The invisible man | 12 November 2011

Besides being one of the most exquisitely melodious, sensitive singer-songwriters you’re ever likely to hear, John Grant is also one of the most beautiful men you could ever hope to meet.

I’m not the only married man to feel this way about the tortured gay pop star. As he tells me over lunch on London’s South Bank, male fans are constantly gushing after his shows about how utterly they worship and adore him. ‘Then they’ll go and ruin it by saying, “Oh, and by the way, may I introduce my wife?”’

And it’s not that the Michigan-born 42-year-old is excessively handsome or exquisitely ephebic or anything like that. In fact, with his woolly hat, bearded, potato-y features, and frayed, haunted, kicked-puppy air, Grant could quite easily be mistaken for a tramp who’s wandered out from beneath Waterloo arches rather than the man fêted by an audience including Jimmy Page and Ringo Starr as Best Live Act at this year’s Mojo awards.

No, what Grant possesses is inner beauty: inner beauty of such extraordinary, weapons-grade potency that, at a special concert the night before we meet, it has reduced the entire auditorium of the Royal Festival Hall — men and women — to a pool of teary mush. Afterwards we all rise as one to give him a massive standing ovation. It has, quite possibly, been the finest, most moving concert we’ve experienced. Grant feels the same way: ‘That night was the happiest of my life.’

If this all sounds like the most appalling sentimental gush — which of course it does — then you clearly haven’t been sufficiently exposed to Grant’s debut solo album Queen of Denmark. It’s a classic, a masterpiece, one of those records you wheel out over dinner so that all your friends go — as they will — ‘But this is amazing. Who is this guy? John Grant? Why have I never heard of him?’

Probably the main reason you haven’t heard of him is that in music, as in life, there is no justice. Despite his cultish word-of-mouth following, despite the Mojo award, despite all the support he’s had from the most unlikely quarters — such as the not-notably-gay-friendly Sun — Grant’s album sales remain way below the 100,000 point at which an artiste manages to accrue any degree of fame or money.

But it might also possibly be because — though the tunes are fantastic (think Abba meet the Carpenters meet Lynyrd Skynyrd in a tasteful — no, really — Seventies soft rock hommage), the baritone exquisite, and the mostly piano-led arrangements with backing from the superb Texas folk-rock band Midlake unerringly gorgeous — the lyrics are so self-laceratingly, unremittingly (if comically) bleak they make Morrissey sound like Lady Gaga.

Which last is no more than a reflection of the generally terrible life Grant has had till now. ‘I’ve felt uncomfortable since the day that I was born. Since the day I glimpsed the black abyss in your eyes,’ begins one characteristically cheery ditty. And it’s not poetic licence. Try being a gay, rock-music-loving child, born into a family of Southern Baptists (who see homosexuality and music as the devil’s work) and being sent to a school of spoilt, rich-kid jocks where almost everyone despises you as a ‘lower-middle class nothing’ and you’re about the only one in school without a Porsche.

‘To this very day I’m sure the reason I walk so fast is because I’ve always been trying to get by people before I could hear what they were saying about me,’ says Grant, in characteristically deep confessional mode. But worse, far worse was to come later in life, as Grant increasingly sought solace in drugs, booze and meaningless sex he was usually too far gone to enjoy. ‘I realise now that what I was trying to do was to crush all my sensitivity and become hard.’

Rock bottom was the occasion when he checked into hospital suffering so badly from the effects of alcohol that they tried to persuade him to take Antabuse (the drug that makes you vomit if you drink alcohol). A nurse in the neighbouring STD clinic noticed the terrible rashes over his arms — ‘like leopard spots, but red’ — and suggested he come in for a test. He tested positive for syphilis. And not just ordinary syphilis, either, but syphilis so advanced that a team of young doctors gathered round to marvel that he wasn’t dead. ‘It was the most humiliating day,’ he concedes. But it could have been worse. ‘If you’re going to get a sexually transmitted disease, I discovered, syphilis is by far the best to get. It responds really well to antibiotics, much better than herpes, say.’

During this period, Grant was enjoying modest cult success as leader of the indie band The Czars. But he wasn’t making a penny and to survive he had to spend all his spare time waiting tables in the same old restaurant in Denver, Colorado. With his 40th birthday approaching he realised it was time to put away his adolescent dreams, get a proper job, sober up and move on.

On a whim, he decided to move to New York (‘not a good place for a recovering alcoholic when every second building on the street is a bar’) and soon found work as a Russian medical interpreter at New York University hospital. An extremely erudite man (his conversation ranges from Rachmaninov to French and Russian literature to his terminal disappointment with the new Kate Bush album) and a brilliant linguist — Grant is currently teaching himself Dutch and Swedish, just for fun — he studied Russian and German at the University of Mainz. His accent is so perfect that, when he visited Russia, those who heard him speak refused to believe that he wasn’t a native.

He also landed an even better job waiting tables at one of New York’s finest restaurants, the Grammercy Tavern, serving heroes like Ernest Borgnine and working in an immensely civilised atmosphere where the tips were good, the training was superb (‘there were classes on Calvados, on Cognac, on whisky making, on everything there is to know about food’) and where staff were recruited for their intelligence and originality. At last Grant had found stability.

But then the Texas band Midlake — label mates and admirers from his days with The Czars — threw a spanner in the works. Grant just had to make another album, they insisted: as an incentive they generously offered to become his backing band and house him while he wrote it. And the rest is history. Or at least it will be by the time sufficient numbers of people get round to appreciating that Queen of Denmark is one of the finest folk-rock albums of the last decade. Buy it, for this marvellous man has suffered enough: from now on he deserves nothing other than to reap the rewards of his rare genius.