Interview Antony Szmierek: Sincerity Overdrive

“I read it when I was like 11 or 12, on a caravan holiday in Wales. I was so taken by it,” he explains, on how Hitchhiker’s Guide… would become both his entry point to science fiction, and a building block for his own writing. “It’s so funny thinking back on it as a narrative point of origin. [I’m] nowhere near the level of Douglas Adams, but when you know that that’s when I started trying to write my own stuff, you can kind of see it… The first page of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and that bit at the beginning, the way it’s grand – talking about the dissolution of the universe, [asking] ‘are we real or are we not?’ – but in a really comedic way, almost with this sardonic, British, wry humour? I think that’s just what all of the songs are!” he laughs. “Even now that I try not to write like that, it must just be a concrete block at the bottom of the wall that I can’t get rid of. Reading that was big.”

A far cry from the slick, showy takes on the genre in American culture, it’s actually the likes of Doctor Who and ‘90s cult comedy show Red Dwarf (“Imagine me meeting fucking Craig Charles when all this was first going on!”) that he cites as real inspirations. “All that stuff where it looks like you could push a wall down and it’s not real,” he grins. “The stuff that’s actually quite shit; that kitsch nature of it, and the sort of underdog thing that we have as British people – not quite the gloss of Americans. It seems to just naturally tie in with where I was brought up and this underdog nature of being from the North. I think it says a lot about British life; it’s like we’re always reaching for something that’s slightly bigger than ourselves and we never quite get there, then we laugh about it.”

While the backdrop to the record is, as its title offers, an intergalactic service station dotted with the kind of evocative details that would give The Jetsons a run for their money (take the self-titled opener’s “mid life crisis convertible star cruiser” or the kid riding a “coin operated meteorite”), the album’s heart is still very much about its cast. Built from his idea of the record “being an anthology, with these characters coming in and out”, each track acts as a detailed but universal vignette of life and love, doubt and loss, that just happens to take place in a galaxy far, far away.

“I think you don’t want it to be elitist,” Antony notes, on his candid approach to lyricism, that comes partly inspired by his own musical heroes – and fellow Northerners – Jarvis Cocker and Alex Turner. “I’ve got out of the habit of wanting to say clever words and trying to make it all seem grandiose, or that I’m dead smart because I know all these big words and everything. You’re trying to distil huge concepts that are probably quite wanky, but in a way where everyone can get on board. That’s teaching, I guess,” he nods. “I think I wouldn’t have been immune to doing that if I’d done this earlier on. [When you’re younger] you’re slightly more insecure, and a bit like, ‘this song needs to be clever or it needs to feel like I’m well-read’,” he adds, nodding to the positives of being in your mid-30s. “I think if you step away from that, you’re gonna make better stuff. I’m not averse to throwing in a huge word every now and again, but I’ll still talk about Twixes.”

“I’ve got this thing with the music videos; I’m not really wearing stuff that I would wear. I want people to be able to draw [the characters]. I see it all as these Top Trumps cards. ‘Yoga Teacher’ is this garish green tracksuit, then for ‘Angie’s Wedding’ it’s a really bright red wedding suit. I would never wear that to a wedding, but I dunno, it works, being these sort of characters and I think I’ve maybe done that because on stage, I’m so annoyingly myself!”

It’s true that with Antony, what you see is seemingly what you get, which – in a way – makes the album’s focus on its fictional cast all the more intriguing. Dig a little deeper, though, and you will eventually find the narrator’s voice replaced by his own. “The record’s really sincere,” he says, “and that was something I was really, really trying to do. ‘Sincerity Overdrive’ was one of the first titles for it. [See what we did there? – Ed] That was literally the mission statement, a working title almost.

“But then I was like, how can it be this ‘sincerity overdrive’ record if I haven’t said anything?” he says, emphasis on himself. “It isn’t sincere if you’re doing it through characters. I realised I needed to be there,” he nods to the two tracks that are taken from his own personal perspective, “as that would wrap it up; if I admit these things about myself, then I’ve done it. No one will think about it this deeply, but it had to be within the confines of this narrative. I thought it was quite funny – that dry humour of breaking the fourth wall – just suddenly being like, ‘Oh, this one’s me now, I’m also here with all of these people’.”

The resulting songs, ‘Restless Leg Syndrome’ and ‘Crashing Up’, are gorgeous and quietly devastating in equal measure, but there’s more to the story of the former – a track that taps into the existential dread that so easily seeps in during the early hours after the night before – than you might realise upon listening.

“’Crashing Up’ feels a bit more triumphant, as it ends and I come through it, but ‘Restless Leg Syndrome’ is just really fucking sad,” Antony admits. “I remember the ideas coming to me, and [how] it resolves with this person saying, ‘Just come back to bed’ and accepting me for who I am, but there wasn’t anyone at that time. There was no one. I felt really on my own and really lonely. Writing that one was me admitting to myself that all of this mad shit was happening but I didn’t really have anyone. I wrote it after a big night out, I had all my friends and I felt really loved by everybody, but I was still going home and scratching myself to death with my eczema on my own, with no one telling me everything was gonna be OK.

“So, it ends with this fake person,” he notes, “I resolved the song with this person who’s at home and it’s fine, but they didn’t exist! To me, it’s more sad because I kind of shy away from it, I don’t quite say that. I’m a bit like, ‘Oh this is fine’, but it wasn’t. That was a weird one to write down.”

An album that runs the gamut of human emotion – from the minutiae to the mammoth – if ‘Service Station At The End Of The Universe’ achieves anything, it’s to remind us that life is fleeting, and we might never understand what others are going through. But if its mission statement was, indeed, to kick into ‘sincerity overdrive’, then it’s only because of the vulnerability and openness of its author that it actually hits the mark.

“I’m a bit worried about it,” Antony says candidly, on the idea of performing the pair of more autobiographical tracks live in his upcoming live shows. “We’re gonna finish [the set] triumphantly with a big tune, and then I think I’ll come back on my own [for the encore], and I’ll probably destroy my fucking self. I think doing [those songs] at home, in front of all my friends, my family and my mum, that’s gonna be super difficult,” he says honestly, before a familiar glint appears in his eye. “But then, what’s the point in doing it if you’re not giving everything? That’s the point of the show, it’s the missing piece. I couldn’t do ‘sincerity overdrive’ without pushing myself to the limit there! I’ll cry on stage,” he nods, before catching himself, “but probably not even at that bit – probably during ‘Yoga Teacher’ for no reason. Too horny, started crying!”

’Service Station At The End Of The Universe’ is out 28th February via Mushroom Music / Virgin. 

Tags: Features, Interviews, Antony Szmierek, February 2025, From The Magazine