Cold weather demands warm music. To which end I am delighted that Mojo, the monthly rock magazine for the more gnarled music fan, has chosen as its album of the year Queen of Denmark by John Grant. As we all know to our cost, albums adored by music magazines tend to be more rigorous and admirable than enjoyable, but this one is as warm and welcoming as a hot bath, a cup of mulled wine and an enormous cheque all rolled into one. Mr Grant, who is 41, gay, from Denver and very gloomy, is the former lead singer of a band called The Czars.
You can tell how serious and gloomy the album is going to be from the off: the photograph of the singer on the front cover is blurred and makes him look like an alien, while the liner notes are written in pink, in his own scrawl, against the pictoral background of a dead bird on an oil-polluted beach, so you have as much chance of reading them as of winning the 100 metres at the next Olympics.
And then there are the lyrics. Mr Grant has the habit, it seems, of falling in love with big hairy men who don’t treat him well. ‘Daddy, what is this song about?’ asked my 11-year-old daughter, who misses little. ‘I think he’s feeling sad because the big hairy man he loves has gone off with another big hairy man…at least, I think he’s big and hairy…to be honest I’m not sure…’ I said, rushing out of the room in distress.
But the music! The Czars, by all accounts, were just another American indie band, but for this solo debut Mr Grant fell into the orbit of Midlake, a band of proper musicians with an avowed taste for mid-1970s Fleetwood Mac and late-1960s folk-rock.
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