Anohni sings in Antony and the Johnsons. That’s my name – Anohni is my real name and it has been for a few years in my private life. It’s as simple as that really.”
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going to be sick.” In a way, this album has been a long time coming – it’s where issues and influences Anohni has been thinking about “forever” converge. It’s certainly a huge evolutionary stride if you’re only familiar with the songs on her 2005 Mercury Prize winning album ‘I Am A Bird Now’ and her work since then (2009’s ‘The Crying Light’ and ‘Swanlights’). While sometimes the subject matter has been spiky, the delivery has almost always been pastoral. It’s also the first to be released as ‘Anohni’ rather than ‘Antony and the Johnsons’. “It was something I was exploring
in my private life, changing my name for a long time,” she explains. “I don’t really want to use the name Antony anymore, I haven’t used it for a few years. It just made sense. “I remember in 2005 when I won the Mercury Prize and there was one interviewer, like, ‘Why do you wear make-up? Why do you hide behind make-up?’ I said,‘Actually I’m showing you more clearly who I am by wearing make-up. It’s actually giving you a clearer window into my spirit.’ I think it’s the same for transpeople when you choose a spirit name. It gives people another indication of your nature.” On her official website the homepage is now divided in two,
Anohni and Antony and the Johnsons. It says ‘archive’ next to Antony and the Johnsons and I ask if A&TJ is now a closed chapter? “Not necessarily, I might do a tour as Antony and the Johnsons – it’s my band’s name. It’s sort of like James and the Giant Peach. I don’t use the name Antony anymore but in a weird way I like the idea of it becoming a band name. It’s quite abstract. I like the idea that it’s not me.” I ask if she would do an Anohni and the Johnsons record in the future? “No, I would do an Antony and the Johnsons record in the future if I did The Johnsons, because that’s the name of the group, but then it would be
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n the day of our interview, the news agenda is dominated by Donald Trump’s US presidential campaign. The previous day it was about a row over retirement age, the day after, Brexit. Since then, take your pick, terrorist attacks, health scare scandals, celebrity deaths, the threat of nuclear war, tax evasion and a thousand other pressing topics. They’re things most people care about. But, such is life, they tangle with personal issues on a daily basis. Trying to digest the Big Picture and these immediate challenging issues can, meshed together, feel unfathomable. ‘Hopelessness’ approaches some big issues – like the US death penalty or President Obama’s presidential tenure – but Anohni also tries to frame them all in one overriding problem. The album is, she says, an exploration into the idea of “human brokenness”. “Racism, endgame international corporate governance, trickle up economics, ever-greater wealth disparity, fundamentalism, extremism, corrupt foreign policy, weapons trade, fossil fuel, endgame mineral extraction, stealing and raping earth… It bottlenecks in ecocide,” she says. “It all draws together into a bouquet that you could call ecocide.” The definition of ecocide is the destruction of the natural environment, especially when it’s deliberate, and it’s her way of thinking about humanity’s position in an holistic way. She continues: “Because we’re used to addressing those issues each individually, we get overwhelmed after about three of them. But if you can hold space for it, I’ve started to see it as sort of a bouquet that you can call ecocide. A bouquet of co-dependent conditions.” These “co-dependent conditions” manifest themselves in the stuff that’s everywhere everyday. Trying to get a job, a mortgage, to have a family. Anything like that. Products of the systems and lifestyles we inhabit, which, Anohni says all continually come back to the environment. “How can we ever hope to change our trajectory if we’re not capable of being honest with what our trajectory even is, or what it is that’s happening?” Anohni says. “We’ve got this almost whack-a-mole approach right now
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