Live: Antony and the Johnsons

Karlstorbahnhof, Heidelberg, Germany: 22 June 2005

Strolling to the show at sunset through Heidelberg’s old city, I saw so many things that reminded me of Antony and his music I felt like I was in a Herman Hesse novel: a poster for the show that called the band “the kings of the New York art music scene,” and a light post down, another one for the newly-opened Queens Club; a hotel that had turned away Goethe, Germany’s literary poster boy for the lovelorn; a goateed neo-hippie wearing blush and mascara cycling by on the river path.

Considering them I asked myself whether, like surrealistic signs for Hesse’s Steppenwolf, they might be messages to Antony that Heidelberg, Germany was the most perfect place in the universe for him to play that night. Nah, just bullshitting. More to the point, were balls you’d expect a guy Antony’s size (I’d heard 6 feet plus and thick) to have big enough to play his song “Hitler in My Heart”?

We arrived at the Karlstorbahnhof as a dirty red DB train screeched loudly by, handed our tickets to the guy with the laptop in front of him, stopped by the bar, and eased into some black plastic chairs at the back of the room. Filling up nearly all the other seats were 300 or so black-clothes-wearing-expressionistic-chin-hair types, fifty-something burnouts in flannel shirts, and tall lithe college girls, chatting over smokes and bottles of Beck’s and Corona.

The Johnsons appeared and took their seats on stage. Then the guitarist began finger picking a pretty little prelude. A few minutes into it, Antony, head bowed, snuck up on the baby grand opposite them and keyed, almost inaudibly under the applause, the first notes of “My Lady Story.” His voice was stunning, and sounded more earnest than I’d given him credit for after listening a few times to I Am a Bird Now.

I was still stuck on it when, a few bars into the second song, Antony threw his hands up from the keys to his face and laughed. “I said, ‘Mr. Pickle,’” he said, shaking his head. “It was supposed to be ‘like some cripple,’ and I said ‘Mr. Pickle.’ I’m really sorry, you guys.”

After a few covers (Nico (born in Germany), Moondog (died in Germany), and Leonard Cohen), Antony asked the audience to sing a duet with him. Instructing us he said, “Imagine you have this little silver fish swimming around, um, right here,” pointing to where his throat met his breast bone, “and it makes this humming sound, like this,” he added, humming a single note. We hummed that note together, guys an octave lower, and over our low droning Antony sang to us. It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard. Seriously.

He closed with “Hope There’s Someone,” and as he and the Johnsons walked off stage, a round woman in her thirties wearing a turquoise T-shirt scurried up behind them and handed Antony a bouquet of white lillies.

We clapped for the encore like an army of robots, beating out a crisp static rhythm until, not thirty seconds after they’d left, Antony, wearing a purse over his right shoulder, led the band back onstage for one more song. And then they were gone.

On our way out I cashed in my bottle for the €1 deposit I’d paid, and some minutes later, at a gelato stand in the old city, I used it buy a kugel of the sweetest flavor they had.