Live At The Empire Music Hall, Belfast

They’re all here tonight – the freaks, the weirdoes, the confused, the lost, the trapped and the marginal. And that’s just the characters in the songs. You really want to see the crowd.
From the moment it was released back in early spring, I Am A Bird Now, the second album from Antony and The Johnsons, has been quietly casting a spell over the musical year – making zealots of those lucky enough to wander into its unsettling, sad and beautiful domain.
A startling mesh of baroque instrumentation, Muscle Shoals horns, and transgressive, humane lyrics, it’s a record that can lodge in your heart with the same eerie force as Phil Spector and Dion’s Born To Be With You or Sister Lovers by Big Star.
Add Antony’s vocals – at times a quivering, androgynous Jimmy Scott, at others a deep, resonate James Carr – and the overall effect is startling.
Tonight gives an opportunity for those won over by I Am A Bird Now to glance behind the curtain at the man whose personality is stamped throughout. And it is credit to Antony that, rather than succumb to the temptation to preserve his considerable mystique (and it’s an LP that audibly licks its lips at this prospect), he instead uses the opportunity to drop his guard and say hi. So, he attempts a (not bad) Belfast accent (“Just fucken sing”), tells a crap joke about a lesbian cave-woman, and involves the crowd in a startling mass hum-cum-duet.
See, he’s human after all.
Which is worth bearing in mind, because at times tonight, the show verges on the celestial.
Where to begin? How about the bereft and desolate ‘Hope There’s Someone’ (“I am scared of the middle place between life and nowhere/ I don’t want to be the one left there”)? Or the part in ‘You Are Me Sister’, sung on the album by Boy George, but taken up, unbidden, tonight by the entire audience? Maybe the version of Cohen’s ‘The Guests’? Or ‘Cripple And The Starfish’ from the first album?
In all honesty, such is the faultless nature of the material, and the subtle grandeur of its delivery by The Johnsons (a kind of McSweeneys-reading Bad Seeds), it’s difficult to pick out one gem from the jewellery box.
That is until the encore when Antony unfurls a version of ‘Candy Says’ that is every bit as sad, defiant and respectful as the photograph of Candy herself that adorns I Am A Bird Now.
It shines so brightly, it’s almost blinding.