Antony and the Johnsons - Turning

That might have been eight years (not to mention two studio, and two live, albums) ago, but the recording of the night alongside a documentary of the same name is now finally being released. Y’know, because why not now. Christmas is nearby, and for many that means balancing the twinkling Richard Curtis magic of winter with a breathless Dickensian sadness between which Antony and the Johnsons' music skates with ease. The hope and the hopelessness, and how one can brim with vacancy. Call it optimistic loneliness. It’s important to remember as well just how significant Antony was to the music landscape of when he crafted this. By just his second album he was collaborating with Lou Reed, Boy George and Devendra Banhart, had (controversially for a non-UK based act) picked up a Mercury Prize and was enjoying chart success and TV fame. 2006 was without doubt an important year for him, at the top of his game and already using his celebrity to accomplish uncompromising creative feats such as the Turning tour.

The album is a snapshot of where his music was at the time. How his voice could transcend the physicality of waves and haunt your every waking minute. In “Everything Is New” and “My Lord” he immediately grinds you down. He cries out. He sobs and grumbles for you to hear every syllable. In “For Today I Am A Boy” he makes his move, stabbing with anxious, discomforting caution. “Spiralling” puts a mountain between you and the artist, and you realise there’s so much to learn here before you can attempt smiling again. These aren’t songs about that person you once either did or didn’t fuck under some coats; these are indefinable ideas that try to escape the grip of Antony’s fingertips before they're lost forever. During “I Fell In Love With A Dead Boy” you have to wait silently by the song’s outskirt until he decides it’s time for you to be let in. That’s Hegarty solicitation; to at least try to understand these brief but weighty moments of his subject’s being.

Antony commands a stadium with his vocals and tone, or in this case the Barbican in London, while the fragile live air has not failed to be captured in the final product of Turning.