Whose idea was it to invite Greta Thunberg to the party?
On Friday evening, Matthew Healy, the fragile frontman of The 1975 – and the closest thing millennials have to Jim Morrison
– was chastising an amorous fan from the stage of the O2 Arena. “I’m singing about my fractured ego as a 30-year-old white man,” he told her, taking a swig from a refillable water bottle. “It’s important stuff.”
Although their pop may sound effervescent, Healy’s Mancunian five-piece appear increasingly occupied with the important stuff. Since their debut album topped the British charts in 2013, he has applied his honeyed vocals and knowing lyrics to everything from sex to social anxiety, homophobia to heroin addiction – nearly all of it viewed through the prism of a life lived online.
The band were last at the O2, performing inside enormous fluorescent boxes, exactly a year and a day earlier: they are in the midst of the apparently unstoppable Music for
Cars tour that started in November 2018 and won’t finish for another nine months, and they are also about to release their fourth album. There’s an obvious Glastonbury-shaped gap in their tour schedule, but even though they are widely expected to be on the bill at Worthy Farm this summer – and would certainly be capable headliners – you kind of wish, for their own sakes, that they’d just take a nap instead.
The tour has been a victory lap of sorts for the group, who managed to wrangle Healy into rehab in the summer of 2017. He emerged several months later with enough new material for two more records.
A handful of singles from their forthcoming release, Notes on a Conditional Form, mingled on the setlist with the introspective and yearning material from their last album, 2018’s A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships, to show a band shifting in focus.
The 1975 have never been averse to sneaking a bit of social commentary in among the bombast of their stadium rock, but there are also threads of both fatigue and rage woven through their newer tracks. Opening with People, an incorrigible slice of metallic indie-rock, Healy
– in a suit-and-tie ensemble that looked more Grange Hill than Savile Row – set the mood for the evening (“the economy’s a goner, republic’s a banana, ignore it if you wanna”) before warning the few parents in the crowd to “stop f------ with the kids”.
Last time around, this tour felt like a party, an irresistible grab-bag of Eighties synths and Phil Collins guitars set within a kaleidoscopic light show that looked excellent on Instagram. But it was harder to dance on Friday night: the set swelled with a clutch of morose, downbeat numbers, set against glitching, monochromatic backgrounds. After Love Me, the 2015 hit that saw Healy – and the group – accused of pomposity, the word “MATTY” filled the screens. “That used to be a joke,” Healy muttered. “Not sure if it is any more.”
The shift in tone, it should be said, didn’t affect the band’s muscular performance. The 1975 remain slick and sharp; Healy can croon, as on the anthemic I Always Wanna Die (Sometimes), as well as roar, as he does on I Like America & America Likes Me. The setlist may have been the largest they’ve ever played, but they grappled with it admirably.
Friday’s most sombre moment came with an attempt to address climate change. The 1975 made headlines last year when they revealed that Greta Thunberg had recorded a speech for their new album. After commanding silence from 20,000 people, Healy stood alone on the stage, head bowed, as the 17-year-old activist’s voice rang out: “There are no grey areas when it comes to survival.” In the crowd, someone raised a fist into the air. Then there were dozens of fists, then hundreds, all silhouetted against the fires shown raging on screen.
The 1975 then broke, seamlessly, into Love It If We Made It, their flag-bearing 2018 single shimmering with new resonance. It’s difficult for pop to feel fun when it’s trying to save the world. But here, at least, was proof that it can be powerful.