I’ve been meaning to post this for a while.
It’s a slightly amended email I received from my dear friend in Vancouver, Cheyanne Turions.

Everett…
Last night I saw Antony And The Johnsons. It was at this place that is actually a bar meant for scantily-clad women to shake their asses in gross perve-man faces. It has a lowered floor meant to be a dancing place, then the rest of the bar has stools so that everyone can watch. It’s a place meant for spectacle. So Jennifer and I walk in and as typically happens, fucking everyone is sitting on the floor meant for dancing. But that’s OK, because it was only the opening band [P:ano] and the anticipation of what people come there for usually draws them to their feet by the time the stage is taken.
At this point, Jennifer and I are huddled in the smoking room, alone and dancing. Girls clad in black looking for cigarettes interrupt our private party. We continue dancing, holding each other’s waists and shifting our hips in tandem, like it’s 1955 again. When the opening band finishes, we take the stage, waiting. We’re standing. Then three other people are. A group of fancy girls take our backs. Then someone, ‘spokesperson of the floor’, comes to tell us that perhaps we would consider taking our music sitting down. I want my music standing up. I want to maybe even dance to the sadness as I cry like I mean to, this night. The fancy girls and three others are still on our side. We agree to disagree with the floor-sitters.
So Antony takes his place behind the piano and tells us that, “It’s OK. You can all sit down…” at which point shouting begins, cheers of winning from the ones that could not even do the respect of supporting their own body weight to the performance they were about to cherish. Some of the standers refuse to give in. The sitters continue to shout. Blah blah. Needless to say, the ambiance is fucking ruined. RUINED. And it’s Antony’s fault. I forgive his suggestion. I know he means no harm, and he seems really sad. It’s the last show of his tour, and you can feel the fucked-up-ness of the place from a block away.
He’s behind a piano, singing about women in a way that feels oddly familiar to me. (I swear I never felt myself as a woman until I met her. I feel completely fucking changed. Found.) He’s using silence in a manner I believe you would recognise, and I cannot feel it through all the bullshit of the place.
It’s tragic, but I’m sure you already know the ending to this story. The music always wins out, when it’s true, faithful to the secret language. I was committed to the beauty of Antony’s music before I walked in the door. I would have found my own silence no matter what else could have happened. It’s beautiful, Jennifer beside me, our hands pressed together, gathering the heat of our accelerating hearts and all the talk of love, how he always wants it to be “filled with pain” and the ugliness that is found in me and you alike.
But then…
But then; Antony leaves the stage and comes back again, and bursts forth with a song that absolutely transfixes me. It isn’t Antony singing – though as first I think it is. It’s a woman large, with hair like Medusa, her voice that of angels. I don’t know what to do. It’s nearly silent but it is her calling back at him on the piano that makes the music notes sound like revelation in the biblical sense.
It isn’t until I got home that I realise the voice. It’s the one who speaks the tongue of opera, from CocoRosie. Bianca, I believe. I figure it out in my writing of it.
“It was who I had hoped it would be. All disguised in anonymity, but the sound was too heartbreaking to ignore. Her voice was so soft that I thought it may have been his, but it was hers without question, even though the picture doesn’t match my eyes. Her hair was wound and curling, dropping in black rivers of the growth around her. Rosie [?] stood behind and with him crafted what was the truest music, took standing up. Softly like angels.”
And then this morning, the morning after, “Her voice is what I remember most. It seemed so absurd that sounds like that could be coming out of the audience, that these people would have taken it upon themselves, once so angry – big, thick, black lines of tension running between us all – to then proffer such beauty, without the official invitations. She looked so mean except for her body touched by women and the obvious drawing to the man who struggled on stage. Jennifer thinks that Antony was ‘on strike’. I could not help but look at her, but I didn’t know why…something askew in the surrounds in which I found her. Her hair like Medusa, her dress like time flashed backward, and with her the only other examples of how I find myself in a love of women…women unapologetic in their touching.”
So Bianca/Rosie stands behind us and it touched me deeper that all the shit that came before, and even more than Antony. Of course it was her. I made my company listen to Candyland and shouted, “LISTEN. IT’S HER. THE VOICE. IT’S HER. IT’S WHY.”