These last few years have seen Antony Szmierek’s remarkable transition from dedicated full-time teacher in Greater Manchester to poet-meets-popstar, taking his heartfelt life lessons from the classroom to some of the UK’s biggest stages. Having previously played a mix of Sheffield shows, Antony brought his blend of dance beats and spoken word back to the Steel City with one of his biggest headline gigs to date at The Leadmill on 6 March.
Signing into our Zoom call just minutes after announcing his place on the main stage of Manchester’s Parklife festival, Antony appears eager, if not slightly discombobulated, by his recent transition into stardom. “It was only a year ago, really, that I left teaching, so it feels quite quick!” he reflects. “We’ve been booked into loads of festivals this summer, including Reading and Leeds, which is mad!”
However, before he takes to the festival crowds, he has a debut album to release and a headline UK tour ahead of him. Service Station at the End of the World, released on 28 February, promises to be a multi-genre voyage exploring the deepest crevices of the human psyche – all in a vessel of upbeat, catchy dance tunes.
A songwriter and composer who transcends many genre and style constraints, Antony’s music is notoriously hard to pin down – but all the better for it. “It’s not quite an indie act and it’s not quite a dance act. It’s somewhere in between,” he explains. “It’s a good place to be for me creatively, but it’s also annoying in this world where everyone needs to put you in a box, or things don’t go as well as they should.”
“I don’t really think people know where to put us. It’s like, would you put us on before Soft Play? Probably not. Would you put us on before a dance DJ? Probably not. It’s super hard to figure out where it goes, and I think, hopefully, the record will help to define it.”
As well as building on the momentum of his recent single releases, Antony is excited for the album to reveal new facets of his musicianship – and perhaps challenge listeners’ expectations of him as an artist. “From the singles that are out so far, I think there may already be an idea of what the project is. But I’m looking forward to putting out the B-side of the album, which is a lot more sad and introspective.”
In particular, Antony teases album B-side track ‘Restless Leg Syndrome’ as a strong display of his reflective, vulnerable songwriting. “An almost straight-down-the-line poem” with little to no musical distraction, it’s “super introspective and sad,” he admits, “and actually quite hard to perform without getting emotional.”
Originally a writer and poet alongside his career in education before transitioning into the music industry full-time, it’s evident that words and literature have always been at the heart of Antony’s work. “I’ve always written things down, I’ve always had the compulsion to create, I’ve always wanted to do stuff like that.”
After struggling to break into the publishing industry as a novelist, Antony eventually gravitated towards music as a creative outlet in his spare time. “I started doing the music stuff over the pandemic,” he explains. “It was just a way to keep myself busy, and then it all took off and just never stopped. Soon it became this fucking mental thing that I’ve had to figure out how to drive as I’ve been going 60 miles per hour down the motorway.”
And so, he became Antony Szmierek: English teacher by day, popstar by night. “I did Jools Holland on a Wednesday and then went in and worked the full day on Thursday and Friday. And I couldn’t tell anyone either. It was like living this double life that didn’t feel real.”
Though his ascent to larger stages and higher streaming stats has since forced him to step away from teaching, Antony’s passion for education lives on in his approach to music – something he refuses to let go of. “I don’t think I’d be as good at this without being a teacher. It largely informs the record, and I hope I don’t forget it. I don’t want to get three records in and forget, because it feels important.”
That background in education, while on the surface a far cry from his current reality as a full-time musician, has clearly prepared him for the stage. “When performing live, you are using the tools that you learn covering a science lesson to Year 11 on a Friday afternoon or whatever – there’s no more difficult audience than a supply lesson in a science lab.”
Alongside his crowd management skills, the artist also channels his teaching skills into his lyricism. He describes the content of his album as “sincere optimism – optimistic music with sad lyrics over it”, with which he hopes to inspire listeners in the same way his lessons once did. “I think the lyrics work in the same way. People find the same sort of solace and hope in the words – I’m still teaching now, in a way, hopefully.”
With such a varied number of passions, it’s no surprise that his influences span across music, literature and poetry. “In terms of music, there’s so many!” he says, discussing the artists who impacted both his songwriting and stage presence. “I mean, you’ve got people like Alex Turner and Richard Hawley,” he adds, pausing to show me his Richard Hawley wind-up music box. “And I try to incorporate lots of different bits, really. I always just wanted to be Alex Turner my whole life, and then a lot of dance music and electronic music found me in the last ten years.”
“Jarvis Cocker as well – his stagecraft has always been something that I’ve been really interested in. ‘Yoga Teacher’ [one of the album’s lead singles] is actually based on Jarvis Cocker – I always imagine him being the yoga teacher in the video,” Antony adds with a grin. “We actually tried to get him on the song, like seriously tried to get him on the song, but he’s obviously a very hard man to reach. I’d still love to get him on a remix or something!”
“All of those great lyricists, great northern storytellers are people I really look up to. And then my own influence in music has changed and evolved. I listen to a lot of electronic music now because I don’t like to have my thoughts hijacked by words when I’m trying to relax. I’m always thinking of words, so when I listen to music, it’s a lot of ambient stuff – and that’s just kind of made its way into the music.”
Once an English teacher, always an English teacher, Antony continues with no shortage of literary recommendations. “Obviously, there’s Douglas Adams,” he says, referencing The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, whose influence can be seen in Antony’s song of the same name. “I find his writing style very inspirational – he speaks up about really huge topics but in a really interesting and funny way, which is kind of what I always try to do.”
“With poetry, there’s a guy (who’s now actually a friend of mine) called Joe Dunthorne. He wrote the novel Submarine, which Alex Turner did the soundtrack for, and he’s just been a huge inspiration in his poetry. There’s also a queer Kiwi poet called Linda Burns, who I always recommend to people. Her poetry is just amazing – it’s very clever and cool and dry.”
This colourful collage of inspirations paints a vivid soundscape for Service Station at the End of the World, released a week before his Leadmill appearance. It’s promising to be a knockout for one of the country’s most exciting lyrical pugilists.
