It’s quite hard not to like Antony Szmierek.
The Manchester-based poet, songwriter, and performer has spent the last year-and-a-bit steadily making a name for himself as something of a BBC Radio 6 Music darling; and now, with the release of his debut album, ‘Service Station At The End Of The Universe’, we think he’s set to break into the mainstream.
So, in order to continue the good health and never-ending growth of our ‘WE KNEW HIM BEFORE YOU DID’ high horse, we sat down with Antony to chat about the characters and choices behind the record, his creative influences, and the barriers faced by working-class creatives within the music and entertainment industries, as well as a veritable plethora of other juicy journalistic titbits.
The concept of ‘world building’ within the context of an album is something that’s quite often discussed but rarely executed well – but we think that you’ve done it very well indeed on this record. You’ve spoken in the past about how building a universe around this, your debut album, was something you intended to do from the start. Were you at all intimidated by the prospect when you began the writing process?
‘It was all about getting the balance. Everyone’s got a good idea somewhere of something they could do, but it’s the execution that’s the strange part. I’m always waking up at five o’clock in the morning with what I think is the best idea for a film or something. But in the execution of doing something long-form, like an album, it can kind of only come out in the way it’s going to come out of you. You can lean into lots of different influences, but it’ll always sound like you. There’s an immense comfort in that.
I could’ve gone a lot further down the concept album route, and I did consider that at points – to the extent of almost having a plot that ran through the record. Instead, it’s almost in the (Arctic Monkeys’) ‘Tranquillity Base’ vein, whereby the characters all exist in the same world, but they rarely meet; until the last song, ‘Angie’s Wedding’, where I wanted them all to meet in some way. It was either going to be at a funeral or a wedding, and that decision was one of the last ones I made for the album – it was the last tune we recorded, and in the end, I just felt that it had to be a wedding. And that’s why that song only has that one final burst of the Madchester, Happy Mondays-inspired part that comes in towards the end; I wanted it to feel like a final hurrah.’
You’ve never been shy about your Madchester and Mancunian influences – but sonically, even we’re bored of people comparing you to The Streets, so God knows how you’re feeling about it.
‘It’s funny, because I think sometimes it comes across like I hate The Streets – which I don’t! ‘Original Pirate Material’ is one of my favourite records. I think the thing that irks me slightly is that people think I tried to make an album that sounds like The Streets – which I didn’t. I’m a poet who was doing spoken word stuff and then put that over music that I liked, and then the comparisons to The Streets came. It was never a purposeful thing. At first, it was the best compliment ever – but I like to think there’s a bit more strange, avant-garde, and weird space shit in my stuff. Honestly, I love Mike Skinner – he’s a genius writer, one of our best – but they weren’t a direct influence on this record.
But comparisons do help people, don’t they? It helps people to discover you and to hear your music. It’s a strange market, nowadays – and I’m kind of halfway between an indie act and a dance act, which is great, because it allows me to do lots of different things; but in terms of being put into a box, it’s tricky, and people don’t always like it. To me, artistically, this freedom is a blessing; but career-wise, it probably would be easier to be one of those things rather than multiple.’
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Let’s go right back to the beginning. You started out as a writer, then started performing your poetry in the form of spoken word?
‘I was always writing privately. I’ve always had a compulsion to write things down, so I’ve always done that – written down things I’ve heard, or stories, or things that might make people laugh. Then I became a teacher, and around that time is when I started doing my poetry and performing it in quite unexpected areas of Manchester; areas that people might deem rough, and places that had quite a big club and MC scene. I’d go and do poetry, and the crowds weren’t the easiest to please; if you were shite, you’d get booed off or pulled away. I really enjoyed the performance of it, and I enjoyed hanging around and having a few drinks or a joint with the other performers on a Tuesday night and then going back into school and teaching Macbeth the following morning. I liked the dichotomy of it.
I had all this material and Covid struck, so I bought an electric piano and started making little loops at home and then speaking my poetry over it… And then I went from there. It’s weird doing these interviews, because you end up talking about all these things that you can barely remember; it feels like all of this just happened. But that did happen. There are some missing steps, but then people found it, and now we’re here.
As a wordsmith and a writer – when you took your pieces of performance poetry and placed them over music, how much did you have to adapt your poems to make them work as lyrics?
‘A lot, actually. It’s kind of the great tragedy of doing the music – you’re killing your darlings all the time. A lot of the more flowery language, that I enjoy in page poetry, doesn’t always stay in the edit. There’s not always room for it. I try to say really complicated things in the simplest way I can, and I find that to be a good mission statement for the music. If the verses are super-complicated or super-wordy, then the chorus can just be as simple as ‘yeah, yeah, yeah!’. You give everyone a chorus to hold onto and that’s fine.
And then once I’ve done a few of those tunes, I always loop back round and go ‘I’m just going to do a straight down the line poem here’. So, on the record, there’s ‘Restless Leg Syndrome’, which is just this big monologue that came out fully formed one day. I didn’t fancy chopping that up or putting a chorus in – it felt honest when it happened, and sometimes you just feel like a conduit for these things. It affected me when I wrote it, and it still does affect me; saying those things out loud is quite an emotive thing, and I didn’t want to touch that. The more you do something as simple as ‘you get one life, live it’ (from ‘Rafters’) as a chorus, the more you then want to do something about the Ancient Egyptians for the next one.
I’m quite proud of the fact that this album has quite a dark Side B and that there’s probably a lot more rawness and depth on that side of the record than a lot of people – even those who liked the earlier stuff – might not expect. You can go a little deeper than you can when you’re putting out EPs or singles. When you’re releasing three singles a year, you want to be putting out songs that everyone’s at least going to have a fair chance of getting into. You wouldn’t put ‘Restless Leg Syndrome’ out as a single. Mind you, I probably would without the guidance of a team… And maybe once you’ve got a bit more of a foot in the door, that’s something you’re able to do.’
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You’ve had a lot of love from BBC 6 Music. Their sonic remit is broad, and esoteric, and eclectic – which can make it tricky for artists and their teams to pick singles if they’re specifically aiming for support from that station. It needs to be pop, but not too pop; clever, but not too clever; and accessible, but not too catchy.
‘My song ‘Angie’s Wedding’ felt like a big BBC 6 Music single. We put that one out once everyone on my team had calmed down a little and saw that we’d had a solid spike of momentum from the last singles, so we felt like we were able to put out a song that was a bit more of a journey.’
As someone from a working-class community, it feels like sometimes people from small towns or working-class spaces can feel afraid to seem ‘clever’. There are a few references to ‘class wars’ and ‘class traitors’ scattered throughout this record – was that a conscious theme and thread throughout the writing process?
‘To an extent, yes. I’m from a town called Hyde, which is only famous for Harold Shipman, the serial killer. It’s a shitty and small satellite town, and stuff like that does subconsciously come out when you’re writing anything. The phrase ‘No War But Class War’ from the record was graffitied onto a motorway bridge quite near where I’m from – I drove under it every day. It now says ‘Abolish The Parasite Class’, so they’ve gotten angrier! But I really like stuff like that. It’s almost like found poetry; collecting little things that people say and then trying to find the profundity in it.
The class stuff has always been there, for me. I’m not angrily rallying against nepotism; sometimes creatives are related to other creatives, and that’s fine. If I do well and I have children, I’m not going to discourage them from picking up a guitar. But I do get why people get annoyed. The other way of looking at it is that some other people can afford to fail, whereas I could never afford to fail. The one thing that annoys me slightly about my education – I went to a really bad state school – is that I never thought that music was a thing I could do. I wouldn’t have even started a band, because it wasn’t for me. And what really pisses me off is that it was for me, and if someone had just given me a nudge, I could’ve saved myself a lot of time.
I do feel a bit of a responsibility to be like, ‘you can fucking do this’. Everyone’s got their own ideas, and it is a lot harder when you don’t have the support of anybody, or you don’t know anybody – but it does happen. The way that this worked out for me is because Craig Charles played a tune of mine on BBC Radio 6 Music, then Lauren Laverne played it; and then six months later, Lauren Laverne played it again. I didn’t have a radio plugger and I didn’t have a manager. When I was meeting people and telling them that I didn’t have either of those, they were almost angry – like they didn’t believe me, like I was lying to them. Like someone else made me happen with this. So, I do feel a responsibility to be vocal about it and I like that it’s a thread that’s been pulled upon on the album – and it’ll slowly unravel.’
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In ‘Angie’s Wedding’, you tie together a range of different characters from across the album. Were these characters based on individuals from your real life or are they purely fictionalised?
‘They’re documentarian-style composites of people I know. Characters like ‘The patron saint of Whitlington’ is a composite of a few ‘man about town’ characters I’ve met over the years. The yoga teacher was a real guy; that was a real, confusing run of five or six yoga lessons I had. I was there wondering ‘do I want this guy to be my dad, or my best mate, or do I want to have sex with him?’ – and I’m a straight man, so it was very confusing. But he’s the only one who’s a proper, proper person. Angie from ‘Angie’s Wedding’ is named after a person I worked with in the last college I worked in, Angie Ryan, and she’s this punk with yellow hair and face piercings. She’s a great teacher, artist, and role model for the kids, and I needed a name to put into that song, so I went with her.’
You strike me as the kind of guy who’s got a pile of notes and voice memos piled on his phone. How do you go about compiling these into something more manageable, either in the form of finished works or more fleshed-out snippets of ideas?
‘I think ‘Rafters’ was a bit of a collating process. It was originally three separate songs, but then I went to a Nia Archives show in Manchester and saw a single piece of confetti falling from the roof, and I’d seen it so many times – but somehow, that’s what connected the three tunes together. Once I write something down, I rarely go back to it for a long time; I collate them, and then I go back through them when I’m in writing mode.’
‘There are loads that you think are great at the time that turn out to be shite, but there are loads that you think are shite when you write them down that actually end up working when you revisit them. For ‘The Great Pyramid Of Stockport’, I was doing a poetry workshop for teenagers, and they were all writing about Stockport; so I did a daft thing about the pyramid, and that one just ended up feeling good.’
‘You’ve gotta wait for that inspiration to come. It’s like a cat – you can’t summon it, you just have to wait for it to come. I have to just live my life like that and trust that these things will happen. The last tune for the record was written a year ago, and that first tune, ‘Yoga Teacher’, was maybe written two years ago, so I’m already well into the writing process for the next one. I’m writing a lot about coincidences, serendipity, and happenstance; I wrote a song recently called ‘The First Five Minutes Of Magnolia’ about the start of a film called Magnolia by Paul Thomas Anderson, and that was a shit idea for a song until I went back, mined it, and polished the edges.’
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When one listens to an album, in sequence, there’s a brief moment of silence at the end before you realise that there’s not another song coming. How do you want the listener to feel in that moment after they’ve listened to ‘Service Station At The End Of The Universe’?
‘Probably how I feel when I get out of a good film, and the credits start to roll, and I’m pinned to my chair a little bit. Maybe just five or ten seconds of respite from thinking about how shit everything is and just realising that they’d just experienced something that affected them.’
It’s interesting that escapism doesn’t always have to be a happy thing. It’s entirely possible to experience escapism by consuming something quite dark.
‘It’s very rarely a happy thing for me. It’d odd, because the record is purposefully optimistic; a lot of the songs that could’ve resolved in a bad way tend to resolve in an optimistic way. A lot of the art that moves me is sad or makes me cry. Sometimes it’s not what you want, what you need.’
Is there anything else you’d like people to know about this record?
‘It’s the old line of ‘buy a record and come to the live show’, isn’t it? That’s a horrible thing to end on. I want to end on a clever, Jerry Springer’s Final Thought note. Maybe just a reminder to try to find the magic in the mundane? *winks*’
‘Don’t put the wink in.’
