Graeme Thomson

26 Jan 2011

The former lead singer with The Czars began 2010 in what seemed a wholly unenviable position. A 42-year-old recovering drug addict still struggling to comes to terms with his sexuality, following the demise of his band in 2004 Grant had qualified as a Russian medical translator but was now earning a more regular crust working as a waiter.Stardom hardly seemed to beckon, yet Grant had a secret weapon waiting in the wings. The previous year he had been invited to Denton, Texas, to live, work and record with acclaimed US rock band Midlake. The result was Queen of Denmark, a unique subversion of 1970s AOR that smuggles intensely personal songs about homophobia, bigotry, drug abuse, self-loathing and romantic loss beneath a cloak of lush, beautiful balladry.A gay Midwesterner brought up in a conservative culture dominated by sport and the church, Grant’s big, velvety voice envelops his songs, but its warmth can be deceptive. His flair for melodrama and humorous self-pity rubs against real pain, creating a compelling dramatic tension.“I’m the same way in my life as in my songs,” he says. “I don’t know how else to be, I have to throw things out there. It’s very empowering to say some of the things I say in those songs. The only thing I’m sick of is that it hurts to sing some of them. Some days it’s very difficult because it hits a little too close to home. I’m definitely still dealing with the stuff that I’m talking about on the album.”The nakedly emotional nature of the album made its trajectory all the more surprising, not to mention gratifying. Released last April, Queen of Denmark was perhaps the most critically acclaimed record of 2010, voted Album of the Year by Mojo magazine and included in almost every other major Top 10 poll. No wide-eyed young innocent, though gratified by the attention Grant is wary about equating media fanfare with tangible success. When he came to Edinburgh in August he played the Wee Red Bar, a venue which does a convincing impersonation of someone’s front room. Album sales,meanwhile, have been healthy but hardly chart-busting.“It was a great, unprecedented year for me, but I’m still trying to process it and I guess there’s a part of me that doesn’t take it very seriously,” he says. “I’m pretty sceptical. I don’t know what it’s going to take until I believe – I just want to make sure that I don’t have to go back to waiting tables before I start getting too excited. The album is selling OK but I’m no Robbie Williams, that’s for sure.”He’s not a man who seems terribly accustomed to accepting that life can sometimes deal out a winning hand. A self-confessed control freak, Grant describes 2010 as “a huge year of letting go, of walking onto that tightrope and saying, ‘I’m just going to do this.’ I decided: this is what you’ve wanted for a long time, and this is what you love. Go with it. It was about letting go of control. Making the album was like that too.”The shadow of the broken love affair which inspired many of the songs on Queen of Denmark also proved hard to shake off, meaning that the exhilaration of acclaim and acceptance has been counter-balanced by an equally profound sense of emotional despair.

“I had all these positive, amazing things happen to me but I was also questioning things more than I ever have,” he says. “I was mourning the death of a relationship for most of last year. I was really struggling with it. I couldn’t believe how bad it hurt, and how difficult it was for me to move through it. Like: ‘Why don’t you love me any more? Did I do something?’ There were days when I was completely consumed by it and dealing with that on the road, singing songs each night about this person, was really challenging.”Grant currently lives in Berlin, but will come to Celtic Connections direct from Sweden, where he has been recording an electronic album which will almost certainly be released under a pseudonym.“I don’t want that to be the proper follow up to Queen of Denmark,” he says. “I want the follow up to be similar, because I love that style of music. I spent New Year with Paul [Alexander], the bass player from Midlake, and we’re getting really excited about the next album. We’re going to meet up in Denton in September and start recording. I have about six songs. It’s like solving a riddle, and the fun part of it outweighs the terror of having to follow up something that has received a lot of positive attention.”His solo show in Glasgow is unlikely to be overtly Celtic in nature, although he does have a genuine love of Scotland and wrote some of the songs for Queen of Denmark in Glasgow. “I feel really romantic about Glasgow – the darkness of it, the brooding quality, the beauty of the language, the romance of Charles Rennie Macintosh. Scotland is a strange little universe – a small country that does these big things.”The same could be said of Grant’s music. Queen of Denmark is a dark, beautiful, powerful world unto itself.