Healy and co kick off album tour with two 3-Arena gigs..
A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships well received by critics
Manchester pop-rockers The 1975 are kicking off 2019 with a tour and are heading to these shores next week for two big shows.
The quartet fronted by Matt Healy, the son of actors Denise Welch and Tim Healy, are back on the road in support of their third album, A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships, which was released last November.
Critics and audiences have praised the band’s bold direction with their new album, noting the record’s lyrical themes and instrumental ambition.
Formed in 2002, the band is best known for hit songs such as Chocolate, Girls, Heart Out, UGH!, The Sound, Robbers and Somebody Else.
Last year, Healy opened about his heroin addiction and how — after spending much of 2017 high — he finally got clean.
In an interview with Billboard, the 29-year-old singer-songwriter revealed that he first decided he needed to seek treatment after accidentally going on a benzodiazepine-based ego trip in front of his bandmates, whom he has known since secondary school.
“Listen, everyone has to get onboard because I’m the f***ing main deal,” Healy said as he paraphrased what he told his longtime friends over dinner that night, shortly after they had discovered he was smoking heroin again.
“If you want the songs, we’re just going to have to get on with it,” he continued, adding that what he had planned on saying was that he would detox off of the drug once the band began recording their third album in Los Angeles.
After a mortified Healy woke up the next morning, “I realised that was absolutely f***ing bulls***,” he continued. So he went downstairs and told his bandmate George [Daniel], “I should go to rehab.”
Starting in November 2017, Healy spent seven weeks in rehab in Barbados and has been off heroin ever since, although he still smokes marijuana.
Staying clean, Healy says, will be “something I struggle with for the rest of my life.”
To keep himself on track, the singer volunteers to take weekly drug tests in front of his bandmates.
Although some of the songs on the band’s new album, reference drug use — including track “It’s Not Living If It’s Not with You,” which Healy described as “the big heroin one” — it’s not something Healy wants to romanticise.
“I don’t want to fetishise it, because it’s really dull and it’s really dangerous,” he explained. “The thought of being to a young person what people like [William S.] Burroughs were to me when I was a teenager makes me feel ill. … I still risked it.”
The 1975 play Dublin’s 3Arena on Wednesday January 9 and Thursday January 10 and while standing tickets are sold out, you can get a seat for the show from as little as €36.92 available at Ticketmaster.
Meanwhile, Dundalk man David Keenan (inset) is playing a show tonight in the Set Theatre in Kilkenny.
There’s an 8pm start to the gig which follows up the December release of EP Evidence of Living. Tickets are just €21, available at set. ie.