John Grant talks turning 50 on a rollercoaster, living in Iceland and his new album Love Is Magic

The big, bearded American has experienced the crashing lows of being picked on in school, failed relationships, drink and drugs addiction, his career stalling and discovering he’s HIV positive.

But, of late, he’s enjoyed euphoric highs with a string of acclaimed solo albums, playing venues like the Royal Albert Hall and finding peace in his adopted home country of Iceland.

So what better way to spend his 50th  birthday than riding the biggest, most bad-ass collection of rollercoasters in the world?

He spent five breathless, adrenalin-fuelled days with his “nearest and dearest” at Cedar Point, Ohio, home to 17 of the massive mechanical beasts.

“I went to 120mph in less than four seconds,” he says of the fastest, the Top Thrill Dragster, which rises 420ft into the air before plummeting straight back down.

I’m meeting Grant on one of the last really hot days of late summer in a particularly sweltering corner of London’s hipster hangout Shoreditch.

He’s making a whistlestop visit to the UK, the country that’s taken him to its heart, to talk about his fourth album, a synth-drenched emotional rollercoaster (yes, that word again) called Love Is Magic.

“Extremes are good for art but not so good for everyday life,” he muses ruefully.

“But even if you are mild-mannered and not prone to extremes, you still can’t avoid them, whether it’s the drunk on the street or domestic abuse going on in the apartment next door.”

Grant’s looking fit and well as he washes down a healthy looking couscous salad with nothing more than water.

I wish him a belated happy birthday and ask if he minds hitting the big 5-0.

“I didn’t mind the prospect but when I got there, I became a little nervous because of my failures, like not having a successful relationship before the age of 50,” he replies with typical openness.

“I thought I would grow old with somebody and now I’m making nasty jokes about signing up for a singles hike . . . maybe meeting somebody when I’m 60 while speed dating!”

Love Is Magic was created in St Breward on the edge of wild Bodmin Moor, Cornwall, with the help of musician and producer Benge, part of electronic three-piece Wrangler.

It follows their recent collaborative album Creep Show and became a perfect opportunity to develop their shared love of old analogue synths, the sort you’ll find dominating Grant’s key inspiration — British electropop acts from the Eighties.

“I keep coming back to Eurythmics, they were top of my list,” he says.

“I continued to be loyal to them throughout their career. Their second, third and fourth albums, Sweet Dreams, Touch and 1984, were huge for me.

“Duran Duran’s The Chauffeur is like a hymn in church. Then there was Ultravox’s Vienna, Visage, Depeche Mode . . . too many to count.”

Another British act, Smooth Operator singer Sade, comes into play on the brooding title track, Love Is Magic, a bruised account of a failed relationship.

“The absurdity is that you’re going through a break-up again and of course it’s f***ing Sade on the radio,” he says, quoting the lyric.

“The guy who drives me to the airport in Iceland knows I love Sade and her greatest hits CD is the only thing we listen to. I liked the bond with him so I didn’t tell him to turn it off.”

Grant feeds his dark humour into the “juxtaposition of withdrawing from antidepressants with Sade singing about the failure of the relationship. I felt she was talking directly to me in those dulcet tones”.

On his new album, he also deals with navigating a confusing world in which everyone is constantly overwhelmed by information from social and other media.

The theatrical opening track Metamorphosis finds him trotting out lurid headlines such as “14-year-old boy rapes 80-year-old man” or the ridiculous choice provided by “67 yoghurt flavours”.

Then the song breaks into a sad, reflective, deeply personal section which serves as a window of opportunity to dwell on what really matters to him.

Grant says he’s matching “a very natural snapshot of all the insanity” with the years he spent “not being able to grieve the death of my mother” in 1995.

“There’s all this stuff going on, conspiracy theories, Trump . . .  you’re bombarded.

When you get to bed at night, you don’t realise what’s really going on inside you.

“There’s this emotional constipation caused by things you haven’t been able to process. In my case, this particular human is talking about the death of someone, his mother, so it’s a really key death.”

For Grant, pouring his feelings into songs has long been a form of self-medication or therapy but he does it with such charm and wit, aided by his commanding and gorgeous voice.

His sexuality comes into play on Preppy Boy, which is about fancying the horrible, handsome “candy-stripe” boy in school.

“It’s an embarrassing thing to say about myself but if I’m sitting with a classically beautiful male, I become like a schoolgirl. I see it happening to myself and it’s just horrible.

“You still see it in the gay community. The men who fit into that category of classic masculinity are still the most highly prized.”

One of the pleasures of Grant’s troubled youth was “escaping to the soothing landscape of the mall”.

He says: “I always make this joke that if I go over to a place like Westfield here in London, I feel my bowels loosen because I’m so comfortable there. An American in his natural habitat.”

Such a landscape provides the backdrop for his most ambitious new song, the long, highly structured and intoxicating Tempest, named after an Atari arcade video game.

“I was obsessed with the game and I still am,” he says.

“The song is about American escapism in the early Eighties — from Reagan, cocaine, money, hedge funds — by playing this beautiful game, which makes some of the most beautiful sounds.”

Our thoughts move to another song, The Common Snipe, set in the sparsely populated island in the North Atlantic he calls home.

It provides one of the album’s most affecting moments and is bookended by an 80-year-old man reciting Icelandic poetry in the native tongue about the small, speckled wader.

The song is a heartfelt reflection on the aforementioned lost love and inspired by the “sorrowful noise the snipe makes with its tail feathers”, his ex-lover’s “favourite sound”.

“A lot of this album is about how love is difficult and losing someone is difficult because you go through all these stages,” says Grant.

“But these songs are about making peace with that process and realising there are always two people involved.

“This fellow I’m talking about is a wonderful human being. I remember seeing him out in the fields in the middle of nowhere at his parents’ summer home.

"This bird was there and seeing him hearing its sound is a beautiful reflection on who he is and who he was to me.”

Grant continues: “I’ll have lived in Iceland for seven years this December. Part of being there is escape, part of it is having a fresh backdrop for my bulls**t and part of it is the curiosity in me that wants to conquer such a difficult language.

“I love getting my head round the grammar of a foreign language and starting to express your unique personality in it. It’s a long but rewarding process.”

I remind him of the hiatus between leaving his old band The Czars, launching his solo career and his temporary occupation in the US at the time.

“Yes, I was interpreting medical Russian at a hospital,” he says. “I wasn’t very good at the beginning but I had the foundations to make it a profession.”

This brings us to the explicit new track with a jaw-dropping title, Smug C*** — which originally had Russian leader Vladimir Putin in mind but maybe is more about the White House incumbent.

“It is inspired by Trump,” he admits. “At first I thought it was about Putin but he’s much smarter. He went to f***ing KBG school and he speaks fluent German.”

Another topical song is Touch And Go, about Chelsea Manning, the American transgender former soldier convicted of being a spy.

“Doing that transition in prison, already being vilified by an entire nation, I just thought, ‘None of you c***s could ever survive that’,” says Grant.

“And I’ve seen a piece on Vice about gay and transgender youths living in this gutter ghetto in Kingston, Jamaica, because they’re castaways from society.

“I have to say I don’t understand transition as a gay man. I find it confusing. But I always ask myself, ‘Can you imagine being willing to go through that?’ That’s all you need to know about it.”

I can’t help feeling that my hour with the sensitive, eloquent and engaging Mr Grant has been — you guessed it — another rollercoaster.

But there’s no doubting this his new album is a thrill-a-minute experience.

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