Or perhaps it is just Healy being “Matty Healy”, or at least being Matty Healy with the microphone on. “I’ve got a tiny little bit, which I got after about six months of negotiation.” Healy ordinarily smokes “all the time”, he sighs. “I’ve spent a lot of time in the hotel room, I’ve been thinking a bit too much, I just need to loosen up,” he says, a situation not helped by Japan’s stringent laws regarding marijuana.
Perhaps Healy’s indecision stems from the preceding week in Tokyo, in which the band attempted to rehearse through jet lag. “Even though I started this interview saying I don’t know what I’m doing.” Guitarist Adam Hann had a baby, while Healy says: “I’ve been clean for ages, I’m at the gym all the time, everyone feels good.” He smiles. “Not from us being cocky, it’s genuine,” he says. Healy is so confident in the band’s abilities that he has bullishly named their forthcoming world tour The 1975 at Their Very Best.
YOURE A ROCKSTAR GET YOUR FAME ON FULL
But it’s all relative: he still occasionally breaks the fourth wall (“enough about me – ‘you gotta talk to the people now, baby’,” Healy sings in a mocking voice on Part of the Band) and revels in provocation: “I like my men like I like my coffee – full of soy milk and so sweet they won’t offend anybody.” He is particularly proud of the entirely unironic I’m in Love With You. Half the length of its predecessor, co-produced by Taylor Swift and Lana Del Rey collaborator Jack Antonoff, the resulting album is packed with gleaming, anthemic pop songs that Healy thinks are more direct and emotionally open than his previous work. The 1975 on stage in Anaheim, California in December 2019. Twelve years ago, if you heard” – he imitates a bubbling electronic noise – “and the producer was 16 and he made it on his laptop, you’d be like: ‘What the fuck is this?’ It’s not the same any more.” You can watch a film with incredible CGI where King Kong kills a thing and it doesn’t even move you because you take everything for granted. “The synthesis of art and technology has now been going on for so long. “I kept saying: ‘What people really want is remarkable stuff that doesn’t require a lot of technology,’” says Healy. After a lengthy gestation – at one juncture, they considered recording the whole album using only one ancient drum machine and a synthesiser, the results sounding like “Suicide and Frank Ocean” – they dramatically changed tack, conscious of preserving what fans love about the band. Moreover, Healy seems rightfully proud of their forthcoming fifth album, Being Funny in a Foreign Language. The adjective “knowing” frequently crops up around the 1975 – inevitable when you perform at the Brit awards in front of a huge display of your most cutting negative reviews or have a penchant for writing songs in which, as Healy says, “there are so many self-references – it’s always me in the songs talking about being in the song, like a character in a film that knows he’s a character in a film”. They have also remained unusually self-aware.
He also says he “tries to think that I’m just doing my own thing, but every time I look back it always really makes sense in that time”. He talks about the curious coincidence that saw them release their previous album, Notes on a Conditional Form, its lyrics transfixed on the notion of what Healy called “a global anxiety attack”, precisely as the world went into lockdown.
It is the night before the 1975’s first live show in two and half years, headlining Japan’s SummerSonic festival, and Healy is talking expansively – Healy always talks expansively – about the 1975’s ability to reflect their era, a skill that has propelled the band to vast sales and something approaching global stardom, and which has caused the 33-year-old to be pegged as a spokesperson for the millennial generation. Matty Healy is sitting in a restaurant on the top floor of a Tokyo hotel – the same restaurant, as he excitedly points out, where Scarlett Johansson and Bill Murray’s characters meet in Lost in Translation.
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