JOSEF SALVAT
Singer Josef Salvat strikes a chord as he opens up to Thomas Stichbury about going into meltdown mode, the chemsex scene and finding love through his lyrics
Opens his heart about reaching rock bottom and finding love
Done a Britney and buzzed off your hair? Check. Attempted to grow a questionable moustache? Check. Deep- cleaned your collection of sex toys? Check. There are only so many ways that us gays can keep ourselves preoccupied during this pandemic.
However, self- isolation should be a cinch for Josef Salvat since this isn’t his first time in quarantine ( or “queerantine”). “I’ve done it before. I was in Berlin and I didn’t really leave my flat for about three and a half months,” he discloses. “I also did the shaved head thing. When there’s a massive life shift, or you feel disempowered, you make drastic decisions like, ‘ I’m going to grow a ’ tache,’ which is obviously wild.”
We’ll circle back to the Australian singer’s own personal lockdown in a moment.
After fleeing from his folks (“spending that much cabin- fever time with your parents, you regress; somehow you end up back in those old roles”), Josef jumps on the phone while holed up in a hotel room in Sydney. “I’m on this embassy list for going back to the UK [ he’s normally based in Dalston, London] because my dog’s at home – I miss him so much. He’s called Monty [ see opposite]. One of his parents was a miniature poodle and the other was a toy poodle. Super cute.”
Josef’s upcoming album seems to have been tailor- made for the nerveshredding nightmare we find ourselves in – it’s called Modern Anxiety, for fuck’s sake. “It’s everything,” he proclaims.
“It’s your relationships, it’s your mental health problems, it’s the climate, it’s the unstable political situation, it’s the fucking coronavirus. When you’re a kid, you think you know how the world is and how life is, and then your teenage years and your twenties are a series of unpleasant lessons. Where are the rules? Where is the consistency?”
The former lawyer wrote the title track in 2017, after bashing the refresh button and moving from the UK to the German capital: “I was not in a good place. I didn’t know why I was doing what I was doing, it wasn’t making me happy. I wasn’t comfortable with myself, and I wasn’t comfortable with my relationship with my audience. I was scared to be myself with them. I’m not even talking about things like sexuality. I’m talking about, like, how I joke, and what my voice sounds like.”
Rather than run from his problems, Josef wanted to hop on a bike away from them.
“I – weirdly – moved to Berlin because it had great cycle lanes,” he laughs. “I’d always been too scared to cycle in London.”
After a few months of living “on cloud nine”, the shit hit the fan when the musician was attacked. “It was on New Year’s Eve in 2016,” he recalls. “I was walking with two friends from my house to a party we were going to, and I just got randomly beaten up. It was intense.”
Josef adds, somewhat unexpectedly, that this is the sort of scenario that he wanted to be presented with – to pick up a few bruises from life — literally, in this instance. “It’s exactly why I moved there, for things like
that to happen to me,” he reasons. “I felt like I hadn’t been living before. I’d been in this weird prison in my own head.”
The incident was the beginning of a series of unfortunate events: “That precipitated this decline, which hit its peak the following summer. I had been seeing someone and I’d been dumped, and I was devastated. I got angry with everybody, and I decided to try a drinking habit [ on for size]. I was depressed and just stayed in my apartment and ordered the Berlin equivalent of Deliveroo every day and went to the off- licence downstairs for beer. That was it. I was trying to sledgehammer open my brain because I felt I was missing the point of life. I wanted to hit rock bottom.”
Thankfully, an unsympathetic pal stepped in to drag him from his self- imposed pit of despair. “This girl is so dry, she’s great,” he says. “She said, ‘ Josef, yeah, cool, I’m feeling a lot of modern anxiety here, just sing.’
“I was like, “Fuck you for not treating my angst with the respect it deserves!’ She was right, though. It was my personal opera and it was so indulgent and melodramatic. I got a little bit of perspective, but I stayed in it because I was like, OK, you’ve obviously got some healing and growth to do. I submitted myself to what was going on and wrote the song Modern Anxiety. I covered my apartment in butcher’s paper, bought a printer and turned my whole living room into a mood board for the album.”
Josef brightened up the alternative- electro scene like a strobe light with his acclaimed debut record, Night Swim, which was released in 2016. It should have been a happier time than it was, and the 31- year- old knows exactly what he would’ve liked to have said to his younger self. Hindsight is a bitch, after all.
“She is cruel,” he sighs. “I wish I didn’t care so much. Night Swim didn’t take off in the UK, but it really did in France, Germany and [ other parts of] Europe. It was so fun, but nothing was ever good enough for me. If I could say something to myself back then, it’d be: ‘ Relax, don’t be so fucking arrogant, lose the ego, drop the attitude, all your dreams are coming true and you’re not enjoying any of it… and don’t take so much cocaine!’”
Josef’s sexuality was also treated like a minefield back then, something for his record label to tiptoe around with caution so as not to decimate his marketing potential.
“It’s always been an issue,” he states, frankly. “No one would ever ask me [ if I was gay] and I wouldn’t say, even though I had a long- term boyfriend at the time. They [ the label] had this meeting and were like, ‘ Is he gay? Is he not gay? How should we market him?’ It was so fucked.”
The Open Season hitmaker continues: “My sexuality has not been a straightforward path. It has not been an easy process. I found it very hard to accept myself at times. I felt shame and then I felt ashamed for feeling shame. I was really bullied at school, and growing up in Australia – Sydney is a very queer city in some respects, but I feel like ‘ gaybourhoods’ pop up so intensely and necessarily in places where there isn’t a wider acceptance of queerness, so people create tight communities because it’s actually a hostile environment. Australia was that growing up.”
Has Josef fully come to terms with being gay now? “Yeah, oh my God,” he maintains. “I’ve been quite sloppy in my own personal navigation of it, but there is a beauty in that in a way for me. I’m proud of myself for where I’ve gotten to.”
Naturally, the queer experience – the good, the bad and the ugly – is the beating heart of his sophomore album. No more so than on Paper Moons, a dark, pained track that Josef penned about a close friend caught up in the chemsex scene.
Who am I to stand in your way/ If you want to lose yourself, I don’t know what to say/ You keep asking me to save you, but it never works, he sings. I don’t know why you’re so committed to your pain/ Another flight, another line to numb the worst/ You are at it again.
“I didn’t want it to be like, ‘ This is about chemsex, it’s really bad, stay away from it,’” Josef clarifies. “If that’s what you do and you’re fine with that and it doesn’t cost you anything, amazing, lucky you. But if it is costing you – and it has cost a lot of people – it needs to be something you can talk about, and not be this secret, terrible thing you only speak to your psychologist about — because it’s really fucking common. My experiences of it, friends that have done it, housemates – I was living in this house share and a guy [ who was into chemsex] moved in. We woke up one morning to shit all over the living room. He’d completely lost control. To take yourself to a space like that is not healthy in any way.”
Plunging the depths of his friend’s addiction to drugs and sex, Josef explains that he was constantly on speed- dial to talk him down from the ledge: “I was really pissed off when I wrote that song, ‘ Fuck you, I’ve been counselling you for three or four months about this and you’ve got no self- control.’ He lived in New York and he’d call me at like 7am, London time. I’d be making my breakfast and he’d be non- stop sobbing, super suicidal, but it was because he was coming down. He would even call me when he was in people’s apartments, ‘ I’m here, I’m doing this,’ and I’d be like, ‘ OK, put your clothes on, just leave.’
“He didn’t want to be there, but he was addicted,” Josef asserts. “He wasn’t addicted necessarily to the drugs, but he was addicted to having sex in that environment. It hadn’t been a problem for him for years and then suddenly one day it changed. He didn’t want that for himself any more. There are a lot of
“i was trying to sledgehammer open my brain because I felt i was missing the point of life”
things you can do to get out of it, but you have to be willing to seek it, you can’t go into denial. That was my issue. At a certain point, when he said the same thing every second fucking day for four months, you go, ‘ Fuck this, fuck you. At this point it hurts me as well.’”
The friend has since heard the song and is on the road to recovery: “Yeah, I played it to him the moment it was produced, which was about six months after writing it. He’s great now. He’s in a very good place.”
Josef then raises the question of why chemsex is so prevalent in the queer community, and he has a stab at answering it. “I’ve been reading a lot of stuff,” he begins. “The normal benchmarks that you get in a heteronormative world are: you graduate, you get a job, you get married, you have a baby, you buy a house, that sort of stuff. Oftentimes, when you’re queer, those checkpoints don’t apply – [ gay] marriage in my country, you couldn’t do it until a few years ago.
“It also depends on when you accepted yourself. For a lot of people that happens in their twenties, maybe early thirties, and you get this second wind and you want to be young again and you want to go out,” he argues. “Also, a lot of queer people don’t have kids – or they don’t have them until later – and kids tie you down. You can’t wake up with a hangover with a fucking six- month- old baby. The things that might stop you having fun aren’t necessarily there in the queer experience, so you can keep having fun for longer. And it’s beautiful, it’s not like, ‘ That’s so tragic, you’re 38 and you’re getting high on a Friday night.’”
Not that heterosexuals hold the secret to happiness – far from it: “So many of my straight friends that got married in their twenties, it’s only been a couple of years and it’s like a mistake. They jumped the gun and they’re miserable. I wrote a song – it’s not on the album – but there’s a lyric, All my friends are getting married/ Some are in love/ Most just gave up.”
It isn’t all doom and gloom, mind.
Josef hits much cheerier notes on feelgood tunes like In the Afternoon, about a blossoming romance. “It’s a crush song, but it didn’t go anywhere” he says. “I’m very superstitious about songs, though. I feel like sometimes you write a song and they turn true, you know?”
Given a little nudge, Josef reveals that he recently met a man: “It happened in February and it’s turning into the most amazing thing and it’s broken a drought I’ve had for seven years.”
Pointing to the predictive powers of his lyrics, Josef adds that his new beau even has some of the personality traits outlined in the song. “He doesn’t like politics, but he knows a lot… he has his coffee black… and he likes his hair pulled back,” he lists. “It’s like, wow, I’m an oracle!”
Don’t suppose you could write me a ditty about finding a guy, Josef? I need all the help I can get…