Antony Szmierek on the cover star of his new album: ‘It’s a taxidermy heron that we found on eBay’
Antony Szmierek is Edinburgh bound with his distinctive fusion of spoken word, indie, alternative and dance music as part of La Belle Angele’s Fringe line-up. He chats to Fiona Shepherd about channeling poetry through music, being inspired by a stuffed heron and loving the quiet life
Let Mancunian ex-teacher Antony Szmierek count the ways in which he has bucked the odds to become a full-time musician. ‘From a working-class background, not knowing anybody in music, can’t play an instrument… it’s so unlikely,’ he reckons. ‘There was no music GCSE at my school. I had no opportunity to do that when I was younger, but music has always been the answer for me.’
Two fates converged when Szmierek left teaching just before covid hit. ‘As soon as everything stopped and I couldn’t distract myself with other things, my response was “I need to make something”. I was turning 30 basically. I had a feeling I was supposed to be doing something else.’
Szmierek was already a regular on the Manchester performance poetry scene so started setting his poems to music, with a little help from his brother and now bandmate, Martin. He first came to wider attention with his track ‘Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Fallacy’ and 2025 debut album Service Station At The End Of The Universe and describes his Streets-adjacent blend of spoken word, indie, alternative and dance music as ‘very much a distilled version of my personality’.
He’s now moved on from Douglas Adams puns to release follow-up album, Decoding Birdsong. ‘It’s about luck and loneliness and me dealing with the changes in my life,’ he says. ‘I always start talking about it as if it’s a Bob Dylan record because I think of the lyrics first but it’s a big dancey euphoric thing. Electronic music has always been an escape for me. It calms my brain down. It seems to me like the perfect delivery system for poetry and big ideas and sad lyrics.’
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Rather than its character-driven predecessor, the album makes use of leitmotifs, not least the cover star. ‘It’s a taxidermy heron that we found on eBay which is about a hundred years old. It’s mentioned in four of the songs. I think of albums as novels really, a complete story: beginning, middle and end.’
Szmierek has written two actual novels, one of them ‘really long and quite bad’, the other, called The Hypocrite, about a protagonist who witnesses a suicide on Arthur’s Seat and lives with the guilt of not reporting the death. It was written, mostly in Dirty Dick’s on Rose Street, he says, during one of Szmierek’s periodic creative field trips to Edinburgh. His next visit to the city will be to front his own show as part of La Belle Angele’s propitious programme of Fringe gigs.
Having experienced a quick dose of last year’s Fringe as a punter, Szmierek is ready to dive in, safe in the knowledge that he has a West Country haven to return to, having moved to Bristol earlier this year. ‘I find it peaceful,’ he says. ‘I’ve been to the parties in London, I’ve dipped into all of that, but I just want a more manageable version of my life. I’d rather look at the herons on the water these days.’
Antony Szmierek, La Belle Angele, 26 August, 7pm.