In love with the moment

That record went to number one and they’ve released two subsequent chart-topping records; the 2016 opus I Like It When You Sleep, for You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware of It and last November’s hit A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships.

The band have already started work on a new record, Notes On A Conditional Form, which is set for release in May. And they’ll play songs from that, as well as tunes from their first three records, when they line up at Arena Birmingham on Wednesday.

The third and fourth 1975 records had been due to be called Music for Cars. But frontman Matty Healy said the band had changed their mind, following the release of A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships. Instead, he said Music for Cars was no longer an album but rather an “era” containing two albums, with Notes On A Conditional Form completing that cycle.

Healy hails from a performance background, as the son of actors Denise Welch and Tim Healy. He formed the band when he met Ross MacDonald, Adam Hann and George Daniel at Wilmslow High School in 2002. The teenagers played together and progressed from writing covers to creating their own music.

The band played under numerous different names, including Me and You Versus Them, Forever Drawing Six, Talkhouse, the Slowdown, Bigsleep and Drive Like I Do.

Healy said: “It’s not a rock band. It is a rock band in the way that we’re four white blokes playing guitars a lot of the time. But we’re an R&B band before we’re a rock band.

“I’ve always liked playing with any form. I don’t think about it when it comes to making music. I hear something I love and go, Let’s do that. I’m one of these kids with a low attention span, access to the internet, and loads of time. I wanna be everything. I’m so excited about the present.”

The 1975 have worked hard to win over their critics during their short time together. Rather than recoil when they’re criticised, they like to rise to the challenge.

“Listen, by the time we got to I Like It When You Sleep … I didn’t care. I work on music, don’t talk to anybody. Then somebody sits down with me and it’s like, What do I think? Well, considering what’s going on in pop, I’d be suspicious if somebody was slagging this record off. Give me a better one. Show me the other big band who’s amazing.

“You don’t write the spiel where I said: Take out heritage artists – Radiohead, Foo Fighters. Then new bands – Let’s Eat Grandma, Idles. What’s left is us.

“We’re headlining festivals on the second album the night after Foo Fighters, before Beyoncé. There are no bands at our stage doing anything as interesting. I’m not saying: I’m a legend. Find me one! Tell me one!

“There are no big bands who are doing anything as interesting as us right now.”

Healy has surfed the waves of rock success in recent years, but would be happy to trade it in for a settled life. He dreams of being a father and having time away from the rock’n’roll circus.

He told NME: “A combination of not being able to focus on one thing, and talking about my drug addiction, interspersed with the world, then me, then the world. I’ve always been staring death in the face. Always an existentialist, a nihilist. I just wanna have a baby now. Then I’ll stop doing that.

“I’d like to become a vessel for somebody else’s happiness. That’s where I get meaning in life. I make music; it makes people happy. I find everything else a bit hard. I love my girlfriend.”

Healy has found success hard to cope with and has faced a well-publicised battle against heroin use. He’s spoken honestly about that struggle after coming through and kicking the habit. He spent two months in rehab in Barbados and has been clean since.

“People had started to lose respect for me, but not an irredeemable amount. The fact that I knew I was building on something that wasn’t destroying made me feel really strong. Because I knew that one more time and that’s it.

“I still risked it but it took me being in one of the most divisive, exciting bands in the world to make me stop doing drugs for a little bit at a time.”

The 1975’s most recent album was compared to Radiohead’s OK Computer, which represented a high point from the Britpop era. It’s a comparison that Healy’s been able to understand. “That time is really resonant to me. I wasn’t part of Britpop, but I was in the house while the beer swigging garden parties were going on. I remember the whole thing. Listen, by the time it got to A Brief Inquiry, I was literally like, ‘What do you want, man’... We didn’t want to be in a punk band, because it’s not punk to be in a punk band. Punk is about the subversion of form, and I couldn’t subvert a form that has already got loads of men shouting in it. I didn’t want to be in an alternative band, I wanted to be played on the radio next to Ariana Grande, to say something different, you know?

“OK Computer, Sign o’ the Times, all my favourite records are about life. You can’t leave out the dancing, you can’t leave out the sinister stuff – you also can’t make a record in 2018 that is about life, without making the record about the internet by proxy.”

By Andy Richardson