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As if he isn’t busy enough with The 1975 and their label Dirty Hit, Matty Healy has launched a new podcast, ‘In Conversation’, for which he gets to go full fanboy and enjoy socially distanced chats with his heroes. Co-produced with style magazine The Face, the series sees the frontman kick with with the likes of Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie, master-producer Brian Eno, Fleetwood Mac’s Stevie Nicks, Bright Eyes‘ Conor Oberst, composer Steve Reich and Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon. Here’s what we learned from the meetings of the minds.
Matty is already writing new much for The 1975
For a while The 1975’s upcoming ‘Notes On A Conditional Form’ album was going to be their last, but it turns out that definitely isn’t the case. Answering Bobby Gillespie’s question about making new music in Lockdown, Matty explained, “I wasn’t going to be, because I just was about to tour, but now I’m not. So, I feel like I’ve got a new word to adapt to. I’m kind of just working towards that. I feel so lucky and quite privileged to even make music. The fact that I can do it now, it feels like if I didn’t I almost wouldn’t be doing my part, taking it for granted. People get a lot of pleasure from music.”
And it’s probably going to be political
After Brian Eno told him, “If I could, I would write political songs now,” Matty responded, “These times, they need to be documented. I wasn’t even thinking about a next record, but we’ve kind of all been thrown into this new situation, so I think that we have started on a new record and it is a very outward lying thing.”
Both Brian Eno and Stevie Nicks want to be involved
After talking about that new record, Matty suggested to Eno that “if we do manage to physically be able to see each other again, maybe you’ll come down and help me with it.” Brian seemed keen (or was being polite), replying, “Oh, that would be wonderful. I’d love that.” Stevie Nicks is much more forward about things: “I just would really love to meet you and your band in person – I think that we should make some music at some point together, definitely.”
Matty once got told to shut up by seminal punk bank Jawbreaker
“Me and Chris from Dashboard Confessional went down to the Jawbreaker documentary premiere,” he said during his back-and-forth with influential emo musician Mike Kinsella (who’s played with the likes of American Football). “I ended up trying to leave because I was having an argument with my girlfriend or something. Then I got told to sit down by the band, and shut up.”
He’s also making new Drive Like I Do Music and wants Kinsella to be involved
“Drive Like I Do was the band that we were before The 1975,” he explained. “After The 1975 happened, people kind of discovered all of our demos. Online, that band very much exists now as its own thing, so I’ve started making some new stuff almost as that band. Maybe that would be a fun thing to play around with, me and you.”
It turns out Stevie Nicks is a huge fan of The 1975
While on the road with Fleetwood Mac over the past few years, Stevie would get to the venue at around 5 and head to her dressing room to get ready. Obviously she gets to decide what music to put on, and it was always The 1975’s first two albums. “I listened to these two records to the point where not only did I just love it, but it was comfort,” she said. “Your music was comfort. Every once in a while I would try to put on something else, and we’d all look around like, ‘What’s wrong with this picture?’ Oh – it’s the music. It’s not The 1975. Well, screw that – put them on. And so every day, that was about two-and-a-half hours, and never, ever once got tired of it.”
Brian Eno wishes he’d written ‘Love It If We Made It’
After Matty mentioned that he pays “attention to the things that make you envious,” Brian explained: “I’m very much guided by that. I felt that way about. Love It If We Made It. I’ve been trying for years. I’ve been thinking, could anyone ever write a good political song? It’s very thin ice to tread on that. So often it ends up being kind of hectoring or naive or something like that.“
The upcoming new Bright Eyes album is about loss
“Loss is a pretty big theme in the new songs,” Conor Oberst revealed. “I’ve lost friends and I’ve lost people over the years but I only had two brothers, so when you lose one of your brothers, it’s just a life-changing event where this thing that had always been a foundation of your life is gone. Trying to pick up the pieces and move on from that, it’s a hard thing.”
The 1975 make pop music because it’s the only way they could be punk
“Heavy music from the ’70s up to the noughties had kind of been done as an alternative statement,” he told Stevie Nicks. “I thought, ‘What’s a really alternative statement? It’s something that sounds like nothing else, something that’s subversive’. There hadn’t been a record that sounded like [The 1975 song] ‘Chocolate’ in a long time”
He picked up the thread again with Bobby Gillespie: “By the time that we wanted to make a difference or do something original, being heavy was off the table. I see a lot of bands and they’ll dress up in the punk clothes and they’ll make the punk music and they’ll do the thing, but you might as well dress up as characters from Back To The Future and re-enact a scene. It’s not real.”
Matty thinks – of course – that now is the time for big statements
“In a fucking hundred years’ time, you can still find records in the rubble,” Matty said during his chat with Kim Gordon. “You’re not gonna find a YouTube channel in the rubble; you’re not gonna find a tweet in the rubble. The people that really inspire me at the moment are just the people that have always inspired me, and the people with purpose. We’re all watching each other or we’re all making sure that everyone’s as ‘woke’ as we want them to be. Everyone’s almost scared of making a statement, so I think that the people that do shine super-bright now.”
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