I ME MYSELF

Boy George was the first person Antony saw who he could relate to. Now the man with the beautiful voice is the toast of New York and duetting with his boyhood idol. He talks to Jim Carroll

The pieces of the jigsaw slot into place when you hear Antony tell about how a young kid from Chichester living in California fell in love with New York. Here's a story that could have been plucked from the lines of a Velvet Underground song. Here's a voice that could only have been nurtured in those seedy, downtown cabaret clubs where there's plenty of spectres in the shadows looking on. Here is certainly the most unlikely pop singer to emerge in many a long day.

The stories and tales really take flight in I Am a Bird Now, the current album from Antony & The Johnsons, with its elegantly dignified and graceful songs about transformations, isolation, anxiety, blurred sexual identity, hopes, dreams and fears. I Am a Bird Now is an extraordinary work of art.

When you consider the voice that makes all these sad laments soar with such euphoric intent, comparisons to equally troubled souls are inevitable. A snatch of Jimmy Scott and Jeff Buckley here, a trace of Nina Simone and Billie Holiday there: Antony's vibrato tones turn every note into a fully realised drama.

As a boy growing up in San Jose, struggling with adolescent confusions about who he was, Antony found solace in colourful pop music from England. "My family moved to the United States when I was 11 years of age. In the early '80s, it was the likes of Kate Bush, Soft Cell and Culture Club who captivated me rather than the American pop music of the time."

He remembers spending as much time as he could with Kissing to Be Clever, Culture Club's debut album. He would stare at the cover and devour the songs. "Boy George was really the first reflection I saw of myself. I suppose I knew from that point on that I would be a singer."

Antony could have stayed singing in California, where he sang first with his school choir and then a local metal band, but then he saw a documentary about New York's underground cabaret scene. He was hooked. The sight of performers like Joey Arias and Phoebe Legere made up Antony's mind. He was going to New York.

"Before I came to adulthood, New York was the landscape for what I thought my adult life would be. I really wanted to be a part of what was going on there because I always thought it would be where I'd come to life."

He went to lectures about experimental theatre at New York University, but the real studies happened at night. "I went to New York to be where the beautiful people were and it didn't disappoint me. It's so open. It's a great platform to do your own thing or start new things. When I got there, I started living for the first time."

Much of that living was done in the Pyramid Club. Shoulder to shoulder with various downtown art scene movers and shakers, Antony found himself becoming an insider at that sleazy Lower East Side cabaret club. It became his home, the place where he felt most comfortable, a remarkable turn of events for someone who had always been an outsider.

Naturally, he felt the urge to perform, putting together an ensemble called Blacklips. He thinks it must have been quite a sight, this bald-headed giant in a slinky slip, holding a cigarette, singing extreme torch songs. "It was all very surreal, very dramatic, very angry with lots of screaming. I styled the arrangements on what Angelo Badalamenti did for Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, that was my template. I did most of the music myself on a little four-track. I didn't really have any relationship with other musicians at the time."

As Antony performed his intense, angry songs in the bowels of the Pyramid, the downtown gay scene began to unwind around him. "It was a dark time in New York history," he remembers. "The first cycle of Aids deaths were in full swing and Rudy Giuliani's reign was just around the corner and it changed the general feeling in the city. Things began to shut down and channels of expression began to disappear in ways which are still hard to articulate."

By the mid-1990s, Antony had moved on from punk cabaret. The first incarnation of The Johnsons put on surrealist plays in tiny theatres, real off-off-off-off-Broadway stuff. But Antony found theatre limiting, the absence of money stifling and the lack of popular appeal frustrating, so he recorded some songs and a self-titled debut album appeared in 2000.

"The first album is like watching something on a stage. Theatrical is not the right word, it's more formal." But emotion-drenched songs like Cripple & the Starfish and Rapture found an audience that Antony's theatrical performances would never have reached. Laurie Anderson compared hearing Antony with hearing Elvis for the first time. Lou Reed felt he was in the presence of an angel.

A world beyond Antony's usual New York's cliques began to take notice and the pace quickened. He appeared in Steve Buscemi's film, Animal Factory, singing to a room full of prisoners. He featured on Lou Reed's The Raven album and then toured with him during 2003, singing Candy Says and Perfect Day every night onstage. He performed with Reed in The Helix in Dublin that summer, but didn't have the time to search out his family roots in Donegal.

Instead, he flitted from one festival to another, one concert hall to the next, wowing and astonishing as he went. An invitation came from the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York for Antony to contribute to the 2004 biennial. As Antony & The Johnsons performed, 12 mostly transgender women revolved slowly on huge podiums, each of their faces projected onto a massive video screen. "What we did was the closest I've ever had to an idea of what heaven might be like."

When the time came to record a second album, Antony's new friends and old idols flocked to his side. Devendra Banhart and Rufus Wainwright and Lou Reed are all there, but it's You Are My Sister with Boy George which bookends Antony's journey from his teenage years in California.

"Here I was in a studio with my childhood icon. He was staring at me and singing his heart out. It was bizarre, wild."

What happens now is anyone's guess. The album, which Antony terms "intimate, personal and real" will go out into the world and touch an audience, who will fall for that heartbreaking voice and its sadcore tales. Antony will tour and sing and make more friends.

For him, it's a new chapter. "I've always been open to new things and new experiences and I'm waiting for the next one to come along." This story isn't over yet.

I Am a Bird Now is on Rough Trade. Antony & The Johnsons play Vicar St, Dublin on July 2nd and Empire Music Hall, Belfast on July 3rd