The 1975: The Lead Singer Part II

Friday, March 11, 2016

The Lead Singer Part II

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In the year 2001, Matt Healy met his to-be bandmates, the guitarist and keyboardist Adam Hann, drummer and backing vocalist George Daniel, and bassist and backing vocalist, Ross MacDonald at the Wilmslow High School in Wilmslow, a town close to Manchester. He then stated that a "hippy council worker" was putting on gigs for teenagers at Macclesfield Senior Citizen Hall and then Hann approached him and MacDonald about forming a band. Healy originally played drums, but then switched in becoming the next lead singer just when George Daniel was added and as the lead singer left to join another band.

Before puberty hits Matt Healy.

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One of the solid raw interviews :

This all came as the group were approaching the end of two years of solid touring in front of crowds that were growing ever bigger and ever more voracious. It was like, Healy says, being in a “really glamorous version ofDawn of the Dead. Instead of being followed by zombies, it was iPhone-clutching kids. There’d be 100 kids between the tour bus and the stage door, when I’m in my boxers with a hangover. So my first reaction with human beings is in a resentful, semi-clothed situation – ‘Matty! Matty! Matty!’ – and I’d be, ‘They don’t even care about the music! They’ve just got their phones out!’”

Healy found himself tumbling towards a crisis, which arrived on 6 December, onstage in Boston. “There was girl stuff,” he says. “There was family stuff. There was financial stuff. There was drug stuff. I remember hearing the crowd and having an identity crisis. I thought: ‘If you want to see a show, I’ll give you a fucking show. If you’ve come to see the jester drink himself into a slumber, I’ll give it to you.’ I felt like I’d become an idea as opposed to being a person.”

At one point, a fan shouted, “I love you, Matty!” He’s ashamed of his response. “What did I say to the poor fucking girl? ‘You don’t have the right to love me. You don’t know me. I love you but you don’t get to love me.’ Jesus. Can you imagine your favourite band shouting that at you? What a dickhead. What a horrible thing to say to a kid who fucking does love me.”

At the show’s end, Healy fell to the stage and refused to leave. “George carried me off, cos I would have stayed there, apparently. I just wanted to sit there and do something you don’t. It was so blurry and of such a particular colour: I remember everything as orangey yellow.”

The easy reaction to take – and one we see again and again when members of groups with startlingly passionate teenage followings hit a wall, as opposed to troubled stars with middle-aged male followings, like Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy – is to say: suck it up, pal. You’re in a band. People love you. You’re making money. Grow a pair.