Seated in a semi-swanky London hotel bar, the man opposite is a benign and playful presence, joshing that he’d like a gin and tonic (despite it being 11.30am), spying Cameron Diaz on the front of InStyle magazine and crying, “Look, they’ve put me on the cover!” and trying to convince the Guide that he’s planning a special outdoor show hung from balloons.

However, there are more serious issues on his mind. Antony’s new album The Crying Light, the follow-up to 2004’s Mercury Prize-winning, half-a-million-selling I Am A Bird Now, sees his gaze turn outwards from issues of gender confusion to meditations on his relationship with nature. Featuring orchestral arrangements by Nico Muhly and even guitar on a couple of tracks (“I’m slowly graduating from my fear and loathing of it,” he jokes), songs such as Everglade imagine him “in this beautiful, animist landscape where the leaves are gazing at me and the water is whispering to me and I’m feeling connected to the world – and yet there’s something in my mind that’s still broken.” Then there’s the threat of impending environmental catastrophe, bleakly imagined in Another World. Antony says his new hero is Joan Pick, interviewed in the Guardian a few months ago as “the woman with the tiny carbon footprint”, who eats raw food, buys nothing except new trainers and hasn’t driven a car since 1973. …

[The Guardian]