The 1975: A year of living sensibly

Thu, 24 Mar, 2016 - 00:00

Ed Power

INEVITABLY I end up asking The 1975’s Matthew Healy about his alleged penchant for recreational pharmaceuticals. He is amused more than affronted.

“Here’s a newsflash for you: young people who do modelling or do music — when they go out for a night in major cities, a lot of them do drugs. That’s just a shocking bit of information for the world to learn… Of course I’ve done cocaine in the toilet at a nightclub.”

None of this will surprise fans of The 1975, who play their largest ever Irish show at Dublin’s 3Arena on Thursday. Healy (26) is an unusually frank lyricist and his often self-flagellating songs do not skimp on the darker facets of celebrity. He has sung about the pressures of fame, the turmoil of life in the public eye — and the excesses that are part of a rock star’s job description.

“There’s this idea that you can’t talk about these things honestly — that people will be shocked,” he continues. “I don’t believe that to be the case. I am talking about little social moments — little bits of reality.”

ARTISTIC MERIT

Healy is verbose, but his self-seriousness is backed up by music of genuine artistic merit. Initially dismissed as just another teenage pop band, with their second album the 1975 have blind-sided their detractors. I Like It When You Sleep For You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware of It is a thrilling mash-up of glam, psychedelia and prog in which the one consistent is a flair for big pop moments.

It’s frequently bonkers but always listenable — and Healy takes understandable pride in what he has wrought.

“The desire to make a big artistic statement is the thing that has always kept us going,” he says. “We make pop music for the art of it — not the commerce. It IS pop — but we do it because we love it. People are always concerned as to whether pop is cool or not. The real question, for me, is whether you believe in what you are hearing.”

With his sideways haircut and grandiose pronouncements, perhaps it was no surprise that Healy became somewhat of a punchbag when the 1975 broke through two years ago. That he belonged to a showbizzy family — he is the son of two minor British soap actors — didn’t help. Nor did the fact that initially the group’s fanbase was perceived as comprising overwhelmingly of teenage girls.

“Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein when she was 17,” he says, bristling a bit. “You can’t negate the opinions of a group of people because of their age. That’s just fucking stupid… a crusty old thing to say. If you look at all the great musical artists — their biggest demographic has always been young girls. They’re the biggest record-buying, emotionally investing consumer that you have for pop music. Look at The Beatles, look at Bowie. Their fans were mostly young women starting out.”

Healy grew up in Newcastle and rural Cheshire, where the family moved when he was 10. By the time he left school age 16, his ambitions were already fixed on rock and roll. He passed in and out of bands before meeting the future members of the 1975 (the moniker, incidentally, comes from liner-notes scribbled at the back of a Jack Kerouac anthology that read “1 June, The 1975”).

“This started as our hobby and now it’s our job,” says Healy. “We’ve always made our music for ourselves. I don’t have a creative relationship with any record label. All of the marketing, all of the visual stuff… everything is written by me, Jamie [Oborne, the group’s manager) and the band. That’s the way it goes — and then the record label help us sell it.”

With I Like It When... vaulting to number one in the UK and the US (it went top five here), Healy’s profile has soared. This has raised him from niche, music industry fame to full-fledged celebrity. His elevation to tabloid “notoriety” was foreshadowed early last year when he was “romantically linked” with Taylor Swift.

“It’s bloody fake, it’s all fake, it’s all a farce,” is how Healy addressed the speculation in 2015. “We met each other, we exchanged numbers in the same way that a lot of people in this kind of world do and we spoke occasionally and then she’s the biggest pop star in the world. I’m in Australia, there’s no relationship or anything happening, it’s funny how people really, really buy into that.”

TIGHT-KNIT GROUP

Even setting the Swift rumours to one side, there is no doubt but that the 1975 have cultivated a reputation as louche rockers. In the media, they are caricatured endlessly as tequila-slamming, TV-chucking, groupie-fraternising party boys. The truth, Healy suggests, is the precise opposite. The 1975 are tight-knit group and who’d rather knuckle down on their music than cut loose until their heads pop off (incredibly they wrote their latest record in the middle of a never-ending world tour). The two-dimensional image that has emerged of Healy, in particular, as a laureate of Byronic overindulgence, is wide of the mark.

“We are a very tightly knit group of people. My assistant is my best friend since school. Our crew are people we’ve known for ten years or more. This is a bunch of individuals traveling around, doing our thing. It has translated into something a lot of people have related to. But it’s not a big Hollywood party. It’s just a few mates hanging out.”

He shrugs when asked if he feels like he was always meant to be a rock star. In postmodern times such as these, what is a rock star?

“It’s a word that gets thrown around a lot. We live in a different age — everything is so ironic and self-aware. I don’t know if rock stardom even exists. I just stand for being really, really honest. I’ve never thought of myself as especially careerist. I’ve always just done things on my own terms and used music to express myself. I’m not out all the time getting photographed or chatting to superstars. That’s not me.”