Every time Matty Healy opens his mouth, somebody gets annoyed. Long before his rumoured relationship with international sweetheart Taylor Swift, Healy, the lead singer of the massively irritating pop band The 1975, had mastered the art of winding people up. He has a supple singing voice and is a decent songwriter: but his true vocation, across his decade-plus career, has been treading on strangers’ toes. He’s the Bob Dylan of raising your blood pressure.
Until recently, this was an accepted fact, and nobody cared that he was a bit of an idiot. It was his calling card. You went to see The 1975 because you were partial to their slick, saxophone-fuelled pop – imagine if Radiohead woke one morning and decided they wanted to be a Level 42 covers band – but also because there was a fair chance Healy might do something ludicrous. As he did when he brought his tour to Dublin earlier this year and, in response to an annoying audience chant of “Olé, Olé, Olé,” told 14,000 Irish fans that they were “a simple people”.
Nobody booed; if anything, the crowd lapped it up. Later in the show, Healy, 34, had a slight meltdown and started swinging the mic stand around. In a world where many male rockers want to be a variation of Chris Martin – the colour beige in human form – how refreshing to see a vast, preening ego imploding for our entertainment.
You were reminded that Healy grew up in an acting family: his father, Tim Healy, starred in Auf Wiedersehen, Pet and Benidorm, and his mother, Denise Welch, is best known as Natalie Barnes from Coronation Street. She’s also done panto – and clearly, some of that knockabout energy has filtered down to her son.
What a rollercoaster ride it was watching him in concert. In between these two extremes of sneery git and man-falling-to-pieces, Healy had briefly addressed the audience. “There’s a story [in the papers] calling me a Nazi tomorrow,” he said. “This is true.”
It was indeed true. Healy had been waving his arms earlier in the tour, and a few tabloids had decided he was giving a Hitler salute. The controversy was ludicrous and flamed out. But another online storm has followed Healy around - and has been intensified by his supposed romance with Taylor Swift. It concerns the New York rapper Ice Spice, whom Healy is accused of mocking in a podcast.
He addressed these claims in a new interview with The New Yorker, which seems to have been commissioned not because of The 1975’s streak of decent albums but because he’s been in the audience of Taylor Swift’s US tour (with Swift having joined The 1975 in London in January).
The singer hadn’t insulted Ice Spice but had laughed when the podcast hosts described her as an “Inuit Spice girl” and a “chubby Chinese lady”. The 23-year-old rapper is, in fact, of African-American and Dominican heritage. The details are obviously irrelevant: it’s self-evidently unacceptable to turn someone’s ethnicity or appearance into a punchline.
Healy had, as was only proper, later apologised publicly – saying he didn’t want Ice Spice, real name Isis Naija Gaston, to think he was a “d---”. But that horse had bolted.
He’s shallow, then – but he has depths. Healy is blisteringly honest about his mental health on The 1975’s 2022 LP, Being Funny In A Foreign Language album as well as reflecting on his years of heroin addiction and his romantic split from singer FKA Twigs.
“Oh, I don’t care if you’re insincere / Just tell me what I want to hear,” he sang on All I Need To Hear, a ballad about his need for human support and connection following a reported breakdown. Later, the Cheshire-raised singer said that it was easier “as an English northern person, to be sardonic in the face of something sincere”. The argument he makes on the new LP is that it’s okay to be corny and fake, if your motives are pure.
He has also gleefully played with ideas of masculinity. On the group’s latest tour, Healy sings against briefly projected images of Prince Andrew and of controversial kick boxer-turned-influencer Andrew Tate, whose toxic machismo Healy appeared to skewer.
But in the New Yorker interview, Healy made the broader point that most of the online controversy he has whipped up over the years has been illusory. In an uncharacteristic display of humility, he explained that people don’t think about him that often.
“It doesn’t actually matter,” he told The New Yorker. “Nobody is sitting there at night slumped at their computer, and their boyfriend comes over and goes, ‘What’s wrong, darling?’ and they go, ‘It’s just this thing with Matty Healy.’ That doesn’t happen.”
What about those people who were genuinely offended, wondered The New Yorker? “You’re either deluded or you are, sorry, a liar. You’re either lying that you are hurt, or you’re a bit mental for being hurt. It’s just people going, ‘Oh, there’s a bad thing over there, let me get as close to it as possible so you can see how good I am.’ And I kind of want them to do that, because they’re demonstrating something so base level.”
Swift and Healy have yet to go on the record with their romance – though Swift has gone public with her admiration for Ice Spice, with whom she recorded a new version of her single Karma. But even without confirmation, the very idea of Swift being with an unreconstructed wind-up merchant of Healy’s calibre has vexed a segment of her fanbase, who have urged her to “actively engage in this process of personal and social transformation”.
This touches on the wider issue of how much say fans should have in the personal lives of pop stars (answer: none at all). It also confirms that Healy is a throwback to an older kind of pop star. There was a time when being outrageous wasn’t a career killer – it was part of the job description. Whether it was Ozzy Osbourne biting off the head of a bat or the Gallaghers launching jibes at Blur (before they turned their artillery on each other), part of the fun of being a pop fan was waiting for your favourite artist’s next outrageous outburst.
Healy understands this is part of his job and hasn’t been found wanting. He’s good at it too. In an age where pop is increasingly a story of the bland leading the bland, it is a talent for which he should be praised rather than pilloried.
