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MATTY HEALY

A second Sydney show being added last minute ( and olympic stadium might I add ), further laments just how in demand they are right now. As the lights dimmed, a single alarm tone went off. One of those generic apple ones that makes your insides cringe with the PTSD of a rude morning awakening. Up on the screen, a camera man began following a bed being wheeled through the back halls of the arena, the pair eventually both ending up on the stage where tens of thousands of fans were howling for them.

Crawling from the bed, was the scrawny 30-something year old self proclaimed protagonist of the evening. Sauntering over to the microphone set up in center stage, he armed himself with an acoustic guitar before  mumbling simply “Hi…my name is Matty��. An uproar from the crowd raucous enough to promise ear ringing for days to follow. I was so utterly fascinated by all of it; the adoration, the performance, the man who needed no introduction past his first name. I’d been waiting to catch first hand a glimpse at this spectacle for months now, ever since I opened my Tik Tok app to indulge myself in the ever pitiful ‘doomscroll’ last September, when I couldn’t help but notice a recurring subject popping up every third video I scrolled through. It felt like I should check what year it is, and what platform I was using, since I distinctly remember this same phenomena in 2014 on the now deceased website tumblr. A slew of young girls running to fit the heroic-chic inspired aesthetic, that consisted of fishnets, chain smoking, black chokers and heavily underexposed photos. Doc Martens probably should have sent this man a gift basket as a thank-you for the sales they generated from this era. I am of course talking about Chesire band The 1975, and their triumphant leader & front man, Matthew Healy to be exact. 

So where did the resurgence come from nearly 10 years after what some would call their peak? Or was what we saw back then just a taster of what they and he is capable of? It would be naive to assume that their success is only due to their eclectic style, when so many bands have done the same thing ( most likely even musically superior ), only to wind up existing in the public as a small font on a festival lineup, while 1975 nab the headline spot.

Personally, I surmise that their huge prominence has to do with something else outside of their sound entirely. Simply put, Matty Healy serves as a modern blueprint of ‘how to be a rockstar.’

Rock isn’t dead, it’s just the age of rock as we knew it that is. With the monopoly of ticket sales, social media and streaming services forcing the sales of individual songs and albums to be pretty well obsolete; the smart ones have turned their enemies against them, utilizing social media and the hysterical nature of young girls to cement themselves in music history and rewrite a new age of rock.

Long have young girls been picked apart and made fun of for their hysterics. Within the music industry, that looks like being labeled as nothing more than groupies or fan girls; when in reality the entire career of most musicians throughout time are heavily reliant on this very demographic. The Beatles famously having the term “Beatlemania” coined after the frenzy, and evidence that suggests that even Mozart had ‘groupies’ during his hay day. This was confirmed back to me as I watched him on stage, swigging from a seemingly endless bottle of red wine with a cigarette held between the same fingers that held his microphone. Guess who was by eye account of the majority demographic? Girls aged 16-25. But how does female fans equate to world domination?

Well, Girls are obsessive, Girls are loyal, and most importantly, Girls TALK. The single smartest move anyone that wants to be thrust into the public domain could do is to pull ‘stunts’ that make girls tell other girls all about what caught their attention. Stunts that our friend Matty Healy, has been all too familiar with on this particular tour. How about an erotic rendition of wanking on stage? Or  bringing a different fan up every night to (consensually ) kiss during the song robbers?  Perhaps my favorite stunt was eating a hunk of raw meat, pumping out a few push ups, throwing up, and then crawling into a hollow TV set…

Its bizarre, its unpredictable and its oh so the best marketing strategy one could harness.

By dehumanizing himself on stage, he humanizes himself to his fans, making him feel more accessible through this rip in the fourth wall.  They are creating the ultimate fantasy, one that is the core topic of countless wattpad stories, and one that has girls literally camping out in the hopes that they’ll be the next lucky contender pulled onto stage. 

There’s a bountiful of articles floating around online about how lame the band is, how problematic he is as an individual, but I truly believe what all of these are failing to see is just how fucking genius this performance is. To Matty, the world’s his stage and he’s the star. 

Even within conversations I had with my own friends, there is an air of “doesn’t he just seem like a bit of a wank?” And yeah, it’s undeniable, I’m sure he is the guy that most people would avoid getting stuck in a drunken conversation with at 3am, but calling out his apparent insufferability only further binds this notion that Matty IS today’s version of a ‘rockstar’. Almost as if we forget why the advice ‘never meet your heroes’ exists, perhaps being slightly pretentious and insufferable just comes with the job title. Which star throughout time can we truly say never once had this attached to their persona? Certainly not Jim Morrison, nor Freddie Mercury, Mick Jagger and David Bowie, and lest we ever forget John Lennon comparing the Beatles popularity to that of modern christianity. Being a bit of a prick seems to become more excusable, the more talent you behold. 

But is this arrogance a bad thing? Or in this world of Iphones with cameras able to record every move, entire threads on reddit just waiting to pick apart the 6 second clip, and pretty much every other social media channel giving the ability to ‘cancel’ someone at the drop of a pin - have we just now been able to see up close the performances and attitudes that we weren’t able to in the past? In a world where you are socially scrutinized for everything you do and say, its refreshing to see someone in the public generally not give a fuck. He’s a PR nightmare every time he shows face to the public, or logs onto his social media accounts. 

He’s the guy you would never take home to mummy, as opposed to the other clean pop stars we have in the charts ( aka, Harry Squeaky clean Styles ). He is to Harry Styles what the Rolling Stones were to the Beatles. Dirty, unhinged, unable to predict their next move. 

We for one, welcome this new breed of rockstar and commend the 1975 for being trailblazers in this resurgence;  A resurgence of teenage girls with posters of stars up in their bedroom that their parents disapprove of. A resurgence of polarizing celebrities who, even if they are a bit of a dick, at the very least will never be boring just for the sake of ‘playing it safe’. A resurgence of rockstars for the modern world, in a time where we need it most. 

The 1975 ‘At their very best tour’ is one that shouldnt be missed, even if you cant get behind their pop-y sound, its worth it for the sheer showmanship alone. On a seemingly endless tour where you never know exactly what you are going to get, every show is like its very own lucky dip.