Golden Years

It's Friday morning in Manchester and Matthew Healy, lead singer for British group The 1975, has a pretty big weekend on the cards. “Our album comes out on Monday so I'm just fucking busy as anything. I'm in my home town for the first time in about six months and back to London this afternoon to prepare.”

Preparation is something that Healy and his bandmates have had plenty of leading up to their debut LP release. “[Over the past ten years] we fucked about, we quit the band and we got back into the band,” Healy reflects. “One of us went to uni then dropped out of uni, until we got to age 23 and decided to put out an album.” It seems the time was right to put the band first. “The last six months have been a very humbling time. We've been a band for ten years and we've never released music… Now, as a band who have been together for so long and never played a headline show, we're embarking on, essentially, a world tour of sold-out shows. It's been incredible.”

With the backing of Sony Music and the production techniques of Mike Crossey (Arctic Monkeys, Foals) on board, there's certainly an air of expectation; something the band embraced in the studio. “All the music on the album was written way before anybody knew us,” Healy reveals. So, when the band went in to record, “It was more a process of preservation. We gave a lot of credit to the actual recording process. I'm a firm believer that physically recording a record is a task enough in itself. All the creative elements of the music need to be locked in before you can go into a studio and experiment with production ideas.” And deciding on Crossey? “There's so much bullshit that happens when your band starts to break. Everybody involved is like, 'Oh, you need to make a record with this guy and this record sold XYZ amount. You need to do a record with Justin Meldal-Johnsen because he did that new M83 record and it sounds aaah-mazing.' Do you not know why the M83 record sounds amazing? It's because M83 are fucking amazing! So in my mind the best person to produce a 1975 record is us. Mike Crossey was the first big producer to come along and say, 'You're totally right, and what I want to do is help you embrace all of your demos and make [them] a grander sonic expression'.” A step away from the standard synth-pop music that has seen a mini-renaissance over the past 12 months (think Bastille, Atlas Genius), The 1975 release is much more guitar-driven yet symphonic.

Soon The 1975 will be bringing their album to Australia as part of Big Day Out 2014's epic line-up. Healy is more than a little excited to return to a country in which he spent some of his formative years. “I actually lived in Melbourne from when I was about two to when I was about four years old. Aside from that, though, the boys and I have never really been to Australia and we're really excited about it. We've been to Los Angeles, we've been to Japan; but I think Australia's going to be the farthest away we've ever been from home. And it's your summer, isn't it? We'll be having this kind of endless summer that we're all really excited about. We've heard plenty of stories about the Big Day Out, so it's fair to say we're all pretty bloody excited about it.” So what can audiences expect from The 1975 live? “It's everything you find on the album, except it's all exaggerated a little bit on stage. That lustful energy that's inherent in our music is really brought to life in our live show. The album has elements of being fantastical and overly romantic… but we want live audiences to laugh and have fun, not only think about the music.”

Now it's time for the question that Healy must get asked in every interview: What's with the “The”? “I met an artist in New York when I was an impressionable 19-year-old,” he enlightens. “When I left he gave me a pile of literature, full of beat poetry and Kerouac and that kind of thing. One of the books had been used as a diary by a previous owner and there were notes all over it. It was dated really strangely; for instance, the first of June, The 1975. It's quite a jarring thing to see. To my knowledge, there's never been a band where the word 'The' had held any relevance. I think we might be the first band where 'The' holds a lot more significance than the word that follows it.”