The greatest motherfucker - John Grant

But while GMF is a proclamation laced in irony and self-doubt, as we’re sat with John among the hustle and bustle of London on a sunny summer afternoon, we can’t help but think, well, yes, he IS the greatest motherfucker.

John is a rare breed for journalists. He’s an anomaly; a white whale swimming through a sea of clickbait banality. Even though he has a new album and tour to flog, when you speak with John, you’re not getting the usual soulless ‘on brand’ QVC-esque hawking, while a record label exec breathes down his neck. You’re getting honesty, sincerity and a bloke who’s striving to be what we’re all striving to be – gay and happy.

“I don’t believe my story is important,” he tells us, quite matter-of-factly. “It’s just as important or unimportant as anyone else’s. And I’m not coming out with this new music on a brand new topic – this is an album about love and the horror of not being able to love someone back once you’ve found them, because you’re SO incapable of loving yourself. It’s the ultimate horror story!”

But as bleak as that might sound, it’d be just as clich?d to talk about John’s sadness.
It’s well documented that after the implosion of his 90s alt-rock band The Czars, John spent a number of years struggling with addiction to drugs and alcohol, his HIV status, heartbreak and ultimately thinking he’d never make music again.

But actually, the John Grant sat before us in 2015, whose eyes dart back and forth as pretty young things walk by our table, is in a much better place. Don’t be fooled by anyone trying to tell you that the godfather of electro-gloom is doing anything but finally letting his hair down and having a bit of fun. You only need to listen to his superb new album – Grey Tickles, Black Pressure – to know that’s the case.

“You can hear it’s coming from a better place,” he confesses. “And if it sounds like I had fun making it, it’s because I did!”

It’s why the album – his third, for those counting – is made up of tracks like the orchestral Global Warming, the cinematic Geraldine, and You and Him – a scuzzy yet gleeful cacophony of distorted guitars and electro swathes, with the kind of flippant wordplay that’d make Oscar Wilde blush.

“Oh yeah, it’s a funky album,” John laughs, when we propose that it’s his most danceable to date. “I don’t want to compare myself to Grace Jones in any way, but it has that slow grove. I love noise, and distorted guitars, and on this album I just wanted to be NASTY. To portray anger and lose myself in that.

Talk turns to another of the album’s standout tracks, Voodoo Doll – a twistingly electronic ode to friendship, with a baseline akin to Parliament-Funkadelic, and a clearcut message about trying to help someone “who’s super depressed”.

“I understand depression,” John starts, “I’ve dealt with it. People tell you you’re sick, that there’s something wrong with you – that you have an abnormality that makes it impossible for you to have relationships in the real world. Depression made me not want to do anything, so I know what people mean when they say they can’t get out of bed.
“But there are people out there – especially men – who can’t talk about it, because it’s seen as a weakness.”

And it’s something that’s affecting gay men more than most, as John knows too well. Growing up in the suburbia of Parker, Colorado, he was always told his sexuality was an illness that needed curing. Even by his parents, thanks to their antiquated Christian views.
“They weren’t the type to tell me to get out of their house,” he explains. “It was a tender, ‘We love you, but you need to be fixed.’ If you’ve dealt with that for the first 20 years of your life, its hard to get past that. You’re told that being who you are is an abomination to the Lord and you’re letting your family down – how can you put that on a child?”

But that’s exactly what John, now 48 years old, has been trying to do – get past it.
Before he was clean of his addictions, he tried to put his depression and anxiety behind him with drugs, sex and booze. “It was avoidance behaviour,” he tells us, “an escape. I used those things to not have to deal with anything at all. I went out and I didn’t care that I contracted HIV – it’s painful now to think that I didn’t care.”

Whereas now, he’s solely relying on his music: “I’ve been challenging my depression and self-loathing. I challenged all these things that I thought of myself. But once you develop a severe anxiety disorder that’s routed in your entire upbringing, things blossom and it’s hard to counteract that.”

It’s a topic he discusses in the title track to his new album – arguably the predecessor to the aforementioned GMF. A lyric in particular sticks out to us: ‘And there are children who have cancer, and so all bets are off, because I can’t compete with that.’

To the untrained ear, this might be the case of John living up to his downtrodden reputation. What other modern musician would write a chorus – for what’s quintessentially a pop song – about kids with cancer? But we put to him that it’s really a lyric born from his progression, his growth, his “moving past things”.

“Well, yes,” he muses, “it was a joke about still being able to be selfish, but being aware that there are worse scenarios in the world than my own. What happened to you is important and what happened to me, which gave me anxiety, is important too. But it’s important to sort yourself out, get out into the world and help others. When you think about kids with bone marrow cancer that have more confidence and more courage than so many other people – and they haven’t even had the chance to live yet!”

In our afternoon with John – which starts to feel like a therapy session, a cathartic experience for both of us – there are few stones that’re left unturned.
We put to him that the key to being gay and happy is learning to respect yourself – especially when it comes to sex. 

“Absolutely!” he declares. “There’re a lot of gay men that are horrified by that behaviour, and think of themselves as trashy whores. Fuck those self-loathing fuckers. And then you get the other side, where these narcissists would never dream of having super hot sex to feel desired. Good for them, but that wasn’t the case for me.”

And when it comes to the recent media hysteria surrounding chemsex and chill out parties, John suggests it’s linked to some gay men’s inability to be truly intimate with another person: “I don’t have a Grindr account – I can’t have anything to do with that world, I’d go ape shit over it. I don’t want to get lost in it – it doesn’t lead to anything good for me. I’ve found an incredi