Born in Michigan and raised in Colorado, John Grant formed the Denver-based alternative rock band the Czars with Chris Pearson in 1994. After releasing six albums, including the acclaimed Goodbye (2004), they disbanded in 2006. His first solo album, Queen of Denmark, was released in 2010 to critical success, followed by Pale Green Ghosts (2013) and Grey Tickles, Black Pressure, (2015) named after the Icelandic for “midlife crisis” and the Turkish for “nightmare”. His music addresses issues of addiction, depression and contracting HIV, with caustic lyrics, candour and dark humour. He will be performing with Richard Hawley and Bill Ryder-Jones in Sheffield on 8 October and with Wrangler at the Barbican, London, on 22 October.

1 | Film

The Invitation (Karyn Kusama, 2015)

This is the only movie I’ve seen recently that has really had an impact on me. It’s an American horror thriller about two people who are invited to dinner by some close friends after a long period of not seeing them. I’m a big fan of horror movies, although I don’t find many these days that are very compelling or interesting, but this one got under my skin and left me feeling quite horrified. I like the tension they built in – it’s very eerie and creepy – and the acting was really strong. If you like to feel uncomfortable it’s one for you.

2 | Documentary

Jiro Dreams of Sushi (David Gelb, 2011)

I thought this was fascinating. It’s about the search for perfection – there’s this sushi chef in Tokyo who actually seems to have achieved that, to whatever extent it’s possible on this planet. As somebody who’s always been quite undisciplined and less focused, it was interesting to see someone strive for that level of excellence. I also recently watched Best of Enemies (directed by Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville, 2015), about the debates that took place between William F Buckley and Gore Vidal when they covered the Democratic and Republican conventions in 1968. It really makes you sad when you think of debates today when you see how eloquently these men expressed themselves.

3 | Music

Yello

I’m very much looking forward to going to Berlin at the end of October to see Yello perform. They’re a group I’ve been listening to since the early 80s: they’re pioneers in the world of electronic music, using synthesisers and samplers and things like that, but you don’t hear a lot about them. They’re about to come out with their 13th album and they’re still doing amazing things in the area of sound design. It’s something I really aspire to and am not good at, so I’m very inspired by them. This will be the first show ever that they’ll be doing: they’ve just never considered themselves a live band, they consider themselves to be artists.

4 | Book

Being the Music: A Life by Madeline Kahn

This is the most recent book I read. Madeline Kahn is one of my favourite people in the entire world and one of the funniest. She was a talented Broadway star and also sang opera. She did her most memorable work - for me personally - in movies such as High Anxiety and Blazing Saddles, and What’s Up Doc? (1972) is one of my favourite films. She died at the end of the 90s of ovarian cancer. The book gives you a very rounded portrait of her. It was fascinating to find out she didn’t consider herself funny and didn’t really understand why people thought she was; she was quite a reserved individual, not at all like she was in her films.

5 | Graphic design

Fuel Publishing

I buy everything Fuel comes out with; I love their choices when it comes to book design. They pretty much centre on different aspects of Russian life: there was one called Drawings from the Gulag, there’s a Russian cookbook and there’s one about Russian space travel. I think a lot of people are familiar with their Russian criminal tattoo books, but one of my favourites they’ve done is of Soviet bus stops. They’re all sorts of bus stops; actually, a lot of them are very bizarre. They have very strange shapes and they look quite incongruous where they are.

6 | Cabaret

Christeene

Christeene, or Paul Soileau, is a cabaret artist from Louisiana who works out of Austin, Texas. He is sort of a male Peaches: his act is really in your face, pornographic, with electronic music, and there’s a lot of audience participation. I think he should be known on a wider scale because he’s doing a lot for the gay community – destroying stereotypes and talking about what it means to be gay in this day and age, so it’s quite important to me. But I don’t know to what extent he’ll be able to find a big audience because it could be quite offensive to some people. One of his sequences includes a butt plug and helium balloons – it’s quite explicit.

7 | Place

Cruise Room, Oxford hotel, Denver

I’ve been going to this bar since the 80s. Whenever I was going to go back to Germany [where Grant studied], I’d meet up with my friends and we’d go to the Cruise Room, and they have a jukebox there that always had on Patsy Cline. It’s one of the finest examples of original art deco architecture in the United States and that’s something I’m really into. The bar opened one day after prohibition was repealed in 1933. The whole thing is lit in red neon but it looks pink because the walls are white and it has all these chrome accents.