In The Studio In The Studio: Antony Szmierek
Having just announced his conceptual, cosmic first full-length, ‘Service Station At The End Of The Universe’, Antony Szmierek gives us an insight into his ambitious distillation of life, the universe, and everything.
Being a musician, Antony Szmierek reckons, is a lot like being a teacher. He would know; up until this time last year, the Manchester wordsmith spent his days working in a school for pupils with special educational needs while moonlighting as an artist around the city’s poetry and gig circuits. To say his words have struck a chord with people is something of an understatement; they’ve been read at weddings and funerals, inspired tattoos, and were used by the BBC’s Newsnight to epitomise the complexity of national feeling after England lost the Euros final this summer.
“It is a responsibility, I guess,” he says of the many, often deeply emotional messages he receives from those his words have touched. “But in the same sort of way that it was [a responsibility] when someone knocked on my door at 3:45pm and said, ‘I’m upset, can I come and sit in here?’. I’m still being a form teacher, just in a more showy way - it’s just giving them songs to help them through the day.”
We’re speaking on video call about a month before the announcement of his debut album. “I probably look like I’ve got the coolest Zoom background ever, but I’m actually just at Lily’s in Leeds,” Antony smiles, as his girlfriend - and frontwoman of the Mercury Prize-winning band English Teacher - pops her head around the door to deliver him a cuppa. Having had to keep details under wraps for some time, his excitement at the prospect of finally discussing the record is palpable. “Unfortunately,” he laughs, “I think you’re going to get the brunt of everything I’ve wanted to say for two years.”
Akin to his apparent, oft-touted forebear Mike Skinner, the poignancy of Antony’s poetry comes from his uncanny ability to express ideas and emotion with deft clarity, unshrouded by flowery metaphors or abstract imagery. It’s specific enough to feel authentic, yet leaves enough room for listeners to overlay his words with their own experiences. He provides the outline; we colour it in. “Up until this point, I very consciously wanted [my songs] to be for the collective ‘we’,” he affirms. “And I think that’s why [breakout track] ‘The Words To Auld Lang Syne’ works so well in a live setting, because people can put their own breakups and hopes and dreams into it.”
For this first full-length, however, he was determined to think even bigger. As far back as ten years ago, he knew his ideas would eventually manifest themselves as a longform project - be it a novel or, as it turns out, a record. ‘Service Station At The End Of The Universe’, then, has in some respects been in gestation for a decade; a concept album built around our yearning for purpose and permanence in a world that is inherently transient.
“Everything seems to be winking at something [these days], and I didn’t want to do that.”
Its title and eponymous opening track are “a little nod” to Douglas Adams’ ‘Restaurant At The End Of The Universe’ - the second instalment of the classic novel series which originally inspired last year’s ‘A Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Fallacy’ (you can take the boy out of the classroom…). That, Antony explains, is the only track from either of his previous projects - 2023 EPs ‘Poems To Dance To’ and ‘Seasoning’ - to have been carried forward onto the album. “It was going back to ‘Hitchhiker’ really, that was the first piece. I knew I needed that on the album to make the narrative make sense… I needed to write the conclusion of what that first track was.” He pauses, then laughs: “Maybe I’ll stop doing sci-fi shit for the second album.”
For now though, time, space, and “sci-fi shit” are firmly on the table. Not that it’s immediately apparent on first listen - lyrically, he still speaks to universal, markedly human experiences. But when you take a step back and consider ‘Service Station…’ as a whole, the patterns of each song align to form a constellation. In the album’s opening number, we meet a cast of recurring characters, the threads of whose lives intersect at the titular service station before diverging - and converging again - over the course of the record.
“That first track is me - or the narrator, I guess - walking through the service station and everyone’s there,” nods Antony, counting off the various personalities on his fingers. There’s “Angie and her hen do” (who reappear in closer ‘Angie’s Wedding’); “the yoga teacher” (semi-inspired by Jarvis Cocker, whom Antony tried to nab for a guest spot on the record); and “the two who fall in love in ‘Rafters’” (known only as “the Patron Saint of Withington” and “a pound shop Geri Horner”).
“You see everyone - all these people who are trying to change things and get people’s attention - and they’re all mentioned again in the final track,” he explains. “On the surface, it’s a wedding, but in my head it’s a place beyond - maybe heaven, or just this imagined place where ‘the doers and the dreamers’, as it says in the song, end up.”
And where, we wonder, does Antony Szmierek figure among these characters? “There are two songs - ‘Restless Leg Syndrome’ and ‘Crashing Up’ - and they’re just me,” he replies. Purposely placed to follow a euphoric, keys-led number, ‘Restless Leg Syndrome’ in particular is an anxiety-fuelled, moving monologue contemplating the point of it all; essentially a poem over an ambient beat, it’s the morning after the night before, the comedown after the high.
“It’s hard to hear myself say those things, because it is so raw,” Antony nods. “But I think all good art is sincere and honest. There’s that line in ‘Hitchhiker’ - “Everything’s ironic now, isn’t it? Post post-punk” - and I like that to an extent, but it’s not what I want to make. Everything seems to be winking at something - sometimes literally [by] wearing masks or a costume - and especially on those songs, I didn’t want to do that. I feel like those few tracks are a real introduction to me as a person.”
“No one’s really met Antony Szmierek, the artist, yet.”
Musically, too, there’s a real earnestness to his choices. Where in the past he’d “kind of purposely always looked away from ‘90s, Madchester stuff,” ‘Service Station…’ and ‘Angie’s Wedding’ - the two tracks bookending the album - instead lean into his city’s sonic heritage, echoing the record’s conceptual circularity.
“That first tune is almost like a Primal Scream song, and ‘Angie’s Wedding’ started with Orbital’s ‘Belfast’ as a reference point,” Antony explains. Heading into the studio with producer Max Rad in Bristol, he aimed to evoke ‘90s figureheads like The KLF and Happy Mondays - an acknowledgement, he half-jokes, that “that’s kind of what I’m doing 30 years later - playing dance music with a live band, with a Mancunian chatting shit over the top. So why not nod in that direction a little bit?”
Besides Max, he also worked on production with Luis Navidad in London and Robin Parker (who also plays synths in Antony’s live band) in his Manchester home, while all the album’s vocals were recorded in Cheetham with Dean Glover. “I think it could have easily been me and one producer in a room for three weeks, and that’s kind of what I thought making an album was,” Antony says. “But this wasn’t like that - it’s been all over the place.”
An apt way to bring to life a project so expansive in both name and nature, the ad-hoc conception of ‘Service Station At The End Of The Universe’ gave Antony the space to finally realise the full scope of his creative vision - and, he suspects, broaden his demographic horizons beyond ‘FFO: ‘A Grand Don’t Come For Free’’. “That’s what’s really exciting about putting it out,” he enthuses. “It’s a proper introduction, and I feel like those comparisons will probably change now. Or, hopefully, it’s its own thing. I wanted to subvert expectations, but there aren’t any expectations yet. No one’s really met Antony Szmierek, the artist.”
And in the meantime, The Streets are still “a pretty handy elevator pitch” - a useful touchstone, we suggest, for those conversations with curious Uber drivers? “Nah,” Antony grins. “I just tell them I am Mike Skinner.”
‘Service Station At The End Of The Universe’ is out 28th February via Mushroom Music / Virgin.
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