Manchester film noir post-pop four-piece The 1975 – Matthew Healy (vocals,guitar), Adam Hann (guitar), George Daniel (drums, backing vocals) and Ross MacDonald (bass), all aged under 24 – have been empowered by The Internet to share their desperately unique sound to like-minded people. It has taken them from indie music abstraction to world journeying audio/visual tour de force.
“It’s something that I have tried to understand the narrative of for a long time. We’re making a film about the whole thing. It originally started as us documenting a time in our life that we thought wouldn’t last forever,” explains The 1975’s visionary frontman Healy.
Healy is the son of British acting royalty Denise Welsh (Coronation Street and winner Celebrity Big Brother UK 2012) and Tim Healy (Coronation Street and Waterloo Road) and due to his parents’ success he admits he has lived a pretty charmed life – a luxury that initially served as a hindrance to becoming a successful musician.
“We started with the idea of expressing ourselves being from somewhere where we thought we couldn’t. Because we didn’t have that much of a social identity being from middle class Manchester and there wasn’t a lot of things to be a part of. We didn’t have economic strife and we didn’t have any political issues with the government so the only thing to do was make a load of noise. And we did that for a long time and people didn’t really take us seriously because every song sounded different. We tried to get a record deal for a long time and people didn’t really take us seriously because no song sounded the same,” laments Healey. Despite not getting a ‘record deal’ The 1975 received kudos from Foals and Arctic Monkeys.
Healey now reveals candidly that embracing thematic and visual simplicity saw a breakthrough. “We put everything in black and white and became one of the new most popular bands in the world,” states the Mancunian with a sly chuckle.
From this point all the band’s press pics, film clips and imagery were presented in a slick black and white film noir style. “What I mean by that is, obviously everything is in black and white, when we did that it was like a time when we got everything right. As long as we had a coherency in our visuals and everything that we were talking about, and all of the music was coming from the same place, people would perceive it almost as a brand. What was initially a perceived identity became this generationally informed aesthetic,” contends Healy.
And that’s the kicker isn’t it? Due to the proliferation of music, film and fashion via the internet, this new generation of music consumers can educate themselves and become fans of thirty-plus genres of music, fashion styles and movies in two hours.
“Imagine being 18 years old and having that as a perspective in a kind of foresight, trying to explain to someone that ‘we are not confused and we are not conflicted, we are a representation of the way people consume music now’. Even when I was 15 there were a lot more scenes, whereas now 15-year-old girls are expected to listen to Kendrick Lamar and Carole King. All of the outlets are so many and so ambiguous, there is no ‘linear’ intake of music anymore,” explains Healy.
Finally – on this pressing topic for the contemporary music industry – Healy concludes, “I’m not an anti-major record label person – since we have been signed they have been amazing to us. But from the perspective of any remotely switched-on band, if major record labels had any foresight then the number one distributor of music would not be a computer application manufacturer based in California, that exists outside of the music industry solely by itself that focuses on and facilitates music. So now when record labels are expecting bands to get into bed with them based on their foresight on what they think will happen bands are like ‘well, no’. There are still stuff like ‘breaks clauses’ that are to do with the transportation of vinyl records that bands lose to money to record labels because the labels just think, ‘fuck it, let’s leave it in’.”
The 1975’s collusion of music and visual expands beyond their film noir video clips and into their live shows. Healy talks about the performance his band is bringing to this year’s Splendour in the Grass and The 1975’s two Melbourne shows at The Hi-Fi Bar.
“There is a difference in the production from our shows in London because we’re playing to 20,000 people, whereas in Australia it will be 2,000. But you can achieve the same feeling with different productions. The main thing I am focused on in the shows in Australia is that it will be, for the majority, the first time that people have seen it. So it’s important for us that the first live experience is an actualisation of what is expected. Like the fact we have the singular box on stage and there is no colour.”
BY DENVER MAXXIMUS DECIMUS MERIDIUS
