Party like it’s 1975
The 1975 frontman Matty Healy talks about the band’s bonkers new album and life under lockdown.
MATTY Healy ruffled his grownout Mohawk and took a drag from a cigarette as he gazed through a window at the spring-green English countryside.
“I suppose I think of this as my second rehab stint,” said the 1975’s frontman, who spent several weeks in a Barbados facility in 2017 addressing his addiction to heroin. This time, of course, he was referring to quarantine amid the Covid-19 pandemic, for which he’s holed up in a remote studio complex north of Oxford.
“At the beginning, the news was rolling in 24/7 and you’re watching it like it’s a disaster movie. Then it kind of faded into something ... else. But familiar.”
Healy, 31, was meant to be touring arenas in the United States right now behind Notes On A Conditional Form, the 1975’s brandnew follow-up to 2018’s A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships, which topped the British album chart and was named album of the year at the Grammy-equivalent Brit Awards.
Instead, he’s been sitting around thinking about himself – about his tendency toward narcissism, his comfort with being depressed, his determination to continue the work of mindfulness that he began three years ago in rehab.
“I needed to upgrade my icloud storage today on my ipad, so I was going through old pictures, and every time I saw one of me where I’ve got this certain face on, it was like there was someone else there,” he said over Facetime from the studio. “That inability to be present in the moment – it was like a ghost in the photo.” He laughed.
“Sorry, man, I don’t know why I’m telling you all this,” he said. “I think it’s because I just don’t know how to promote this record.” How could he?
Even minus the global health crisis leading countless artistes to reconsider the machinery of pop stardom, Notes On A Conditional Form would be hard for anyone to get his arms around. The 1975’s
music, not unlike Healy’s thoughts in an interview, has always been something of a data dump, with sounds and styles and textures pulled from an array of scenes and eras.
And the band’s fourth LP is even more sprawling than usual, with 22 tracks (counting interludes) totalling 80 minutes, including an ecstatic 1980s-soul number – If You’re Too Shy (Let Me Know )–a bruising post-hardcore rant (People), a tender acoustic duet with Phoebe Bridgers (Jesus Christ 2005 God Bless America )anda jangly ‘90s-guitar jam with some
big Empire Records energy ( Me& You Together Song).
Oh, and an opening cut that sets an original monologue by Greta Thunberg over twinkly ambient music inspired by Healy’s hero, Brian Eno.
“To be a type of band that plays a type of music – I just see it as cosplay,” said the singer, dressed in a long-sleeved Obituary T-shirt, as he leaned down to pick up the 10-week-old puppy he’s been training while in quarantine. (The dog’s name, Mayhem, nods to a Norwegian black-metal band even more extreme than Obituary.)
For Notes On A Conditional Form – which Healy co-produced with the 1975’s drummer, George Daniel – the singer said he tried to remove his ego from the music and just ask questions that amount to: “Is the current set of circumstances, in terms of society and the way it’s impacting the individual, sustainable? Can the centre hold?”
“The economy’s a goner/ Republic’s a banana/ Ignore it if you wanna,” he sneers in People, which also rhymes “Barack Obama” with “living in a sauna with legal marijuana.”
But it’s not quite the case that Healy’s new songs don’t reflect his particulars. On the band’s breakout album, 2016’s I Like It When You Sleep, For You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware Of It, Healy was doing a kind of postmodern riff on the self-centred rock star – best exemplified in Love Me, which he went on to perform on Saturday Night Live in a wilfully grotesque display that triggered countless variations on “Who does this guy think he is?” from online commenters.
Yet the 1975’s members – the others are guitarist Adam Hann and bassist Ross Macdonald – quickly became actual rock stars with devoted fans and a clear influence on pop music. Jamie Oborne, who manages the band and runs its label, Dirty Hit, said he can detect the 1975’s impact in the new artists he meets.
“Though I’ve been very cautious not to sign another 1975, only because I don’t think my mental health could take it,” he said with a laugh.
In quarantine, Healy says he’s been pondering the dangers of his celebrity. “Doing what I do, selfobsession is the fuel of the engine, and of course people don’t challenge you on it,” he said. “I mean, if I’m on smack, the guys will call me out, as they did. But if it’s just being selfish, and that’s part of my process” – here he grimaced as he made air quotes – “then everybody just leaves it.”
True to his restlessly analytical mind, Healy then wondered aloud if knowing you’re a narcissist makes you better or worse than someone more oblivious. And though that’s precisely the type of question that drives the 1975’s deeply layered music, the singer sometimes wishes he could shake the impulse to double back on himself.
One reason he’s drawn to the gleaming surfaces in If You’re Too Shy (Let Me Know) _alsoa hallmark of earlier 1975 hits such as the Whitney Houston-ish The Sound – is because they remind him of music from the 1980s, he said, “when pop stars weren’t so encumbered with self-awareness. I know that time had its decadence, but there’s a real freedom in those records.”
His approach to songwriting basically amounts to trying to create the same sensation he gets out of the music he loves. “I’ll hear a song and say, ‘Oh, we should do a song that makes us feel like that’,” he said. “Then George makes a piece of music and I emotionally react to it.”
With Daniel, who’s also quarantining at the studio, Healy’s already started work on new 1975 music – a product of his “weird compulsion to make stuff,” as he put it, as well as the knowledge that the modern pop environment demands constant engagement.
“The days of the NME being like, ‘This is your new favourite band, and here’s one song’ – that’s over,” he said, referring to the tastemaking British magazine. “People want a real-time relationship now. When I saw Cardi B communicating with her audience on Instagram with zero mediation, I knew everything had changed.”
As he spoke, Mayhem let out a little squeak, evidently wanting to be cuddled again.
“He’s a proper quarantine pup, this one,” Healy said as he resettled the dog on his lap.
“Someday I’ll tell my kids, ‘You don’t even know what this dog’s been through. You want £20 for the shops? He didn’t even have a shop to go to when he was your age.” – Los Angeles Times/tribune News Service