“I sometimes have a fear of wearing that on my sleeve,” he says. Sitting on the studio’s terrace, sucking on a terrifyingly strong joint, Healy considers his desire to be not just a star, but a huge star, the kind still talked about 30 years later. If this is the album that determines whether the 1975 become U2 or Big Country, they’ve staked everything on the former outcome.
It veers from the Bowie-meets-Gabriel art-funk of the lead single, Love Me, through She Lays Down, an acoustic ballad about his mother’s postnatal depression, to Ugh, a strange splurge of a song that is Healy reflecting on his relationship with cocaine, to She’s American, a sharp pop song about being an Englishman desired by American girls. It’s awfully long – but Healy says it needs to be to capture what has happened to him since he last wrote a set of songs. It’s a panoramic album, a step on from their debut. It was one of the rare interviews that you find yourself fascinated to transcribe.Īnd so I’m unusually excited about their second album – I Like It When You Sleep, for You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware of It, due next February – which is the one that should turn their already large and fervent fanbase into a huge and seething following.Ī few weeks before that Camden gig, on a broiling day in Los Angeles, with the temperature rising past 100F, I had found Healy and the album’s producer playing tracks from the record in the studio. At one point I had to say to him that he really shouldn’t be telling me all this stuff, because I would be duty-bound to print it, and it would rebound on his personal life. Then, two years ago, I interviewed him for the first time, and I’ve rarely been so taken aback by someone’s desire to spill everything. There was a groping for emotional and intellectual clarity – not always fulfilled, but attempted – that seemed a world apart from most of his pop contemporaries. He might not see the link, but I heard something in common with another of my favourite lyricists, Craig Finn of the Hold Steady. Instead I was taken aback by both their sense of ambition and by Healy’s lyrical frankness: he wrote not about the party life of the 20-something, but about the fallout from the party. But you don’t have to be a kid to like them: the 1975 were a band I expected to hate when I first heard that album. Their self-titled first album was a UK No 1 in autumn 2013, its cunning amalgam of more pop styles and techniques than you could shake a stick at – a bit of emo, a bit of R&B, a bit of funk pop, a bit of the Streets – striking a chord with a young audience for whom Healy’s self-lacerating lyrics must have seemed like a dramatic step towards adulthood. After a decade or so of trying to be pop stars, Healy and his bandmates have become the real thing. In the Japanese House’s dressing room, Healy laughs.
Healy, Daniel and Hann are shepherded into a side corridor and away. “But I have to get a photo.” One boy, closer to the fleeing group than the girl he’s with, shouts back: “Quick! Quick! Give me your phone! I’ll get them!”īut neither succeeds. “I feel bad leaving early,” one young woman says, trying to fight her way to the stairs. The party leaves en masse, and is instantly pursued by a buzzing, kinetic swarm. Everyone who is aware of their presence keeps turning, craning, looking with various degrees of ostentation, from the poorly disguised stretch-and-turn to the outright and unapologetic stare.Ī few minutes from the end of the show, the 1975’s manager decides they need to leave before the rush. It’s only moments, though, before it’s too much, and Healy and Hann signal to the sound engineer to let them into the soundboard area so they can watch the show without being bothered. But Healy doesn’t so much get approached as have a receiving line of fans awaiting his benediction. Guitarist Adam Hann – no relation – receives the fewest. Within seconds, the three of them begin to receive a stream of supplicants, looking for a hug, a kiss on the cheek. They find a tiny pocket of space in the back corner, and heads begin to turn. There are a handful of people from Dirty Hit, her label, along with three of the four members of her labelmates the 1975, including Matt Healy, the group’s singer and leader, and her producer. Amber Bain – aka the Japanese House – has already started her set at the Barfly in Camden when a small party sweeps up the stairs into the room where she is playing.