In January, the thirty-four-year-old British rock star Matty Healy woke up on a couch in his house, except it was not his house, it was a stage set at the O2 Arena, in London, and twenty thousand people were there with him, screaming. His band, the 1975, stood in position among wood-panelled walls and framed family photos, and Healy—skinny, in a close-cut suit and a tie, black curls slicked back behind his ears—rose and dramatically blinked at the lights, took a swig from a flask, and sat down at a piano. Then he lit a cigarette and began to play the jittery riff that opens the band’s latest album, “Being Funny in a Foreign Language.” “You’re making an aesthetic out of not doing well / And mining all the bits of you you think you can sell,” he sang, taking long pulls from a bottle of red wine as the audience roared.
He sang the song’s refrain: “I’m sorry if you’re living and you’re seventeen.” When Healy and his three bandmates were that age—they have been a band, and best friends, for twenty years—they were mostly concerned with shows, records, parties, and girls, and they believed earnestly in the power of art to free themselves and change the world. Now, as Healy sees things, the average seventeen-year-old is worried about melting ice caps, or the failures of capitalism, or how easy it is to say the wrong thing. The future holds little imagined promise, and, to cope, teens are indulging in reactionary conservatism or the oppression Olympics, the world and their identities distorted by social media.
Healy is something of a test case for the digital panopticon and its reaction cycles. Though he has always run his mouth, he long seemed dedicated to saying the right thing, eventually, and getting praised for it. He sometimes ceded his spotlight to the voices of women. The band’s last album, “Notes on a Conditional Form,” from 2020, opens with a monologue about the climate crisis delivered by Greta Thunberg. When the 1975 won the British equivalent of a Grammy, Healy, in an acceptance speech, read a snippet of an essay by the writer Laura Snapes about misogyny in music. Fans asked him to take a stand on other things—Israel and Palestine, police abolition—but his politics, by his own estimation, are not particularly radical, and he was not the voice for activism that some wanted him to be. In May, 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, he tweeted, “If you truly believe that ‘all lives matter’ you need to stop facilitating the end of black ones,” and appended a link to the 1975’s most anthemic song, “Love It If We Made It,” which begins, “We’re fucking in a car, shooting heroin / Saying controversial things just for the hell of it / Selling melanin then suffocate the black man / Start with misdemeanors and we’ll make a business out of them.” It was, to Healy, the clearest way to articulate his thoughts about racial injustice and police brutality, but people perceived it as a callous attempt to promote the band.
He deactivated his Twitter account and began the slow heel turn that has brought him to his current persona: a post-woke rock star, switching unpredictably between tenderness and trollishness. He stayed on Instagram, where he constantly made fun of both himself and the fans who seemed obsessed with his morality. He likened his music to a YouTube video titled “Sound Effect—Grown Man Crying Like a Little Baby.” When a fan messaged him to ask why he followed the Kenosha shooter Kyle Rittenhouse and the self-declared misogynist Andrew Tate on the platform, he posted the message, along with a reply: “We are starting a band.” On tour, he began kissing fans onstage, and these moments kept going viral—he sucked a girl’s thumb, he kissed a boy, he kissed Ross MacDonald, the band’s bassist. In the middle of one show, he lay back on a couch onstage as a tattoo artist inked the words “iM a MaN” on his torso. He inspired articles about the resurgence of the sleazeball and the appeal of the sensitive dirtbag. He sang like a louche Elvis and played a lipstick-red guitar.
“If you do a show that’s about the duality of your life, is it still Method acting?” he asked between songs at the O2. The house lights came on, and white-coated technicians touched up the band members’ clothes and faces. A tech slammed a clapboard, and they resumed their positions, concluding the meta intrusion.
The band resumed playing against the house-in-the-suburbs backdrop; the crowd sang along blissfully to a bouncy song about a school shooting. At the halfway point, there was a theatrical interlude, in which Healy, alone on the stage, played the role of one of the confused young men he’d been singing about. He unbuttoned his shirt and mimed masturbation; he desperately embraced a stage tech. While TVs blared footage of Tory politicians, he pretended to make out with himself, hands travelling up and down his back. I’d seen the same show at Madison Square Garden a few months before, and I’d cringed at this part, initially. Then Healy knelt in front of a raw steak, took an enormous bite, did a couple of dozen pushups, and squeezed his entire body through a small screenless television. His willingness to be embarrassing and abrasive edged into a kind of generosity, and a vulnerability. This is the heart of his appeal.
A few minutes later, the crowd went nuclear, but not for him: Taylor Swift, in a mirrored minidress, had walked onstage, performing “Anti-Hero,” from her most recent album. “Did you hear my covert narcissism I disguise as altruism / Like some kind of congressman,” she sang. Swift has been a fan of the band since at least 2014, when she was photographed wearing a 1975 T-shirt. Rumors circulated, at the time, that she and Healy were dating. (Healy, hounded for months to comment, said that having “Taylor Swift’s boyfriend” as one’s public identity would be an “emasculating thing.”) “Anti-Hero” is self-deprecating and self-consciously Zeitgeist-y, with convoluted lyrics wrapped so tightly around the melody that they somehow seem tossed off—in other words, it’s a little like a song by the 1975. She then performed “The City,” a song from the band’s first album. Girls around me were sobbing, as if they’d just gone blind looking at a solar eclipse.
“It’s the last rock-and-roll show in town,” Healy said after Swift had left and the band had returned for the second half, a set of hits culled from their first four records. After two decades together, the 1975 is as tight and instinctive as a legacy act. Healy’s shape-shifting voice—he croons and wails and screams and murmurs, shading his delivery with a variety of personae—laces together the band’s encyclopedic set of pop references: the soaring urgency of Peter Gabriel, the muscular propulsion of Bruce Springsteen, the addled funk of Talking Heads. Against the set dressing, Healy looked like a drunk boy dancing in his living room, ripping cigarettes and blowing kisses.
By 4 p.m. the next day, the band was back at the O2, sound-checking without him. The word backstage was that Swift had stayed until 3:30 a.m. the night before, singing 1975 songs with the band’s bookkeeper after Healy had gone home. He arrived late, wearing a hoodie pulled tight around his face, like a “South Park” character. He started to light a cigarette, then saw that a child—MacDonald’s niece—was lounging on the couch onstage, and put the cigarette away, laughing at himself. Healy led the band through a revised version of the interlude with the technicians, in which he’d tell the audience that nothing in the show was real. “For example, if I were to say stop,” he said, rehearsing the bit—and everyone onstage froze, until he said, “Go.” Someone suggested a tweak. “Yeah, but that’s not conceptual,” he replied.
Afterward, he walked onto the empty floor of the arena, and I asked him about Swift’s cameo. “It was really based of Taylor to do the show,” he said, seeming a bit awed that it had happened. A fake set list was circulating on Twitter showing Harry Styles as the guest for that night’s performance. In the British press, Healy is sometimes positioned as Styles’s Wario, his evil twin. Their bands became popular around the same time; both men are straight-leaning but, like Mick Jagger and David Bowie before them, enjoy revelling in sexual ambiguity. Healy said the band had asked Styles to come. “He gave us a hard no,” he added, laughing. “He’s afraid that he would have to say something.” Healy found it annoying that, at a certain level of fame, celebrities can cultivate liberal auras while avoiding the risk of taking real political stands. (Swift, I thought, but didn’t say, seemed to be excepted from his critique.)
He headed to the greenroom, where a mellow family vibe prevailed. MacDonald had been joined there by his niece; George Daniel, the drummer, was sitting with his girlfriend, the pop star Charli XCX. It has been alleged online that Healy is actually, secretly, five feet five inches tall; in truth, he looks short onstage only because Daniel and MacDonald are both six-four. (Healy says he’s five-eleven; I’d guess five-ten.) Adam Hann, the guitarist, was also backstage, with his wife, Carly. The two have a one-year-old son. They had woken up at home just a few hours after Swift had left the O2.
Healy had skipped his make-out routine during the previous night’s show. “I’m not kissing anybody in front of Taylor Swift, have some respect,” he’d said. On night two, the fans reached for him with grasping fingers and tormented faces, a tangled mass of limbs, like a scene out of Hieronymus Bosch. Healy kissed one, then his face was grabbed by two others. He did his pushups and crawled through the TV. He told the crowd that Swift wasn’t coming and that, instead, they could expect five extra minutes of his thoughts on industrial action (the night before, he’d given a shout-out to striking railway workers). He also talked about how the right was better than the left at offering anxious young men a path for their floundering masculinity. “All I can tell is that I’m a bloke, I’m confused, and I’m definitely on the left”—a roar of approval cut him off. “Shut up,” he said, dismissing the reflexive praise.
The next day in London, it was mild and drizzly. I met Healy at a private club, a Soho House spinoff in Notting Hill known as the Electric. Young mothers with blond blowouts fed their children scrambled eggs amid old-fashioned wallpaper and framed black-and-white prints. Healy was carefully dressed: a pressed white shirt, perfectly shined shoes. He ordered orange juice and a steak.
“Steak?” I asked. “Again?”
Healy explained that he was from “circus stock” and needed to eat a lot of protein to keep muscle on. “My grandparents are from the circus—like, Irish travelling circus on both sides. I come from this really sinewy line of contortionists.”
There are many performers in Healy’s family. His mother’s father, Vin Welch, was a successful drag queen, and both his parents are actors. Tim Healy, his father, was a welder before he joined a theatre company that staged productions in community halls. He met Denise Welch, who’d been onstage since her teens, at an audition in Newcastle. Matty was born in 1989, the year after they were married. His parents got TV work and became known as working-class heroes; Healy got used to holding their hands, patiently, as strangers waylaid them on the street. He found it confusing to grow up with parents who pretended to be other people for a living—he’d go to meet his mom on set and find that it was suddenly the eighteen-fifties and she was an old woman. One night, in a dark theatre, he watched his father take a punch under the stage lights, and went into a panicked spiral: his dad was getting hurt in front of everyone, but he couldn’t do or even say anything about it.
The year he turned eight, his mother was cast on the soap opera “Coronation Street,” which has been on the air in the U.K. since 1960 and which, in the nineties, regularly attracted nearly twenty million viewers. Welch has said that she began drinking heavily to deal with the pressures of the role; her alcoholism, and her marriage, became popular subjects of tabloid scrutiny. (She and Healy’s father divorced in 2012; Welch recently celebrated eleven years of sobriety.) Healy told me, “I’d be a child, and something would happen in my real life, and then I’d see that thing on a newspaper, and I’d think, That’s not what happened, but that’s my mum saying a version of what happened, and I know Mum’s at home and she’s O.K.” He came to understand that a person’s life was “a balance between what is real, what is said, what happens, what people believe, what people project, and what is true.”
“The Truman Show,” in which Jim Carrey plays the unwitting, lifelong star of an always-on reality series, came out when Healy was nine, and he developed an intrusive fear that the movie was, in some way, about his own life. His parents were actors—what if everything was a loveless farce? On a vacation in Spain, in a taxi, his dad teased him about this ongoing neurosis, and Denise turned around from the front seat and told Tim to stop it. “She meant, Don’t wind him up, he’s obviously freaking out about this,” Healy explained. “But I read that as one actor saying to another actor, ‘Hush, you’re going to give up the gig.’ ”
Newly flush with TV money, the Healys moved to Wilmslow, a posh Manchester suburb—“basically three square miles where Manchester United players live,” Healy said—and he was sent to an all-boys private school. “Because I hadn’t come from that culture, I was very aware of this hypermasculinity, and this desire for domination,” he told me. He started a fight club in a locker room, charging fifty pence for admission and splitting the money with the fighters. He was expelled and returned to the local public schools, where he met Daniel, MacDonald, and Hann. They were all thirteen, they hung out in the music wing, and they formed an emo band that cycled through a series of emo names: Me and You Versus Them, Forever Drawing Six, the Slowdown, Drive Like I Do. They went through puberty as a unit and developed their identities symbiotically. One day, they all did MDMA for the first time, lying on the floor in the Healys’ house, listening to music and feeling as if they had never truly heard it before.
Healy, an autodidact, didn’t go to college; he streamed lectures on YouTube. The three others went to university in Manchester, to keep the band together. All four worked as delivery drivers at a Chinese restaurant. They played gigs and recorded songs but attracted no professional interest: their sound bounced around among pop genres, and they didn’t fit into an indie scene dominated by bands such as Arcade Fire and Grizzly Bear, which leaned artsy and baroque. The 1975 weren’t inheritors of Manchester’s hard-edged musical lineage, either. “We looked like effeminate Catholic schoolboys,” Healy said. “It wasn’t exactly Oasis.” A young music manager named Jamie Oborne heard some tracks they’d uploaded to YouTube and took them on as clients in 2007. All the big labels passed, so he founded a label of his own, Dirty Hit, in partnership with the band. Over bowls of pasta, the 1975 signed a deal.
Their first EP came out in 2012. Their breakout song was “Sex,” a shimmery anthem about grimy teen-age lust: in 2013, the influential BBC d.j. Zane Lowe declared it the hottest record in the world. They developed a small but intense following, primarily consisting of music-blog obsessives and teen-age girls. Their first album hit No. 1 in the U.K., as did every album that followed it, but they didn’t seem to have any casual listeners. “We’re the biggest band in the world that nobody’s ever heard of,” Healy often said.
After finishing lunch, Healy and I headed to the roof of the Electric. A ponytailed bartender with “love it if we made it” tattooed on his arm stopped Healy to praise the previous night’s show and to thank him for getting him tickets. (“Did I do that?” Healy wondered later. “Guess I must have.”) Healy’s stream of consciousness is constantly swirling; he is fervent and buzzing and unexpectedly solicitous. He was recently diagnosed with A.D.H.D. When I asked him if he was surprised, we both started laughing.
In 2014, amid the early rush of fame and steady touring, Healy began smoking heroin, the only substance he found that could pull him down from the stratosphere. It was a secret, for a while; then the band staged an intervention. Healy resisted: he was the star, and the rest of them would have to get on board. He woke up the next day feeling like a fool and told Daniel he would go to rehab. He spent seven weeks at a center in Barbados, then flew back to London and immediately used again. “And then I used a little bit longer,” he said, “and then I was just, like, Fuck, Matty, what are you doing? What you going to do if the guys find out?” He quit cold turkey in 2018. He’s not involved with a formal sobriety program—he often seems drunk by the end of the live show, though he described this as an act only partly rooted in reality. “A lot of people will know that, given my history, I can hack a bottle of red wine over two hours,” he said.
When I asked him what differentiated the 1975 from Matty Healy, solo pop act, he said, “It kind of is that.” At various points, he’s recorded music to use for a solo project, but so far it has all ended up going to the band. They depend on one another, he said. “We know when I’m addicted to smack, and we pick me up. George is dramatically depressed—we rally around him. One of us had a baby—so we had a baby, and when the baby is backstage, the greenroom is like a crèche. There’s a ‘Wizard of Oz’ element to us. One of us needs a heart, one of us needs a brain, one of us needs this other thing, and we’re all on the road together.”
A year or so ago, the band turned down the opportunity to open for Ed Sheeran. On the roof, as Healy smoked his millionth cigarette, I asked him what was so precious about the 1975 that it would fall apart if they took that slot. “If you’re someone’s favorite band, that takes a lot of real emotional investment,” he said, paraphrasing something that the producer Jack Antonoff had told him. “Let’s say that relationship is, analogously, us talking here. I’m your favorite band, and you are the audience. If at some point in our conversation I start going like this all the time”—he looked pointedly over my shoulder, toward the pastel buildings of Notting Hill—“and you know over there is money, fame, personal enjoyment, whatever it is, you’ll just go, ‘O.K., I’ll get another favorite band.’ ” Healy looked back at me closely. We had been talking for several hours, and I realized that the moment he looked over my shoulder was the first time he had broken eye contact.
Across their first four albums, the 1975 became more and more eclectic. They followed up their emo-inflected début with an eighties-style synth-pop record bearing the majestically corny title “I Like It When You Sleep, for You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware of It.” In a review for Pitchfork, Laura Snapes—whom Healy later quoted in his acceptance speech—wrote that “for every neatly zeitgeist-capturing couplet” there was a lyric that made Healy “sound like the trustafarian street poet that he already slightly resembles.” She described the album as “the X-rated cousin of Taylor Swift’s 1989.” Then came “A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships,” a maximalist statement record with bits of tropical house, a spoken-word track recited by Siri, and several immaculate pop singles. It got the best reviews of the band’s career. “Notes on a Conditional Form” arrived next. It veers from garage to industrial and ambient music with some dabbling in country. “We always used to say that our attention spans were so bad that we had to do a million things,” George Daniel told me. “But it was actually a product of insecurity, where we thought sounding like a band wasn’t good enough—we had to do an orchestral piece, we had to do this or that. We felt like we couldn’t do a short, coherent album.”
Drummers tend either to vibrate with manic energy or to radiate a profound stillness. Daniel falls into the latter category, to the point that, when we spoke on Zoom, I kept thinking his screen had frozen. He and Healy have always made the band’s music together: Healy writes most of the lyrics and many of the melodies, and Daniel, who studied music production in college, designs the sound. “In a way, Matty and George are opposites,” Antonoff told me. Healy is a “wonderful balloon, who loves to fly out there but also wants to be held,” he said; Daniel, then, is steady on the ground, hand tight around the string.
In 2021, though, they hit a wall. Healy had gone through a tough breakup with the musician FKA Twigs. Daniel, meanwhile, was dealing with depression. “We found it hard to get anything done musically, because we were both so acutely aware of the other person’s suffering,” he said. He described his dynamic with Healy as the kind you have with a romantic partner: “You love them more than anyone else in the world, and you cut them less slack than anyone else in the world.”
Then they brought in Antonoff, whose band, Bleachers, came up around the same time as the 1975, but who is better known for producing Swift, Lana Del Rey, Lorde, and seemingly every other big name in pop. The safest thing for the 1975 to do, Antonoff said, would be to venture further into the esoteric; the surprising and brave thing would be to make a really good, straightforward album, as simple and as complex as a perfect slice of pizza. The band, with Antonoff, set rules in the studio. Everyone would play everything together, in real time, as much as possible. Healy wouldn’t do any of the backing vocals, so that the album would be replicable live. Everyone would play analog instruments, and, ideally, ones they didn’t normally play.
“Being Funny in a Foreign Language” ended up an album in pursuit of love, rendered plainly. “Before, I always debased myself when I became sincere,” Healy told me. “I’d be sincere, and then I’d say, ‘Oh, I’m only joking,’ or ‘Oh, I pissed myself,’ or something else unglamorous to negate how much I just let you in.” At one point, in the studio, he was recording vocals for a track that became “I’m in Love with You,” and he kept trying to sneak a “not” into the chorus. Hann stopped him, and said, “Dude, five albums in, everyone knows you’re funny. So if you want to say ‘I’m in love with you’ then just do it. Say it. That’s where you’re at.” Healy told me, “All of the things that used to define my work, or the nihilistic part of one’s twenties—postmodernism, addiction, individualism—they’re all cool and sexy and appropriate at the time, but, for me now, are those the things I yearn for?” In his personal life, he had found himself wishing for consistency and reliability, “the things we get from a partner that we don’t get from the rest of the world.”
“I think Matty is a deeply sincere person, who can, at different points, be misunderstood because of how much he enjoys a bit,” Antonoff said. “If you don’t know him, if you don’t get him, because you’re not really tuned in to the work, you might assume a cynicism that is literally not there.” He mentioned the song “Part of the Band.” The lyrics are inflected with Healy’s persona games, his compulsion to comment on the politics of pop culture, and at least three references to ejaculation. Healy sings, “Am I ironically woke? The butt of my joke? / Or am I just some post-coke, average, skinny bloke / Calling his ego imagination?” And yet it’s a beautiful—and, somehow, even understated—song, set to a “Street Hassle”-style backdrop of lilting, bittersweet strings. “That to me is the most exciting part of him and his work,” Antonoff said. “That the façade of it can beg so many questions, but that the heart is still so obvious—that it’s this deep sincerity, and a longing for love, to love, to be loved.”
Still, Healy remains caught between the heartfelt and the arch. On the second night at the O2, after calling the right wing’s appeal to men “dangerous,” he seemed suddenly self-conscious about his righteous pose. “I also really don’t care that much, to be honest,” he said. On the roof of the Electric, he launched into a passionate rant about the banjo player Winston Marshall, who’d left the band Mumford & Sons after praising the alt-right Twitter figure Andy Ngo and prompting an online furor. Marshall, as Healy saw it, had been radicalized not so much by right-wing ideas as by the praise and attention he’d got from right-wing circles—this, Healy said, is the situation for all sorts of young men whose world views are getting distorted by online feedback loops. Then he said, again, that he didn’t really care that much.
“It seems like you do care,” I said. “Otherwise you wouldn’t keep bringing it up.”
“I do,” he admitted. “It’s a good point.”
Healy often laments that “we used to expect our artists to be cigarette-smoking bohemian outsiders, and now we expect them to be liberal academics.” He has also said that, although he doesn’t count his political views as particularly educated or authoritative, he knows that they stem from impulses toward empathy and freedom that are important.
“What do I mean when I say I don’t care?” he asked. “What is that apathy I speak of? It’s an exhaustion, maybe. The truth is, when I go home, this is not the shit I’m dealing with. I’m not dealing with the crisis of masculinity. I’m dealing with how my mum’s feeling, what Ross is going through. I’m trying to be in service to people.” He was no longer invested in the project of being publicly correct. “I’ve done my decade of trying to be that,” he said. “I’m more interested in actually being wrong, and people seeing that, and knowing what’s right because of it.”
Amonth later, Healy went on a podcast called “The Adam Friedland Show.” Friedland, whom Healy had befriended in the past couple of years, used to host the podcast “Cum Town,” a title that reflects the “Borat”-esque level of seriousness that he and his co-hosts generally brought to the table. Friedland is part of a downtown New York scene referred to as Dimes Square, which, during the pandemic, became widely known for an ostensibly transgressive rejection of liberal pieties and a reactionary brand of post-left politics particularly associated with another podcast, “Red Scare.” Healy has sometimes been spotted wearing a “Red Scare” hat; he told me that he became a fan in part because he was attracted to differences in opinion, and also to one of the hosts, whom he described as “really sexy.”
On “The Adam Friedland Show,” Healy and the hosts roamed more or less randomly around the cultural landscape, cracking jokes. One of the hosts asked if the rapper Ice Spice, who is of Nigerian and Dominican descent, was an Inuit Spice Girl, and the group then did crude approximations of an Inuit accent, veering from vaguely Chinese to quasi-Hawaiian. Later, he laughed as the hosts did impressions of hypothetical Japanese guards at German concentration camps. He joked about watching the brutal porn channel Ghetto Gaggers. After the episode went up, outraged headlines and furious tweets—“matty healy, how are you getting on stage every night and mocking toxic masculinity and then going on a podcast and undoing the whole thing by being wildly ignorant, misogynistic, homophobic, racist, everything else under the sun”—predictably ensued.
Healy had reached the level of fame that makes celebrities start speaking like politicians, even as he was still skinning his psyche for his performances. Aside from the podcast controversy, he was getting slammed for “doing a Nazi salute” onstage, a gesture he made, rather crucially, while singing a litany of horrors in “Love It If We Made It,” including a line that quotes Donald Trump’s praise of Kanye West. He didn’t apologize or comment on the uproar, but he did seem more outwardly subdued afterward. When the band came to New York to perform on “Saturday Night Live,” he played it straight, crooning in an unbuttoned tux. We met for lunch again, downtown, at Balthazar, a couple of days later. He was wearing another white shirt, but open to the chest this time, his tattoos showing.
I asked him about the podcast. He’d been doing so much promo, he told me, that he wanted to do something that felt more like simply talking with his friends. But, of course, he had done this all in public, on mike. Had he baited his fans on purpose? “A little bit,” he said. “But it doesn’t actually matter. 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.”
“Maybe it does,” I said.
“If it does,” he said, “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.”
The night before, he’d hung out with the indie filmmaker Caveh Zahedi, who has cannibalized his relationships for his art. (In his first film, Zahedi tries, unsuccessfully, to make his estranged father and brother take Ecstasy with him, on camera. His most famous movie is an autobiographical comedy called “I Am a Sex Addict.”) Not long before our lunch, Healy, on Instagram, had uploaded a short film he’d made, in which he plays his “real” self, first watching porn in a hotel room, then practicing being perfectly natural and lovely with selfie-requesting fans. “You wanna take it or you want me to take it?” Healy asks, before tilting his head to rest on the head of an imaginary girl. Then we see him walking around New York, and watch actual fans stop him and ask for selfies. “You wanna take it or you want me to take it?” he asks. Healy said that he admires Zahedi, but that he’s wary of heading further in that direction.
“Like, I think the whole exaggeration of my shit throughout the past year and a half, maybe it proves there’s something oppositional happening, that I’m getting something out of my system,” he told me. “Because the truth is, I’m really quite anxious. We’re all anxious, but at the moment I’m really anxious.” It had something to do, he suggested, with his desire to be stoic, because stoic means masculine. “And this doesn’t come from having an oppressive father who doesn’t communicate,” he added. His dad, he said, was open and soft, the one who passed on his belief in art as a vessel for radical truth. His mom was the “gobby” one—mouthy and intense. She’s still on TV every day, on a talk show called “Loose Women,” a rough analogue of “The View.” She also has a podcast called “Denise Welch’s Juicy Crack.” (“Crack” is U.K. slang for gossip. At Balthazar, Healy, with weary affection, deadpanned a podcast tagline: “Come on Denise’s juicy crack!”)
Healy touched his “iM a MaN” tattoo, on his rib cage. “This whole thing, it comes from something real,” he said. “I’m always sort of”—he mimed shadowboxing, nervously pumping himself up. “And this is all just a mental thing to be doing.”
We finished lunch, then talked for a while longer outside, under an awning, as Healy smoked a cigarette. “I’m not trying to make myself famous,” he said. “I want to be known for what I do. But now fame is about being known for who you are. And people are complicated.” Girls were camping out on the sidewalk beside his hotel, stalking him all over the city. “If people are going to make me this famous, I’m going to make people work for it,” he said.
The band was headed to South America, then to Australia. There, in April, he announced that he was quitting social media altogether—another turn. The 1975 was an “eras band,” he said, and “the era of me being a fucking asshole is gonna come to an end . . . I’ve had enough.” It sounded sincere, but the wording was curious; fans started to speculate that he was alluding to Taylor Swift, who had recently begun her Eras Tour, and that he was cleaning up his act in preparation for an announcement that they were dating. Was this a performance, or an existential shift? What would be the difference?
In May, tabloids reported that Healy and Swift were an item. Both of them, onstage during their respective tours, seemed to conspicuously mouth the words “This is about you, you know who you are, I love you.” Healy flew from the Asia leg of his tour, in the Philippines, to attend Swift’s show in Nashville. There was chatter, online, that it was a joke, or a publicity stunt, or perhaps simply two ardent self-chroniclers gathering material about intertwined egos for devastating pop albums to come. Neither of their representatives would comment on the record, but I kept getting texts from people who knew them, and who insisted: this time, it’s real. ♦
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