A very good year: The 1975’s Matty Healy on taking it to the next level
The hot British band – an ‘effeminate, goth, ’80s, R&B, rock ’n’ roll, modern art thing’ – have just released their second album, whose mix of raw emotions and clinical delivery has been polarising opinions
The video is remarkable, a true window into its subject’s soul.
Posted last year on celebrity gossip website TMZ, the two-minute clip shows Matthew Healy (known as Matty), frontman of the popular British band The 1975, on the pavement outside a restaurant in West Hollywood, where Healy has emerged to find several young women excitedly offering him an old-fashioned bong. The singer accepts, noting how much he loves California, then fills his lungs before exhaling smoke over the heads of a gathering scrum of fans and photographers.
“You want me to hit you up?” he asks one girl, happily refilling the bowl as her friend records the puff-puff-pass on a smartphone. “Let’s do it.”
Generosity, exhibitionism, the heedless pursuit of pleasure – it’s all there in The 1975’s music, a canny blend of sounds and attitudes that has turned Healy, 26, into a pop idol for the social media age. His band’s 2013 debut reached No 1 in the UK with sly but swooning hits such as Chocolate and Sex, and for a while the internet was convinced he was dating Taylor Swift. Now the group have just released their second album, which could vault The 1975 to the next level.
“If we’ve ever had the chance to be a big band, it’s with this record,” Healy says.
Yet rather than streamline their approach for maximum efficiency, Healy and his bandmates – guitarist Adam Hann, bassist Ross MacDonald and drummer George Daniel – have only added wrinkles for the new album, which advertises its complexity with its extravagant title: I Like It When You Sleep, for You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware of It.
The son of two television actors, Healy grew up comfortably in Manchester, where his parents exposed him to classic rock and soul music by Wilson Pickett, Roberta Flack and The Rolling Stones (The 1975 opened a show for the Stones at London’s Hyde Park in 2013). Later, after seeing Less Than Jake and The Ataris at a festival, he got deeply into punk and ska; soon he was spending four nights a week at concerts, he says.
Healy and his mates came together at school in 2002, but they spent the next decade cycling through different styles and band names. The 1975’s first release, an EP titled Facedown, came out in 2012 and took off quickly, thanks in part to support from the influential radio DJ Zane Lowe, who was then at the BBC and is now at Apple’s Beats 1.
“I tried so hard for so long to be like a million other bands,” Healy says. Dressed in a baggy sweater, his curly hair piled atop his head, the singer is sprawled on a couch backstage before a recent gig at Club Nokia in Los Angeles. “And then the first thing I do that’s all about me, where I was just myself, that’s the thing that works.”
For the new album, Healy wrote songs about his experiences over the past three years: becoming a celebrity, fending off vampires, struggling not to become numb. (The TMZ video shows you what you need to know here.)
Although the digital era has warped these topics nearly beyond recognition, this is familiar territory for pop songs, of course. And Healy knows it. When I told him that Love Me reminded me of David Bowie’s Fame, he nodded and replied that Fame had come out – wait for it – in 1975.
What bolsters his case is how specific the sounds are on I Like It When You Sleep. Mike Crossey, who produced the album with Healy and Daniel in LA, said he shipped three tonnes of gear over from England so the musicians could build their own studio and work without watching the clock. They also recruited big-name players to realise certain sonic ideas, including the trumpeter Roy Hargrove, an alumnus of D’Angelo’s Voodoo who appears on the slow-mo R&B ballad If I Believe You.
Healy compares his desire for fine detail to a phenomenon he’s witnessed among some of his fans. After years of taking cheap digital pictures, they’ve started bringing Polaroid cameras to concerts. “Looking at things on a little screen – it’s like it’s not there enough,” he says.
For all its references, this music still has loads of Matty Healy in it, starting with the lyrics, which toggle between disarmingly sensitive and defiantly bratty in a way that keeps upsetting your expectations. He’s equally dynamic onstage, where his manner amounts to a kind of aggressive flamboyance made of hair tossing, eye rolling and lip licking. (The band is set to play the Coachella festival in April.)
Nevertheless, Healy’s theatrics have turned off some. Reaction online to the band’s SNL performance was wildly mixed, with detractors claiming to be repelled by the very same qualities fans praise.
John Janick, chairman of The 1975’s record label Interscope, views that response positively. “If you don’t have people who hate something, you’re doing it wrong,” he says, putting The 1975 in a lineage of brilliant but divisive acts that includes Eminem, Marilyn Manson and M.I.A.
Healy, perhaps because he’s a child of show business, seems more eager to be loved. Which doesn’t mean he dismisses the value Janick describes.
“I’m an ambassador of youthful ideas and teen drama,” he says, somehow earnestly. “But I’m also a grown-up, and I know how to play the game. I know what I’m doing. I’m not naive.”
Los Angeles Times
