As the European leg of her first tour in ten years comes to a close, the artist talks to Emily Crooked about returning to the stage and finding light in the darkness
Anohni is an artist whose voice does so much more than sing – there is a power to her words and an indescribable beauty to listening to her speak. Between songs, she often begins lilting, meandering tales that take you from the minute and personal to the monumental and everlasting. At her Barbican show on July 2, it was childhood memories of sugar in tea, understood through the violence and crimes committed by colonial Britain in acquiring those substances.
Her latest project, Anohni and the Johnsons, named after Marsha P Johnson, is a cumulative project, at once touring her latest album and also drawing connections through her 30-year body of work, from her time as a figure on New York’s 90s queer club scene to her 2005 Mercury Prize-winning album I Am a Bird Now, to her current status as a spokesperson against ecocide and the violence against trans people on tracks like 4 Degrees and Scapegoat.
Anohni’s message is one of connectivity, of hope, as often a call for care as it is a call to arms. She functions like a prophet of mother nature, though I’m sure she’d reject that title, one who can see it all. The deep past, the enormity of the present and the potential of all futures. She speaks with a rare grace, wisdom and insight, always beginning softly and considered, building to a gallop as she passionately decries the “suicidal death cult of Abrahamic theology”.
Catching up after an eight-hour train to Berlin, Anohni delves into the reasons for touring and the enormity of the world’s problems.
This is your first tour in ten years. What changed?
Anohni: It was a difficult decision. For a long time, I didn’t think I would tour again. I took baby steps. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed that process of writing and recording [with Jimmy Hogarth]. I had a feeling that I wanted to show up for the moment. We’re in a different place now than we were when I recorded Hopelessness, in so many regards. It’s been so long since I performed live that it was literally like a new experience for me, like I didn’t know whether I’d be able to sing in public. So I was surprised to find that I had so many body memories of how to do it. So it’s been an interesting odyssey to be on tour.
An odyssey starting in Greece as well.
Anohni: Yeah, exactly. That was just bonkers, that we did the first show at the Acropolis, at the Coliseum of Herod. Like, just ridiculous, really. It was so overblown, but it felt eternal, you know? Marina Abramović introduced the show in Greece. She’s an old friend of mine, and I asked her to inaugurate the tour. And she did. She was so sweet about it.
That’s definitely a friendship that I think a lot of people love to see, you and Marina. Is there a message or a string that ties the multimedia aspects of the show together?
Anohni: It’s a cumulative message. It’s songs I wrote 25 years ago alongside songs I wrote in the last couple of years, there’s so much reiterated throughout the work. I wanted to just draw a circle around it, maybe clarify some of the connectivity. The only thing that’s really original about me is the specific story that I’ve walked – and that’s true of everyone. I’m not a big subscriber to the idea of chronic uniqueness. Everything that I’ve made comes from somewhere, you know? But we each walk this profoundly individual path through the manifest world. That’s what gives each animal its own specific song.
Performing tracks from Hopelessness now, how do you feel we relate now to the Hopelessness of eight years ago? And how do you relate to it now?
Anohni: Now we’re a few more years into a broader collective consensus about what’s going on, about the kind of crisis, and the intersectional-ness of the crisis that we’re facing globally, within individual countries, economically, obviously, most significantly, biospherically, and socially. I feel like my work has shifted. No one needs me to be reiterating a story that everyone knows now. When I was doing The Johnsons in the 90s and the 00s and the teens, like, people didn’t know who Marsha Johnson was. I told that story a thousand times and just carried it. My job was to relay things from an underground to an overground, to a different time, to a different community, to a different generation. I still don’t know if that’s been completely absorbed, or whether that’s more something that people are in reaction to now. Because things have become so much more contentious in the daylight – there’s much more strife than there used to be between cis-gendered women and trans women. That’s an unfolding violence that that more of us are managing now. Things keep shifting and I keep trying to respond.
“Be brave, take risks, hold space, support each other. Don’t throw yourself on the pyre. Try to moderate your exposure to violence that could take you down” – Anohni
That tension between trans women and cis women – we’ve just had our Labour government elected in this country, which has been a little contentious. How closely have you followed the election?
Anohni: I’ve been watching for sure. Yeah. I think it’s an awful generalisation to say the tension between cisgender and trans women, because it’s so much more complex than that, and it’s so much more weaponised than that.
It’s profoundly distressing for a child, for instance, like femme kids who spent their lives in the playground as the confidants and counsellors and holding space for girls at school. We were their sisters and their best friends, we were always their best friends, you know, as children, before we were ever pushed out of our nests and forced to move to cities to find each other. It’s just tragic that trans kids are getting dragged into these conversations about bizarre, antiquated stereotypes.
People pretending that trans expression is a new innovation that they have to quash is bullshit. We’ve been here for many, many centuries, and we’re part of the historical fabric of our species. It’s just the same old bullshit. It’s the same way that they’re weaponising reproductive rights. That’s what’s so ironic when really powerful women throw their weight behind the assault on trans femme bodies. It’s such a tragic expression of their own perpetuation of a misogyny that dooms us all.
What do you think we can do in the face of the slide to the right in our governments, in our left-wing political parties?
Anohni: Be brave, take risks, hold space, support each other. Don’t throw yourself on the pyre. Try to moderate your exposure to violence that could take you down. It’s a dangerous world, it’s an inhospitable world and the onus is on us to take care of ourselves and take care of each other as best we can. The danger is real and if you’re feeling unwell when you look out on the world, it’s because the world is in a lot of pain. And it’s not personal. It’s very easy, especially as trans people, to think that the problem starts and ends with us. And that’s the experience that women have had for many centuries, of being divided and conquered and told that they were the problem. They were the disease. And by getting rid of them, that wellness could be restored to civilisation, civility and society. It’s not personal. It’s not an indictment on my spirit, you know?
Yeah, beautiful. Do you find hope in the election of Labour in the UK and the left-wing coalition in France?
Anohni: I think when we’re looking for hope, we’re looking for relief from the way we’re seeing things. One should have empathy for oneself, because if you’re alive and breathing, whether you make a sound or not, is really the greatest expression of whether you have hope or not. No bird cries out, no animal cries out, if it doesn’t believe it has hope. When an animal believes it has no hope it stops crying, you know? So I mean, if you’re crying, you’re participating. You’re part of this.
The truth is, as a species, we’ve never faced this, and it’s terrifying and it’s overwhelming and it’s startling. It’s disorienting, and alongside tech bullshit and internet bullshit. It’s fucking overwhelming. Everyone who feels weirded out and overwhelmed and upset is pretty much right on time.
Yeah, for sure. Do you think we have a way out of this?
Anohni: That’s maybe the lesson I could offer you with the Marsha P Johnson story. Could I ever imagine that Marsha’s name would become like the Rosa Parks of the gay civil rights movement? No, I could never have imagined that. You don’t need to see the end of the story to participate in the middle of the story or the beginning of the story. You don’t need to know that the story is going to be fixed. No one can offer us that.