ASKING THE SAME OLD QUESTIONS

JOHN STAFFORD - X-PRESS - 1987


Get a chance to talk to Matt Johnson, the man behind The The, and any plans to get it over with quickly by asking ten standard interview questions quickly fall aside.

For a start, asking any questions at all is a little tricky while one is still puffing hard after a late arrival caused by a bus strike, consequently clogged roads and swollen car parks, and a thousand metre dash from illegally abandoned vehicle to hotel lobby. An appropriate start in a way, though, given Johnson’s predeliction for lyrics about the state of western decay.

Second up, no questions until the drinks problem is resolved.

‘Are you sure this is a full measure of vodka?’ he asks the steward, ‘I can’t taste it much. Can you put in three in one glass next time? Thank you’

Johnson is definitely a vodka man. I’m not, but I accept a measure anyway, mixed with orange juice. It is 10.30am. Breakfast.

‘I wish someone would ask me a question I’ve never heard before,’ he says, more in a tone of resignation than complaint.

‘Everything I say has been said already. You might as well make up your own interview from what I’ve said before.

‘Six months of talking about yourself is not good for you.’

He talks, nevertheless. He may be single-minded, contradictory, unpredictable, aggressively working class, opposed to the cult of personality and so on, but he knows his business. ‘Infected’’ is his third album under the The The tag, and, together with the ambitious eight song video which accompanied it, cost him, or his record company CBS, around six hundred thousand dollars to make.

Let’s face it, it’s worth promoting. ‘Infected’ is an excellent album, chocabloc with great ass-wriggling tunes standing in pleasant and effective contrast to the lucid pessimism and despondency of the lyrics.

That pessimism, perhaps the core of his work, pervades his conversation. He is not a sullen man, sometimes he’s as chirpy as an Covent Garden barrow boy, but there’s a certain darkness to everything he says.

‘Music awards? They’re a pile of shit. They’re all based on commercialism.

‘Those ones in LA: they’re all sycophantic and meaningless, just cold and calculated commercialism.’

Does one detect a touch of cynicism here?

‘I suppose you do get cynical. It’s part of the corruption process. You go corrupt, get cancer and die.

It was a joke, but one suspects one’s not too far away from Johnson’s terrible vision.

One thing Matt Johnson is not, however, is a rigid idealist. He paints musical pictures, rather than gives lectures. He accepts his own fallibility, and his process of change.

‘I think you need a set of moral codes. If you don’t stick to them, then you get screwed up and feel guilty and bad. You end up experiencing a lot of inner turbulence.

‘But I don’t see as a 16 year old how you can keep the same set of moral codes when you’re 25.’

At 16, Johnson was a teaboy in a Soho recording studio. He had started his first band five years before. It was called Roadstar. He began The The in 1979, as a live outfit. He also had a studio group, The Gadgets.

These days, The Gadgets have gone, and it is The The that exsists in the studio. Johnson hasn’t played live in four years. As The The, he couldn’t. It took 62 musicians and the best part of three years to make ‘Infected’.

He is planning to do an on stage solo version of ‘Heartland’ soon, at a benefit concert headlined by Billy Brag. Live performance, however, is a touchy subject.

‘I gave up playing gigs four years ago. I was playing gigs when most of my contemporaries were in nappies.

‘I played gigs when I was bloody eleven years old.

‘I’ve been offered $30.000 to play live, and I’ve said no.

‘There is this notion that you haven’t fully consummated your relationship with your audience till you’ve played live. I’ve never heard that so often except in Australia.

One can see his point, but there is perhaps something a little ironic about a man such as Johnson, dedicated anti-Thatcherite, man of the people, being unable to perform in public. After all, if it wasn’t for the capitalists so beloved of Thatcher and Regan, the businessmen who run the record companies, who invest large amounts of cash into musicians. The The in its present form could not exist. It is a fragile, volatile symbiosis.

Johnson, however, observes and reports on contemporary Britain more than he preach to its inhabitants. He doesn’t hurl torches: he simply writes about what he sees.

‘They are encouraged to consign responsibility for their lives to either the confessional or the ballot box.

‘The lower people’s expectations of themselves, the more harmonious – but falsely harmonious – a community is.’

Which leads to the other peculiar contradiction about Johnson. He hasn’t consigned responsibility for his life to anything. He is an individual, and individualist, with the sort of get-up-and-go entrepreneurial drive to gladden the heart of any free enterprise freak. He is a socialist in the style of Norman Tebbit.

There is the vexing question, too, of how his moral codes might cope with his future. ‘Infected’ by and large, has been a very successful album. It has won much critical acclaim, and, despite having singles and videos banned at times, has sold in reasonably large numbers around the world.

It is not inconceivable that the next album, whenever it comes, might go through the roof it that happens. Johnson could find himself loaded down with oodles of money, large tax bill, and a certain sympathy for Thatcher’s supporters.

‘True, but I think one must always reserve the right to be a human and a hypocrite.

‘Actually, last year I did make quite a bit of money so it would have been in my interest for Thatcher to be in power – for tax reasons.

‘But I’d rather live in a more socially harmonious community, with less money.’

Socially harmonious Britain is not, but one feels Johnson will be there for sometime yet, documenting its deterioration. His prognosis for the mother land is not optimistic, but he does have a plan, a pointer towards the much discussed economic recovery.

‘I think the United Kingdom will be a third world country within twenty years. The future lies around here, in the South Pacific and Australia.

‘I think England should go back to happier times. They should bring back little red phone boxes, pound notes, old policeman’s hats and so on. Then everybody, tourists, can pay money to come over and watch us, just like a little Disneyland.’