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. These are gentle songs, mostly minor-key and mid-pace, but given lovely, warm arrangements, with loads of Fender Rhodes electric piano, violin and what sounds like old analogue synthesiser, so you could be listening to Abba, or Gerry Rafferty, or John Martyn on Grace and Danger, or even Gilbert O’Sullivan on one track. I’m not sure any of these comparisons are quite right, because Grant’s music reminds you of so much while remaining entirely of itself. (You might say McCartney, for instance, but there isn’t a trace of sweetness to it.) Best of all, though, is his voice, a rich and impossibly comforting baritone, often multitracked to glorious effect. Mojo’s hacks have chosen well.
What does strike me, though, is how little music there is like this, and how much we like what little there is. I’m talking about comfort-blanket music that is warm but not schmaltzy. I bought an old Art Garfunkel album the other day: Breakaway, from 1975. It’s his best solo record, primarily because of the high quality of the material (The Beach Boys’ ‘Disney Girls’, Dubin and Warren’s ‘I Only Have Eyes For You’, not to mention Gallagher and Lyle’s title track), it’s luxuriantly produced by Richard Perry and as beautifully sung as you’d expect, but it dips too often into schmaltz for my taste. Lose all those strings! Dump the oboe! Very rarely is an oboe a good sign in a pop song, unless it is being madly blown by Andy Mackay of Roxy Music.
Which reminds me of the warmest, most comfort-blankety record ever made: Roxy Music’s Avalon. There is a theory that, having taken his music to its obvious conclusion in that one song (‘Now the party’s over / I’m so tired’), Bryan Ferry has spent the past 28 years trying to recapture whatever it was that he captured in that moment. Perfection, probably. Glimpsed briefly by the men making the record, and enjoyed for ever by the rest of us.
Such music evokes the 1970s, when schmaltz-free warmth became technically possible for the first time. In the 1980s, electronics would kill warmth as surely as myxomatosis killed rabbits. Only now, thousands of years later, does an album like John Grant’s seem not only possible but actively desirable, too. It’s the sort of music that would fit so comfortably on daytime Radio 2, if they could get past song titles such as ‘Jesus Hates Faggots’ (which naturally has one of the most sumptuous tunes of all). Just have a good explanation ready for your 11-year-old, should you happen to have one lying around.
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