A SAD AND LONELY GUY?

THE SUNDAY TIMES - 2000 - Mark Edwards


He still writes despairing lyrics, but The The’s Matt Johnson is hardly a miserable man.

‘When my son grows up’ says Matt Johnson with a sigh, ‘he’ll view me the same way we would view an old music hall comedian.’ Johnson has brought his band The The back into the spotlight after a long gap (it’s eight years since his last album of original material) and he wonders if he fits in any more. ‘The era of the album artist is well and truly dead,’ he says. ‘I wish I had been born 20 years earlier.’

Johnson is a fine example of the ‘album artist’. For 20 years, the 38 year old has pursued his uncompromising musical vision – his lyrics paint a bleak, existentialist view of the world in which characters typically live sad, lonely lives. His take on life was pretty well summed up by a line from his second album, Soul Mining: ‘I’m just a symptom of the moral decay that’s gnawing at the heart of the country.’ Not exactly the stuff of which a steady succession of hit singles is made.

During that eight-year gap, East End born Johnson moved to New York’s Chinatown to work on a new album ‘Gun Sluts’. ‘It was a break with convention for me,’ Johnson explains, ‘in that there were no song structures, not many lyrics, some of the tracks were 16 minutes long. Some people from Sony heard it and weren’t too happy. Until then I’d had a fantastic relationship with Sony, but they said, ‘Look mate, the industry’s changed, you’ve gone too far, this is the era of boy bands and dance music and you’ve got to get with the programme.’

Johnson put Gun Sluts on hold and began work on an album of songs. It’s called ‘NakedSelf’ and it’s excellent. But Sony wanted hit singles and they didn’t hear any, so Johnson left Sony for Nothing, which is part of Interscope, which is part of Polygram which is part of Seagram.

The fact that he is now working for a multinational drinks conglomerate has left Johnson puzzled too. In London recently for a warm up to his forthcoming tour, he walked up to the microphone and asked: ‘So what about all these mergers then ?’

I won’t pretend that a reasoned dialogue ensued between performer and audience, but Johnson had a point to make and he was determined to make it. ‘As our attempt to help Seagram to afford the Polygram merger, we’ve really stripped back our light show’, he said after the next song, his voice heavy with sarcasm (the stage appeared to be lit by about three household bulbs).

NakedSelf (which will be released next month) is worth paying for. Early in his career, Johnson was a pioneer in using drum machines and samplers, but for this album he has returned to the classic rock band line up: two guitars, bass and drums. ‘It seems quite antiquated, but there’s also a magical thing about a four-piece. It’s like a magical circle – there’s something about that line-up that’s special.’

The magical circle creates a rich stew of sound, dominated by seemingly endless echoes from the guitars of Johnson and former Iggy Pop sideman, Eric Schermerhorn. As ever, Johnson provides desperately sad lyrics wrapped lovingly in beautiful melody lines and delivered with a voice that communicates straight to the gut. In person, however Johnson seems far from sad.

‘I’m a happy person generally,’ he confesses, ‘but it doesn’t come over in my music. The problem is that I have been pigeonholed, probably through my own fault, as being completely without humour. It’s like the paradox of comedians you would presume to be humorous and they are literally the most despairing people you’ll ever meet. The people that write dark songs are actually more fun that you would imagine.

‘I do find it hard to write about for instance, being at the birth of my son, which was the happiest, most profound moment of my life. But to but to put it in a song would seem almost glib, almost like I was exploiting those feelings. That’s not to say that those feelings didn’t percolate down into the melodies on the album, but it’s hard for me; it’s one of the limitations of my song writing. I think that joy and happiness are the most fantastic emotions; if I can get them across, I’d like to. Probably one of my regrets over my career is that I wish I had expressed the more positive side of my personality.’

Johnson’s best songs do convey a positive side, perhaps most obviously in the uplifting melodies of such songs as ‘This Is The Day’ and ‘Uncertain Smile’ (which featured a career-best piano solo by Jools Holland). If you don’t remember them you’ll have a chance to refresh your memory later this year, when Sony releases not one but two albums compiling all the singles released by Johnson – the artist they dropped because he didn’t write hits.

That’s one thing about big Record Companies, then: they have no sense of irony.




TRUE BLUES

Many of rock’s greatest writers hold – or held – a bleak world view, their creative peaks coinciding with their personal lows.
John Lennon
The world may prefer Imagine, but Plastic Ono Band stands as his finest artistic statement. Beginning with the harrowing Mother and encompassing the emptiness of Working Class Hero and the loneliness of Isolation, Lennon sees no salvation in organised religion (‘God is a concept by which we measure our pain’).
Lou Reed
From Candy Says (‘I’ve come to hate my body and all it requires in this world’) to Caroline Says (‘You can hit me all you want to, but I don’t love you any more’). Reed wrote about a world most of us prefer to ignore. In recent years, he has given up some of his grimness.
Ian Curtis
The Joy Division singer looked set to be the most important songwriter of the 1980s; then his lyrical obsessions (‘Existence, will what does it matter? The past is now my future, the present is well out of hand’) were revealed to be all too real when he killed himself before the release of the band’s second album.
Morrissey
Chronic shyness gave Morrissey his subject matter, and his view of life resonated with a generation. ‘Heaven knows I’m miserable now’ was his catch phrase.
Kurt Cobain
The screamed chorus (‘Go away’) of Scentless Apprentice summed up a man whose suicide note explained that even the good things in life ‘terrify me to a point where I can barely function’