Pop phenomenon The 1975: "I'm a fucking artist, I ask questions"

Matthew Healy has moved. He now lives in the north of London, in one of those neighborhoods where the streets meander in winding arches over hills. Where the houses are not in line, as in the British suburbs, but emphasize architectural extravaganza. Healy's home is a stern, windowless wooden box behind an equally austere wooden fence.

Behind him everything is concrete. Concrete walls. Concrete floor. The courtyard? Gray gravel. The tree, which stands between the stones, throws off its colorful leaves as if to take care of the building materials. Healys dining room has a rough wooden table and two chairs.

4.3 million copies sold Healys Band The 1975 of the two albums released so far. Both records reached top positions in the charts worldwide. There are also about a million concert tickets sold. The 1975 is one of the most successful pop bands of the hour.

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Now album number three, it is titled "A Letter Inquiry Into Online Relationships". Healy and his colleagues George Daniel (drums), Adam Hann (electric guitar) and Ross MacDonald (bass) take a walk through all sorts of genres. In some songs you can still see in the background the emo-rock, which trained the band in the early nineties. In addition, there are also very harsh-looking autotune exercises, boy band pop, R & B sketches, acoustic ballads and spoken by a robot spoken word interlude.

"Like context in a modern debate I took it out", Healy sings once, and that explains the album pretty well. It happens a lot, and you do not always realize why. Some of it looks very interesting, others very boring. "A The 1975 record is like a magpie, a magpie collects glass, diamonds, scraps of plastic wrap - all she cares about is that everything shines," says Healy.

The internet, our heroin

But anyone who sits in the expensive emptiness of his dining room with the 29-year-old soon realizes that the glittering of the surfaces is not so important to Healy. He is concerned with the big picture. Around us and those who make us who we are: Silicon Valley with its decision makers. To Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia. To the "read" hook behind iMessages, social fears when sharing a profile picture. To filter bubbles, to good, to evil, to curating your own image.

At a breathtaking pace, Healy dictates his point of view to all these things, he fires his theses like a ball machine tennis balls, some seems obscure, most of the enlightening. "If someone told us 15 years ago that all our communications would soon be over the network, we would have found it a little bit unsettling, right?" He asks. After a pause, he adds, "I was addicted to heroin, and I can assure you one thing: the behavior we have when it comes to the Internet and everything related to it is that of a heroin addict."

Nevertheless, he makes the aesthetics of the net his own. Recently The 1975 released a video for the song "Love It If We Made It". It shows film clips and photographs, especially those that can be understood as bad or sad: the refugee boy Alan Kurdi, drowned in 2015, a military cemetery, the rapper Lil Peep, who died in 2017 from an overdose. What should that be? Healy laughs for a moment.

"I have no answers, it's not my job, I'm a fucking artist, I'm asking questions!" This can be called understatement or coquetry, because on the major issues of the time, migration policy, climate change, right-wing populism, Healy regularly and gladly takes a stand.

He overcame his heroin addiction last year. He talks about it, but now no longer as a ball machine, but hesitantly. Starts sentences, then pulls them back, just as you can make too much toothpaste disappear into the tube again. What he leaves in the room is a terse "I hate heroin, I hate the Pete Doherty shit, the William S Burroughs shit, but that's part of my story."

Mark Knopfler is sitting in the living room

Later he adds: "There is no room for fuck-ups." This can be related to his own past, but also to Rock'n'Roll itself. The Rockstar model, says Healy, is outdated, if only because of the misogyny that so often accompanies. Musically anyway. "I love the shape, the shilouette, a lead singer, guitars, four guys, that's great, I just reject all that piecework shit, let's look like a rock band - but sound like Whitney Houston!"

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Healy itself sounds reflected despite all the pose. It seems as if he is constantly negotiating with himself, seeking a balance between private person and frontman. He wants to understand his role. That may be because he grew up in a celebrity household; his parents are well-known actors in the UK, Denise Welch and Tim Healy. Sometimes Mark Knopfler came home in Newcastle and picked up the guitar, occasionally Brian Johnson from AC / DC.

15 years later he is the singer of one of the biggest bands in the world. Sometimes, he says, he gets SMS from Mick Jagger. The Rolling Stones took The 1975 on tour even before the release of their debut. "The audience found us terrible," says Healy. "People did not believe us, which I can not blame them for, but I saw that Mick was standing on the edge of the stage and dancing, so I looked into the audience and thought: I support the Stones here with my band not, from there it worked. "

The next album of his band is due to be released in the spring. Matthew Healy still has a lot to say.