Antony and the Johnsons

New York

ANOHNI was born in Chichester, West Sussex, on 24 October 1971. Her family spent a year in Amsterdam from 1977 and moved to San Jose, California, in 1981, where she went to Lincoln High School. In 1990 she moved to Manhattan to study at New York University's Experimental Theater Wing. Two years later she and Johanna Constantine founded Blacklips, a performance collective later called Blacklips Performance Cult. She has said her job there was largely administrative.

Her band took its name from Marsha P. Johnson, the New York trans activist, and Constantine has danced with it from the start. Anohni gathered musicians to record a first album between December 1997 and October 1998, and Antony and the Johnsons) came out on 8 February 2000 on Durtro, David Tibet's label. She wrote every song and produced it herself. The EP I Fell in Love with a Dead Boy followed in 2001, and Live at St. Olave's Church in 2003.

Around 2003 she toured as a backing singer with Lou Reed on his Animal Serenade tour and sang Perfect Day on his album The Raven. In 2004 she staged Turning with Charles Atlas at the Whitney Biennial, while Secretly Canadian reissued the debut and released The Lake EP.

I Am a Bird Now

I Am a Bird Now appeared on 1 February 2005, on Secretly Canadian in the US and Rough Trade in the UK. Its cover is Peter Hujar's photograph of Candy Darling on her deathbed, and its guests include Boy George, Rufus Wainwright, Devendra Banhart and Lou Reed. It opens with Hope There's Someone, the lead single and one of the band's signature songs. Mojo gave the album five stars and made it its record of the year.

On 6 September 2005 it won the Mercury Prize, from a shortlist that included Coldplay's X&Y and Kaiser Chiefs' Employment. Anohni's first reaction was that the judges must have made a mistake. Within a week the album had climbed from No. 135 to No. 16 in the UK, and it went on to gold records in Britain, Sweden and Norway and some 350,000 sales worldwide. Kaiser Chiefs' Nick Hodgson dismissed her eligibility as a technicality. Much of the early press described her as a gay man. She later said she was surprised that people with disabilities were drawn to the record, finding in it the idea of the spirit transcending the body.

Dylan, Björk and Turning

At the end of a tour of Australia in January 2006 she began singing Bob Dylan's Knockin' on Heaven's Door alone on stage. Her slow, minor-key studio version closed the soundtrack to Todd Haynes's Dylan film I'm Not There in 2007. In November 2006 the band brought Turning to the Barbican in London, concerts later released as an album and a film. She co-wrote and sang on Björk's Volta in 2007, and in 2008 sang on five tracks of Hercules and Love Affair's debut, including Blind.

The Crying Light to Hopelessness

The Crying Light (2009), arranged with Nico Muhly, was dedicated to the butoh dancer Kazuo Ohno, whose photograph is on the cover. It topped Billboard's European album chart, and Ann Powers of the Los Angeles Times heard it as an intensely personal environmentalist statement. Swanlights (2010) included a duet with Björk, Flétta, and Cut the World (2012) caught the band live in Copenhagen with the Danish National Chamber Orchestra. The stages grew grander: Radio City Music Hall with MoMA in 2012, the Royal Opera House in 2013, the Teatro Real in Madrid in 2014. In 2012 Birdy sang Bird Gerhl at the opening of the London Paralympics, at Anohni's suggestion.

After Dark Mofo in Tasmania in June 2015 the band went on hiatus. In 2016 Anohni's song Manta Ray, written with J. Ralph, made her the first openly transgender performer nominated for an Oscar. She did not attend the ceremony. That May she released the solo album Hopelessness, made with Hudson Mohawke and Oneohtrix Point Never.

Anohni and the Johnsons

On 9 May 2023 the band became Anohni and the Johnsons, and on 7 July it released My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross, produced with Jimmy Hogarth. Its cover is Alvin Baltrop's portrait of Marsha P. Johnson, and The New Yorker named it the best album of the year. The band toured Europe and North America in 2024, and in November played two London concerts of Lou Reed songs. Shows in 2025 took them to the Sydney Opera House and Victoria Hall in Geneva. In 2024 Anohni marveled that Johnson had become a figure on the scale of Rosa Parks.

For a long time, I didn't think I would tour again.

Anohni, Dazed, 2024