"There was a lot of joy making this record"
John Grant tells us about his tremendous new album, his love of Yello, and why sheep are preferable to GOATS.
Photographer Hörður Sveinsson
John Grant releases his sixth solo album The Art of the Lie today, his first with producer Ivor Guest (Grace Jones, Brigitte Fontaine, Lana Del Ray) and, incredibly, it’s his best yet. As always, that smooth and sonorous voice is front and centre, while sonically it revels in the synthetic sounds of John Carpenter, Laurie Anderson, The Art of Noise, Vangelis, and Yello. Working with a crack team of session players John has created his most cinematic sounding record yet, moving him ever further from his 2013 balladeering breakthrough, The Queen of Denmark. Electronic textures and sci-fi synths are now as much his stock in trade as are meditations on the personal vs political.
I spoke to John back in April from his home in Iceland via Zoom. We’d spoken before for my Some Bizzare book, but this time was ostensibly to talk about his own music rather than that made by others. However, that didn’t stop many digressions into other artists’ catalogues, and we even started pulling records from our respective racks to show each other. The call ran way over two hours, and I ended up with so much material I’ve decided to split it over two posts, with the second one coming next week. In this instalment we talk about the record’s genesis and how it was made, while next week we delve more into the lyrical content and the deeply personal stories behind the songs. You may want to have a hanky close to hand for that.
The Art Of The Lie is a rich and dense record that rewards repeated, attentive listening. I think there’s a danger of taking John for granted (no pun intended) as his output over the past decade has been of such high quality it’s easy to forget what a rare talent he is. He’s also a total mensch; passionate, smart, and erudite, and it was a real pleasure to have a proper long chat with him.
Hi John. Congratulations on The Art of the Lie. This must be an exciting time for you with it just about to come out?
Thank you. It should be, shouldn’t it? [laughs]
I’ve had it for a few weeks which was a good thing because it’s definitely one of those albums that rewards repeated listens. Producer Ivor Guest is the 4th Viscount Wimborne – why did you want to work with him and did you have to call him Lord in the studio?
I didn’t have to, I did it by choice! We first met after one of Grace Jones’ Meltdown shows – he was sort of looking at me like, “Who is this fucker?”. I sat down with him out on this huge veranda at the Festival Hall and it was really lovely. I love Grace’s Hurricane [2008] and so I already had an idea that he was really good at what he does. But then he told me he worked with Brigitte Fontaine on her album Prohibition [2009] and I’m a huge fan of hers, and that is one of her best records. So that immediately piqued my interest because he’d worked with two of my favourite musicians and made really important pieces of their catalogue. We exchanged information and over the ensuing months had many telephone conversations and just got along very naturally. We talked about our love for Yello, which we both feel is a very misunderstood band. People tend to discount them because of the success of some of their maybe more gimmicky offerings, like Oh Yeah, which was a monster hit back in the ‘80s.
I thought Bungalow on the last Creep Show record was very reminiscent of Yello.
Thank you and that was of course exactly what I was thinking! When I heard the music for it, I was just like, This is Yello, and I’m certainly no Billy fucking Mackenzie but that was what I was going for on that. I really liked that track and I’m sort of disappointed that it hasn’t gotten me that house on the lake that I was looking forward to! I finally got to meet Yello after their show in Berlin in 2017. I had some albums for them to sign and the pen I had with me leaked all over the place and Dieter was just sort of looking at me... he was the grumpy one. When I walked in the room though, Boris said, “Oh, John Grant!”. You must understand what that meant to me because I’ve been listening to Yello since I discovered You Gotta Say Yes... when it came out in 1983. That album is an absolute masterpiece as are the two before it, and also Stella and many of their albums are masterpieces. People sort of get this supercilious smirk on their face when you bring up Yello, but you can’t overstate their importance in the world of electronic synthesiser sound design. They’re up there with Cabaret Voltaire and all those pioneers. It may sound a little bit silly but that’s what me and Ivor bonded over; we both feel the same about Yello and that was really important to me.
You seem to have fallen into a pattern of working with a different producer on each album. That kind of collaboration is obviously important to you?
I’m just hoping somebody will help me be good! I joke, but in some ways I need help to get to the level that I feel I should be at, musically speaking. I also really need interaction with somebody that I feel close to and who I identify with as far as taste, and what it means to have a vision. I feel very lucky that I’ve gotten to work with the people that I’ve gotten to work with, like Cate, Mal, Phil and Benge, so many incredible people. And I definitely would love to work with Ivor again.
I’m surprise you’ve not worked with Chris & Cosey
Chris asked me to do a remix for him several years ago when I wasn’t ready to do it, I hadn’t sort of got my sea legs when it came to that sort of thing. I didn’t do it, but when he asked me, I almost came unglued, because you know how incredibly important Chris & Cosey are to me. They just bring me incredible joy. But I’m not terribly surprised that I haven’t worked with them because they’re just very insular, they’re doing their own thing and they’re super busy. They do little collaborations here and there but not a lot, but I would love to do something with them. It’s incredible what they’ve done throughout their career. Cosey is a card-carrying badass.
The stuff that people of that generation had to go through to create and make their art, there’s nothing comparable these days.
That’s absolutely true and one really has to see it and understand it in that context, because these people were fearless and completely unflappable and unwavering throughout the entire journey.
Could you just talk me through like a timeline of making the record? You met Ivor in 2022, but that was a pretty busy time for you with Creep Show and the Patsy Cline project with Richard Hawley, plus you were still playing your own shows as well. How did you fit it all in?
We started in October of that year but it was all done piecemeal. After I finished that year, I felt completely exhausted. Although Cosey probably gets more done in an afternoon than I did in that entire twelve months! I think we started with two weeks in October 2022, and then maybe we had two weeks in November. Then I had all sorts of other stuff to do so we took a break and came back to it in like January 2023 and they came up to Iceland again, and then we moved everything to London to start working with musicians and stuff at Ivor’s studio and HOXA studios, and also Matrix down in Parsons Green.
Had you demoed tracks or did you just start from scratch?
I started from scratch.
Is that the usual process for you?
It has been the last couple of albums. I’m constantly making loops and little vignettes and pieces of music, but I’m very sort of scatter-brained. I have all these tiny pieces that I’ve gathered like a bowerbird building a nest with all these different colours. It’s a very intense puzzle I need to put together. So I had all sorts of ideas and names of songs – I like to write down names of songs and envision them before I do the lyrics, like an outline for a theme. It’s sort of all over the place. And it took Ivor a little while to get his head around it, to understand exactly what he was going to be doing, and what he probably wouldn’t be doing. He was very gracious and giving and able to adapt very quickly, so that was nice.
Did you give Ivor a sonic mood board for the record? Because I’m hearing John Carpenter, Laurie Anderson, Art of Noise – and ZTT in general – Vangelis, Zapp, a bit of Cameo...
You hear Cameo? No one else has picked up on that. That’s all I thought of while we were making it.
First time I heard It’s a Bitch I immediately thought of Cameo, but I also heard a bit of Wolfgang Press in there too.
Oh, bless you for saying that man, I’ve been listening to a lot of Wolfgang Press because I absolutely adore them. They’re one of the top favourites for me, ever. I just got the Big Sex EP on vinyl, which I’ve never owned before, and it’s a beautiful piece of art. They’re so special – there’s no substitute for that band. There’s nothing new or old that you can replace them with, they’re their own thing for sure. I have all of it here on vinyl. I just love them.
But Ivor and I did talk about a sort of a sound mood board and I made reference playlists on Spotify, which is the devil. I wanted it to be like if John Carpenter were in The Carpenters, which is what the song Marbles is aiming for. The Child Catcher is all about Dead Can Dance and Vangelis, if the two of them were to have a baby, you know?
Dead Can Dance were allowed to develop and change and become a very different band to what they started out as by 4AD, and I wonder if that’s a similar thing that you have with Bella Union. That you’re with a label who are not constantly pushing you towards making Queen of Denmark part two.
Yeah, I mean, everybody’s always like, “You ever gonna do anything acoustic again?”. I got that from Mojo this time, one of the guys in the office was like, “Ask him if he’s ever gonna do anything acoustic again”, and I said, Well, you can tell him to fuck off, because this record is an amalgamation of all those things. There are incredible musicians all over it. It’s got beautiful fretless bass playing from Robin Malarkey, David Okumu’s amazing guitar, Seb Rochford on drums. Robin Simon from Ultravox! plays guitar on Father, and Leo Abrahams plays the vicious guitar solo on The Child Catcher. But we also had Robert Logan with us who’s an incredible sound synth sound designer and makes his own synth music. And Ivor wanted him to be part of the process, so he brought him along and I immediately fell in love with him and he was amazing and we just had so much fun. It was just so beautiful – there was a lot of joy making this record.
I love Marbles. It sounds like The Carpenters produced by Massive Attack. You must have been very happy when that came together.
I designed these sections and then wanted them to go together and Ivor and some of the others were like, “That doesn’t go together”. I was like, No, it does, we just have to find the dressing for each piece so that it flows perfectly. The drums on that track were inspired by the song Anti-World by Nina Hagan, the first track off of Nun Sex Monk Rock (1982), which is my favourite record. And then the guitar that Dave plays is very Bauhaus to me. So I had the first verse for the song and then it took me forever to get the second verse, and the choruses. But the opening lines, “I have the poise of a newborn giraffe / I feel like I’ve fallen off the wagon / My moves are quite clearly unchoreographed / My comportment like that of a Komodo dragon” were completely inspired by Sondheim and that school of lyric writing. It’s like a mixture of Cole Porter and The Carpenters and John Carpenter and Bauhaus and Nina Hagan. And when it was finished it just worked. And you’re very correct in saying that it was exactly what I wanted it to be. Ivor spent a lot of time sculpting all those pieces together. He worked on that track for a long time, and there were things that we needed to cut out in order to get parts to work together. It sort of goes into a slow disco beat on the chorus, almost like a bossa nova. I should have gotten cuica in there!
Maybe on the 12" remix.
Exactly, that’s got to happen for sure. I haven’t even arranged for remixes to be done yet and I’m really excited about what’s possible. And we may do some ourselves like in the old days, the extended 12” remix where you get to show off the parts that aren’t showcased enough in the finished track. You have to always kill your darlings to get frequencies to work together into a cohesive whole. And then in those remixes, you can showcase your favourite part that everybody was like, “No, that’s too loud”, and have it blasting for 10 minutes!
All That School for Nothing has one of my favourite lines on it: "You’re the personification of the selfie stick."
I’m so happy you said that because I didn’t think that was going to be noticeable. And that’s one of my favourite lines myself I have to say.
As far as insults go, that’s a pretty good one.
It was another gift, I got lucky. That song was originally written for Blondie. And I sent it to them and I never heard anything back. I was asked to write a track for them by John Congleton who was producing them at the time, maybe they didn’t even know about it. Then I thought this would be great for Grace Jones, and this was before I knew Ivor. By the time I got to meet Grace I had already started working on it for myself. But I’ve been listening to Blondie a lot and I just can’t believe how fucking good her voice is. She’s the whole package. I mean, even as a young gay child I just thought she was the most beautiful creature I’d ever seen. I saw her performing Heart of Glass with her peroxide and black hair, and unbelievable presence and beauty and talent.
Right now, what songs are you happiest with from the record?
Meek AF and Father are my two favourite trucks on the record. Meek AF is supposed to have a Nine Inch Nails vibe going on and I can’t get enough of that song. I really had to get it right because the lyrics are so important to me. It talks about how the evangelical Christian movement has been taken over by the idea that Jesus wants you to be rich; that’s the new sales pitch. When I was in church, as a child, we always heard about this parable of the sheep and the goats. And the sheep are the ones that get into heaven because Jesus says, “Ah yes, I recognise you, I knew you”, and the goats represent this other group, to who Jesus says, “I never knew you”, so they go straight to hell. That’s what I’m saying in the first verse: “I know that you think you’re really smooth / You think you’re one of the sheep, but you also think that you’re the GOAT”. In politics these days, those two words have totally different meanings and it’s weird how the evangelical Christian nationalists now see sheep as the most horrible negative thing – nobody wants to be a sheep, nobody wants to be a follower. You have to be a closer, like, Shelley ‘The Machine’ Levene in David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross. They want you to be the GOAT now. For the evangelical Christian movement the meanings have been totally switched. And the coda is me talking directly to these people, and the last line is, “You never believed the meek would inherit anything, let alone the earth”. And that’s the theme of the song right there in a nutshell. It’s basically me taking the piss out of those people, which of course, it’s not a nice thing to do, because I’m an extremely flawed human being too, but it’s the truth about how I feel. The anger of having been judged by that system my whole life, and then it turns out they don’t fucking believe it either.
The Art of the Lie is out now on Bella Union, and you can buy the double pink vinyl version here.
You took your time…
Photographer Brian Griffin
Another album released today is British Murder Boys’ Active Agents and House Boys, which is, amazingly, their debut long player. Formed in 2003 by Surgeon (Anthony Child) and Regis (Karl O’Connor) the pair have been at the cutting edge of techno, both as solo artists and BMB, since the early ‘90s. After a series of punishing 12” singles that set the course for early ‘00s industrial techno, they split in 2012, reforming sporadically for live shows only.
Finally releasing an album in 2024 has surprised everyone, not least the duo who made it. It’s far more stripped down than their previous releases, showing the influence of dub alongside the usual brutal rhythms and sinister electronics.
I grabbed five minutes with Karl to get his ‘happy release day’ take on the album, and despite having just boarded a plane in New York, he was in a playful mood.
BMB formed in 2003, yet you’ve only just got around to releasing your debut album. What took you so long?
Well, this wasn’t planned. We’ve tried to make an album a few times before but for one reason or another we aborted them. The closest we got was doing a covers LP – we recorded ‘Bright Eyes’ from Watership Down and Bonnie Tyler’s ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ for it but didn’t get any further.
Conceptually and sonically, it’s definitely an album, rather than a collection of individual 12”s.
The LP was designed to be played live. We felt we needed to change something, be more direct. We were in Bristol doing a gig last year, and we both felt we needed to change the approach somehow. We’ve always been very inspired by Mark Stewart and maybe something was communicated that night. Tony went home and wrote the whole thing in a few days, like we did in the ‘90s.
The sound is comparatively stripped down. Did you discuss what you wanted the album to be, or did it just evolve naturally?
We wanted a more King Tubby and Suicide vibe, totally stripped back. We felt we’d taken the BMB sound of the 12”s as far as it could go and the new approach was very liberating. Tony had a very clear vision and was energised by the need for some rawer tracks in the set. It’s extremely rare we are both in the zone like this, but we were carried by this momentum. They’re basically raw warehouse tracks and I laid the vocal ideas directly over the music – it was instant and felt right.
You once said BMB came out of a frustration with Techno. Is that still the case?
Less so now as we have nothing to lose. Very few artists are truly brave, and we just go about applying our sound – and it is OUR sound – in a way anyone with half a brain would. And of course we are just better than anyone else and only a simpleton would dispute that.
What’s it like being the elder statesmen of Industrial Techno?
We don’t use the ‘I’ word – that’s for H&M Goths and Americans. Being elder statesmen though feels saucy Hawtrey, while also smelling of piss.
Have you played any ‘Barn Dances’ recently?
Oh yes. It’s hard to take your partner by the hand if it’s just one bloke and his dog in attendance.
I can really hear the Suicide influence in the vocals. Are you Digbeth’s answer to Alan Vega?
Ha! Tipton, Tipton is killing their youth!
Active Agents and House Boys (Downwards) is available on limited clear double vinyl from Boomkat.
For those who read to the end…
Thanks as always for reading and, hopefully, subscribing.
Thanks to those who have opted for a paid subscription – it really helps with covering the costs of putting this all together. If you’ve enjoyed the Dancing Architect so far you may want to consider making a donation. There are various options available, but even a couple of quid would be most welcome.
Next week I’ll be posting the second part of my chat with John Grant, and I’ll also be interviewing one of my all-time musical heroes about his first album in a quarter of a century. I’ve heard the new record and, unbelievably, it’s been worth the wait.
But that’s for the future. It’s great to get feedback so please feel free to leave a comment, and do tell your friends about what I’m doing here. Cheers!