You’d think that people would have had enough of silly love songs (as the song goes), but in fact the opposite – the anti-love song – is desperately difficult to achieve without sacrificing basic elements of melody, harmony and musicianship.
Take Marvin Gaye's Here, My Dear . The title comes from the fact that, as part of a divorce settlement, half of the royalties of the album would go to Gaye's ex-wife. The album is an eloquently bitter and resentful affair, speaking as it does of restraining orders and fights over custody of children – not to mention a song called You Can Leave, But It's Going to Cost You .
Dylan's Idiot Wind aside, enmity generally doesn't make good music. Until you hear John Grant's Queen of Denmark . Forget the album version of the song, which doesn't do it justice. Look and listen instead to the Strongroom Sessions live version. From the early line, "I hope you know that all I want from you is sex", we know we're not in Kansas anymore. Onwards through "I casually mention that I pissed in your coffee" and then "Why don't you take it out on somebody else, why don't you bore the shit out of somebody else . . . a weakling, coward, a pathetic fraud".
Queen of Denmark soars with a sense of sweet loathing before the final nail is hammered into the relationship: "I really don't know who the fuck you think you are".
You don’t get too many songs like that these days. It takes courage and brilliance – the former just to articulate sentiments that are routinely air-brushed out of popular music’s lexicon, and the latter to make them sound beautifully poetic.
It was with no little surprise, then, to see Grant at the recent Brit Awards battling it out with Justin Timberlake, Bruno Mars, Drake and Eminem for the Best International Male category. It was some indication of how far Grant has travelled from marginalised cult musician to nudging his way towards the fringes of the mainstream.
His 2010 debut, also called Queen of Denmark , was one of the few albums to get the Mojo magazine "Instant Classic" label. (Previous rare recipients include Joanna Newsom and Fleet Foxes.) The critical momentum carried over to Grant's current Pale Green Ghosts .
Grant looks like a fisherman, sings like a classically trained baritone and speaks openly about his HIV-positive status. He has been embraced by Ireland in a sort of mini-David Gray way, whether it's über-fan Sinéad O'Connor evangelising about him or magnificent lives performances (Whelan's, Vicar St, Kilkenny Rhythm & Roots, Electric Picnic). See it as a national collective atoning for the sin of Garth Brooks.
It's hard not to like someone who says of his past cocaine addiction, "As soon as I had it, I wanted to have nasty, unprotected sex with a weirdo in an alley", and who says of his songs: "They're all about having a love-hate relationship with your-self. Yes, sometimes I really do suck but so do you, so fuck off if you don't like it."
John Grant plays Dublin's Olympia on Monday, March 3rd, Galway's Róisín Dubh on Wednesday, March 5th, and Cork Opera House on Thursday, March 6th
Mixed Bag
Love: Bray musician Hozier blowing up big in the US
Hate:Ted Nugent rails against "the Communist-nurtured, subhuman mongrel gangster Barack Hussein Obama".
