John Grant: HIV 'Doesn’t Make Me Less Of A Human'

Standing outside a night club in Reykjavik while fumbling with a pesky zipper on his jacket, John Grant contemplates the ease with which we have connected over the phone and seems amused that he's talking to someone from the future. “It does seem that Iceland is becoming my home,” he says with the late night thud of dance music pounding in the background. “I really loved the place when I first visited for the Airwaves festival. I ended up staying here because I didn't have to go anywhere or really needed to be anywhere else. I fell in love with the place, the people and the language. I've studied German and Russian and am fascinated by Icelandic.”

Iceland is also where Grant recorded his second solo album Pale Green Ghosts. Pale Green Ghosts is littered with songs about dysfunctional and broken relationships, dealing with homophobia, a friend's suicide and HIV infection. “I just want to talk about what I know. I am just trying to figure out what happened in my life. I guess it is a form of therapy,” Grant suggests. “Mostly it's observation, recording and trying to figure out how things were. I have spent a lot of time escaping and forgetting so I have destroyed a lot of memories. In order for me to stay clean and sober and enjoy my life I need to be very clear with myself about how things are in reality. I guess I am still pretty fucked up so who knows if the therapy is working. I have never been able to express myself succinctly and clearly in particular situations and in the moment. I guess I am trying to go back to those situations to address them in these songs.”

Grant's honesty extends to the rather public disclosure of his HIV status when guesting at Hercules & Love Affair's Meltdown gig in London last year. It's a move he does not regret, claiming that he has encountered only support and not discrimination. “I've not been a good example,” he concedes. “Disclosing my HIV status was my way of dealing with the function sex was playing in my life. It was just another part of my self-destructive behaviour. After I got sober I thought it was something I could keep for myself. Sex and, more particularly, unsafe sex was just another way of escape and forgetting: I could disappear and feel wanted but never really loved. So I ended up getting HIV after I had sobered up for all the wrong reasons, really.

More.