery. I think it was Chadwell St Mary Cemetery because it was just off the motorway, past Tilbury and the pylons and what will eventually feed into the North Sea. It looked like somewhere in Oxfordshire, semi-rural and moderately opulent. Everybody is here and I'm not sure they believe that they're here, that they ever had to go beyond the farthest eastern boundaries of the city they assumed would forever enclose them all.

Why am I anywhere? Why does it always have to be about me? There are people around me, people with whom I speak all the time over a computer screen. Real, proper close friends of the person we've all come to mourn today. Not nodding acquaintances like me. Do I come across as though I'm pretending to be sad?

There is no pretence about my sadness. I am sad, but not just because of what happened to my nodding acquaintance, and close personal friend to others here who are infinitely more important than me, a family member to yet others, and to one other person their partner in life. One other person who's wandering around slightly dazed and baffled.

But there is also a countenance which I am morally bound to keep. Play it straight and heartfelt. This was a deeply intelligent and lively person who disappeared a couple of Thursdays before because she was on the train to work and that was somehow, obscurely, illegal. The everyday horror which routinely provokes only a shrug until someone you know, even if only vaguely, becomes involved.

It is not about you, yet it's all about you, from your perspective. It's been nearly four years since you were at another funeral. You couldn't get past what happened, or liked to convince yourself that you couldn't. You know this is, for a key nanosecond, ALL about you. You have to prove that you're still fit to live as a human being. You have to show people that somehow you can get beyond the fourth stage, accept and try to get on.

Because you sat at home and brooded under headphones while they went out, danced and had fun. Two of the people on a dancefloor you never visited gone within a couple of months of each other. Do you know where you're going to, Diana Ross once rhetorically asked herself. You know where you might be going if you're not careful.

You need to show these people who you are. You're much better at doing that in person than you are online. A lifetime in the shadow of a ball and chain you've been biologically obliged to haul around with you, or even around your self. They think you're standoffish. Never say anything. They don't get it. Although a few try. They know what key to turn in order to get me functioning and then it's anybody's guess where the rollercoaster lands.

You stand in solemn silence but that's all you need to do, everything that's being asked of you. After it's happened, people look at you differently. You might even say, in some cases, fondly. You don't need to say anything because your left hand says it all.

We'll make sure that you don't end up like I did, you think. But it's all words; what you mean is you'll make sure you don't end up like you did.

It was the end of somebody's life, but also the closure of your premature death. You'll hardly tell anyone, but this is, tragically, the almighty kick in the backside that you needed. How much more life are you going to miss? You walk out of that cemetery, back into the car, heading back to the City, and you know you are different from the collared wretch you had been that morning.

"There's a ghost on the horizon

When I go to bed"

You only know ANONHI (as she later became known) from her cameo at the end of a Rufus Wainwright album the autumn before. She sings on the version of "Perfect Day" you find on Lou Reed's The Raven, too, but you don't really get the connection at that time. This extraordinary voice which sounds beamed down from 195-94 materialises like an old Cape Apples shop poster from the sixties crooning about how something gets him going, and you can't get going away from it, from her.

 

She comes from Chichester but subsequently lived in Amsterdam, San Jose and subsequently Manhattan. She did enough growing up in the UK to hear what radio DJs and manly music critics had to say - mainly spite-filled ridicule - about all the music she intrinsically loved. Her career can be interpreted as her final revenge on all that disused discourse. Ho ho, Marc and the Mambas - ha ha, it helped ANONHI grow up and who remembers any of the jokers hyped up instead?

Later in the summer of 2005 there is an album, I Am A Bird Now, with its cover of Candy Darling on her deathbed, terminally ill and bored with life. I think of later in the summer of 2001, just before that last funeral I attended. I buy the album, take it home and play it, and like all the best albums it's as though the artist is singing, or playing, to me.

"Hope There's Someone" is the first song on that album and it's mostly just ANONHI at the piano with subtle and not-so-subtle vocal overdubs. I listened and thought, here's someone who actually gets what Culture Club were trying to say with the song "Victims" (and, as you'd expect, Boy George himself turns up later on the record, duetting with her on "You Are My Sister"). The piano is hopeful but tense. The voice of ANONHI cannot be pinned down, has to fly out of the church tower's barred window. A high vibrato which doesn't have to exhibit its prowess.

And a soul that is alone, and hurt. Time might be running out for the singer, and she's hoping that when the end comes he will not have to face it alone, in common with all of the rest of us. Confident yet hesitant - the pause before the semi-guilty sigh of "uh-hmm" that heralds the second half of the second verse. The tower of orange defiance which rises with her determinedly climactic "SET MY HEART FREE," the little chuckle of "YEAH," which she permits after the final "nice to hold."

But then she begins to hammer chords of unexpected fury, or is it fear? Multiple ANONHImass voices come in on varying wings of harmony or discordance over a Philip Glass organ arpeggio and violent strings - Joan Wasser on viola, Vancouver's Julia Kent on 'cello - as if to scream, politely, "don't let me die." Reaching a final climax, the music recedes, back down to one voice and its piano, a wordless, sibilant weep seeking permission to go on living.

It sent me out the door, that song, and back towards the world.