taking every chance available to speak out and step up. “I think it's part of my new ethos. Like, fuck it, I'd rather take up the same position in culture that other proper pop stars do and be myself fully, flawed and all, at the risk of getting cancelled than I would buy into a culture that I don't agree with,” he says. “I'm not a misogynist, I'm not a racist, I'm not any of the -ists, and I know that. So I refuse to live my life in fear that I'm going to be falsely exposed for being one of those things. I'd rather make a mistake and then say sorry for it, or make a mistake and not say sorry for it and be like, you know why I didn't say sorry? Because I was pissed off.” It's a headline-grabbing attitude made all the more notable by the sheer lack of competition. If it feels like Matty is the new go-to musician for quotable bon mots - a kind of woke Liam Gallagher with a spliff and a library card - then it says more about The 1975's increasingly singular place in popular culture than it does about the frontman himself. They're a massive band working largely outside of the major label machine; a group with the top level visibility of pop's elite but the ethos of a bunch of indie kids. “Of course I seem problematic and extreme because you put me next to [most famous pop artists] and my ideas and my outward projections are not being met with ANY outward projection. They don't even talk about themselves, you know?!” he says. “I come from punk and hardcore, and I come from 'music has a meaning', and 'music can change the world'. And if it can't change The World it can change this fucking world, so let's create our own reality. I don't come
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from wherever those pop stars come from, which in some cases is X Factor or telly or whatever. So there's this inherent desire to express who I am and that will bleed into a performance where it wouldn't bleed into another pop star's performance. I'm like Dennis Waterman: 'I write the theme tune, I sing the theme tune...'” he jokes. “If you're in One Direction and you've got 20,000 people singing your songs, but you're singing with six other people and the lyrics were written by a load of 40-year-olds from North London, then you can enjoy it and be emotionally engaged to a certain extent. But imagine what it's like when I do it? It's mad.”
T
here are a lot of things in Matty Healy's life right now that you could accurately sum up as 'mad', but what strikes you most about the 31-year-old is that, under the verbose statements and weighty proclamations, he's an exceedingly, almost bizarrely down-to-earth guy. When we rejoin the singer at their Oxfordshire studio a few weeks later, he's wearing the charityshop floral skirt that he's recently taken to sporting, toking on a customary joint and moaning that he's aching from a recent effort to get back into martial arts (the trick, he tells us while putting the kettle on, is to destabilise your enemy by poking them in the eye). He doesn't really drink and, after his admission last year that he'd been to rehab for a period of heroin use, is now clean and healthy. “The thing is, I had toured, lived, experienced things
without drugs before - I just preferred it with it...” he shrugs with a knowing grin now. “So it's more of an 'Oh', than a 'What do I do?'. I know what I do. I don't do the drugs. And that's the hard thing. Like, giving up smoking is so hard because you actually have to stop smoking. But that's just part of growing up or whatever. You've just gotta grow up a little bit.” The same innate restlessness and desire to “change the way I feel in the moment” that led him to experiment with hard drugs, he explains, is why he finds himself constantly propelling himself forward creatively, in search of new thrills and unable to sit still. It's a distinctly less problematic way of dealing with his urges, but it still sounds exhausting. “I'd love to switch it all off. I'd love to be able to be like, ahhhh,” he exhales, “have a mind bath. Have a bath in the old brain where it stops and I'm not...” He pauses for a second and changes tack. “I think it's because I really do have this sense of purpose. Not in a Morrissey or a Mother Teresa way, not on either of those spectrums or because my ego needs it. But because I feel like it is who I am, so if I'm not being 'that' then I'm not quite fulfilled.” When The 1975 announced at the start of the campaign for 'A Brief Inquiry...' that the record would be the first of two released in quick succession, the pair making up a two-part 'Music For Cars' era, it seemed like a borderlinesenseless task for a band nearconstantly on the road. But through a patchwork, magpie-like approach to creation and a probably quite unhealthy work ethic, they've made it happen. “I've been getting up in the morning and my day job is trying to make a record, and my night shift is playing a huge international rock show stadium tour,” Matty chuckles. Now finally back on home turf for a solid month to put the pieces together, follow-up 'Notes On A Conditional Form' is in the latter stages of completion. Today, we're here to get a preview. “Every record so far