Antony's weird world

Antony Hegarty is the singer for Antony and the Johnsons, the winner of the exclusive Mercury Prize.

One morning in July, I sat next to Antony Hegarty, of Antony and the Johnsons, in the BBC's radio centre in London. Below us, the Johnsons - the small, rotating-member chamber ensemble that regularly accompanies Hegarty - were chatting and tuning up, getting ready to record a few songs for Radio 1.

Hegarty was watching a video of his appearance on Later, the music programme hosted by Jools Holland.

There he was on the screen sporting the long brunette hair extensions he has been wearing lately, which frame his gentle, full-moon face.

He sang from the piano in his signature high quaver: "Hope there's someone/Who'll take care of me/When I die; will I go?"

Hope There's Someone is the first song on his second album, I Am a Bird Now, released this year.

Like most of his songs, it has the pace and intimacy of breathing. And like most of his songs, it's sad.

Over his two albums, two EPs and a series of New York plays and stage shows going back 15 years, Hegarty has often returned to a kind of soulful, melancholic pining - for lost friends, dead loves and, especially, for transformation.

Hegarty, 34, sings often of wanting to become a spirit or to grow wings, to be set loose from a world where he is alone. Or of wanting to become a woman.

While his earliest work was presented in the gay mecca of the East Village's Pyramid Club in the early 90s, it would be wrong to call Hegarty a drag act. The makeup and silk slips he has worn on-stage have never seemed to be an imitation of womanliness, but more a pursuit of an inclusive idea of beauty that he is still in the midst of defining.

While he has lived since the age of 10 in the United States, his childhood in southern England qualified him for the Mercury Prize, Britain's most prestigious music honour, which he controversially won this week.

In the US, his work has received near universal praise from critics. He has gone from New York cult status to national alternative status and, next month, to a concert at Carnegie Hall.

Hegarty's voice is difficult to describe. It is a largely untrained but instinctive and wholly singular sound that keens in the upper registers, somewhere between male and female, between childish innocence and weary adulthood, at once ethereal and earthy.

It emanates from a diverse tradition of divas and divos, including Nina Simone, but also Boy George and Otis Redding, Marc Almond of Soft Cell and Donny Hathaway.

But it is not a voice to soothe a ride down the highway. It is beautiful but unsettling.

He often multi-tracks his own backing vocals, and when his voice occasionally swoops in to accompany itself in spare, churchy harmony, you almost drive off the road.

Born in Chichester, Sussex, he is the second of four children. His father, an engineer, and his mother, a photographer, moved the family to the Netherlands and then California.

By the time he was 10, Hegarty's parents had settled in San Jose, where he went to a Catholic elementary school and then a high school for the performing arts. He sang in the choir and in a death-rock band.

As Hegarty moved into his teen years, in the early 80s, punk had already moved on to post-punk, and pop culture was beginning to be subverted in a quieter way by the cool gender-sedition of synth pop and the New Romantics - bands like the Human League, Adam and the Ants, ABC and Spandau Ballet.

And then there was Boy George, with his unapologetic androgyny. If some people failed to decode the message Boy George was sending, Hegarty heard it clearly. By his late teens he was staging plays based on John Waters movies, then he saw the 1988 cult documentary Mondo New York, a tour of the city's underground music and performance art scene.

What impressed Hegarty most was Joey Arias, the drag diva, dressed as Billie Holiday, singing A Hard Day's Night.

"It was so punk and so aggressive and so extremely beautiful - and even curiously vulnerable," he says.

He enrolled in the experimental theatre programme at New York University and began staging plays and musicals and seeking out contemporaries. He formed a performance collective called Blacklips in 1992, which consisted of 15 or so "downtown artists, gender mutants and drug-addicted hybrids".

After Blacklips he formed a new performance group, the Johnsons, in order to focus more squarely on his own plays and songs. Four years ago he released his EP, I Fell in Love With a Dead Boy, which featured a cover image of Hegarty writhing on the ground beneath the gaze of a nude Japanese hermaphrodite nude but for antlers, leaves and body paint.

This image caught the attention of producer Hal Willner, who played it for Lou Reed.

Reed said: "He's a great guy, absurdly talented, and he seemed ready to sing. It's these parts he can come up with, these ways of double tracking, these really unusual harmonies - I could listen to Antony all day."

Reed invited Hegarty to tour with him throughout 2003, and every night he would sing Candy Says, Reed's tribute to Candy Darling, the transvestite Warhol superstar who died young of leukemia.

Meanwhile, the soul and blues and jazz that Hegarty had been listening to since he was a teenager began to assert itself more prominently in his phrasing and arrangements.

Reed guests on the album, as does Boy George.

"Antony's vulnerability is so honest and powerful, and that is what makes a true star," Boy George says. "I've seen live audiences twitching when he performs, because some people get very uncomfortable with such raw vulnerability."

The song Hegarty sings with Boy George is a slow, stately duet called You Are My Sister. Earlier this year, they sang it together at Joe's Pub, and Boy George says he saw Reed in the audience with tears in his eyes.

On CD

*What: Antony and the Johnsons
*What and when: Mercury Prize-winning album I Am A Bird Now, out now

- INDEPENDENT