Anohni Hegarty isn’t surprised Donald Trump has regained the White House. “It was predicted that this would be the outcome, pretty consistently,” the Mercury Prize-winning singer says with a sigh over Zoom from New York. “People have been preparing themselves, but it doesn’t change the impact of it.”
Anohni and her band, The Johnsons, recently concluded a US tour supporting her soulful and heartbreakingly beautiful 2023 LP, My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross. Travelling around the country, she had the powerful sense of a nation sleepwalking into dystopia. Maybe it has already arrived there.
“It was kind of heartbreaking to see the way America has changed, just the landscapes and ... [the] problems people are facing on the street. The stress that the country’s under is obvious on a street level – at least among classes of people and demographics. It [seemed] definitely like a country in turmoil. The fentanyl [prescription opioid] epidemic is profound in the US and in Canada. You see a lot of people struggling on the streets. Also there’s a sort of a sense of disconnect. In San Francisco, there were cars driving themselves, next to people seemingly lying dead on the side of the road.”
Anohni is speaking in the run-up to a concert in Dublin this month at which she will celebrate the music of her late friend and mentor Lou Reed. As a trans woman in New York in the early 2000s, the British-born, largely American-raised artist had struggled to find her way into the music industry. It was Reed who offered a helping hand – arranging for Anohni to sing on his 2003 tribute to Edgar Alan Poe, The Raven, alongside David Bowie and then bringing her on tour. When Reed died, in 2013, Hegarty described the singer as like a father for her.
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“He was a big figure for me,” she says today. “He was a major mentor. It was his force of will that insisted I be allowed a career in the music industry of the early aughts. It happened because of his iron-fisted insistence on it. He convinced third parties to release my record [so that] it could reach the thoroughfare of the culture and people could respond to it. But up to that point there had been a gatekeeper. The [gatekeepers] of our culture were never going to let someone like me sing for people. So it was Lou who insisted on that and finally broke that firewall down for me.”
Reed sang on Anohni’s 2005 breakthrough album, I Am a Bird Now. Recorded before the artist had changed her name to Anohni (pronounced “Noni”), from Antony, the LP was a stunningly moving showcase for her voice – angelic but with an edge of darkness. The songwriting was equally remarkable – tender yet threaded through with pain. “Delicate, ghostly, mournful, emotional and troubled,” The Irish Times remarked. Rolling Stone described her vocals as “an instrument of delicacy and rapture in which Nina Simone, Morrissey and Joni Mitchell seem to inhabit the same breath”.
“And then the Mercury Prize happened,” she says, referring to the prestigious UK album-of-the-year award, which she won for I Am a Bird Now, seeing off Coldplay, MIA and Kaiser Chiefs, among others.
“Then it was this anomaly where somebody like me actually had a platform to sing and speak. I was afforded this incredible privilege of having a voice as a trans person in daylight culture, which is something that hasn’t happened since the beginning of Aids. The last time there had been any gender variance expressed in pop-culture figures was prior to the advent of Aids, at which point it was all shut down.”
The Irish concert will be a return to the source in a way for Anohni, whose father is London-Irish and whose grandparents are from Co Donegal. As a child she would travel from the town of Chichester, in West Sussex, to the family home, a two-roomed thatched cottage where her great-uncle still lived.
“It was shocking to go visit my great-uncle in my grandmother’s house. See him living in a thatched cottage with no running water, no electricity, minding sheep. It was very visceral – as a kid coming from the south of England ... to understand that some of my relatives were still living in a way that was ... they didn’t have electricity. It blew me away. But it was very clear to me at that point that that was where I came from. My father was part of this haemorrhaging of people from Ireland.”
[ From the archive: Cult musician Lou Reed who walked on wild sideOpens in new window ]
Donegal is very different today, of course, and it is where Anohni is happy to live for part of the year. She isn’t misty-eyed about Ireland; she is very much aware that it has its issues, just like everywhere else. She is not a sentimental Irish-American living out her Lucky Charms/Irish Spring fantasies in the old country.
But she nonetheless speaks about Donegal with warmth and passion. It isn’t just a place to lay her head between tours or stretches in New York. It is home, to one extent or another. She is proud, too, that Ireland has become a beacon for liberal thinking in Europe – with the caveat that we cannot be too smug or rest on our laurels. There are always challenges to overcome and wrongs to put right – especially in a time of potentially catastrophic climate change.
“I can’t speak for Irish people, but I can speak as someone of Irish descent,” she says. “I know the Irish are fighting the good fight in so many regards. There is a sense that Ireland is among the more liberal countries in the world. That’s actually quite an important mantle. Because it’s not Scandinavia any more. It’s not the countries you would have thought it was 20 years go. It’s countries like Ireland and Spain that ... have the potential to hold the torch for some kind of moral authority.”
Inevitably, the conversation cycles back around to Trump and what his election represents. Anohni has been talking the dangers of environmental collapse in her art. Consider 4 Degrees, her stunning song from 2015, which the Guardian described as “a climate change anthem for our doomed planet” (though it also tackled the parallel subject of American hyperpuissance). Given that Trump has labelled the climate crisis a hoax, she is not optimistic about the future.
“I just recorded it [4 Degrees] from the present. What was happening then – 2012, ’13, ’14, ’15 – was about Obama and his administration, about ... American imperialism and also climate change, which has been a subject of my work since the mid-1990s. It’s been a conversation in certain quarters for over 50 years, 60 years. I’m not inventing a conversation. I was just participating in one. I think what was unusual was people to hear it expressed viscerally,” she says.
Eight years later, she fears the worst. “It’s a painful song to sing. Because that’s actually what the papers are now projecting [an irreversible rise in global temperatures]. With America about to [pivot away from its climate-change strategies] ... now, we’ll definitely step back out of the Paris agreement. It’s a frightening prospect. We’ll have to see what comes. I’m just an artist. I have no clue.”
It’s not news that people bully queer kids and trans kids. They’ve been bullying and killing us for 2,000-plus years
— Anohni
In 2015 Anohni announced that her new album, Helplessness, would be released as Anohni and the Johnsons – rather than Antony and the Johnsons. She explained that Anohni was a name she had used privately for years.
As a trans person, she is aware of the recent rhetoric against her community – whether by Trump (who ran TV ads saying his opponent, Kamala Harris, was “for they/them”) or by prominent figures on the internet. But she disagrees that this is particularly new or that social media has conjured it out of nowhere. It has always been there – maybe not on Elon Musk’s hellspawn “X” app but certainly out in the real world.
“Misogyny and the loathing of women, [and] by extension, the loathing of trans femmes, for instance ... it’s all part and parcel of an aggressive resumption of a patriarchal mindset – an apocalyptic patriarchal mindset. They’ve been running at women and reproductive rights in America for the last several years. The [US] supreme court turned on women [by restricting abortion rights].”
Her response is a sort of figurative shrug – as if to say, “same as it ever was”.
“It’s not news that people bully queer kids and trans kids. They’ve been bullying and killing us for 2,000-plus years. It’s not news ... We’re quite used to that. That’s part of the dowry of Christianity.”
Anohni speaks passionately and with authority on these subjects, and while her outlook is hardly optimistic, she hopes her music can help raise spirits and instil in her audience a spirit of resilience. “That’s one of my skill sets. My voice is useful to help people move through [their fears]. That’s something that I’ve honed as a strategy. It’s something that I’ve sat with.”
Anohni’s voice is a thing of bright shining wonder and it will be thrilling to hear her negotiate Lou Reed’s repertoire of ballad, dirges and scuzzy anthems at the NCH. As a person of Irish heritage, she is looking forward to returning to Dublin – to finding solace and encouragement among her own. It is sure to be a homecoming to cherish.
Dark Blue: Anohni Sings Lou Reed is at the National Concert Hall, Dublin, on Tuesday, November 26th
