Anthony Gross - About My Songs

My parents knew I wanted to write songs. Told them when I was a kid. Dad made me audition. I was about 10. Told me I couldn't sing, had no musical sense. Wasn't all bad. Dad took me to see the Supremes at The Talk of The Town and sent me to see Frank Sinatra at the Festival Hall. But he made sure I wrote books and stayed away from pianos and guitars.

By the time I was 20 I was writing these songs in my head. Exploring the boundaries of friendship, love and physical desire. Still wrestling with those adolescent questions about the meaning of life. Finding it difficult to understand my place in the world as a gay man, why all my old schoolfriends had girls and I just couldn't.

Being gay always made me feel ostracised, left on the outside, exiled- well from everything that really mattered anyway. Lot of my songs are about that. Not saying that's right or that it's how other people should feel. Just the way it always was for me. And all the time there was the consolation of these songs growing and playing in my head and the frustration that there was no way of getting them out. 

At about 30 the songs stopped coming. I wrote a song about a young friend I loved and lost. After that I didn't want to write songs any more. It was about 15 years before the next one came- song about a woman who drew pictures of birds in India in the time of the Raj.

But my first song on here is completely new. It's about the terrible murder of that young girl on a beach in Thailand a few months ago and the equally terrible rush to condemn her killers to death.