BROTHERS OF INFECTION

G.D. Henderson - CUT Magazine - 1987.

‘I hope that everyone who listens to INFECTED appreciates it, because it has cost me two years of my life killing myself doing it. And it put so much pressure on my personal life that she left me after five years.’

The The is Matt Johnson’s creation. Conceived in 1979, it’s a collaboration of his ideas and the contributions of other artists, musical or otherwise. To date it has produced three acclaimed albums, almost a dozen singles, videos, a book, and recently a well deserved and wider acclaim.

Matt’s work is an unparalleled and often startling look at the problems of living in the 1980s. It has been suitably and provocatively complimented by the cover designs from his brother, Andy Dog, now recognised for his own unique and controversial art.

Matt Johnson is The The, to all intents and purposes a name flexible enough to encompass a host of musical and visual collaborators, but it’s Matt Johnson’s baby. It’s his songs recorded on the album Infected – around which all other work pivots, specifically the Infected film and Infected 1979-1987, the book of paintings, drawing, lyrics and sheet music.

Catching up with him was unsurprisingly difficult, the momentum of all the infection having catapulted him around the world twice in the last year. That work paid off – huge viewing figures for the video, rave reviews for the album (get this – ‘a beautifully piercing pleasure’ – Sounds, ‘Brilliance’ – What Hi-Fi) – and it’s lost him his girlfriend. So, whether ironically or not dressed entirely in black when I met him, he was not the happiest of men.

‘I hope that everyone who listens to Infected appreciates it, because that’s what it has cost me. Two years of my life killing myself doing it, and it put so much pressure on my personal life that she left me, after five years.’

Qualifying that with an admission of his tendency towards a ‘lying, cheating, womanising drunk’, as he puts it, ‘the Dean Martin of Some Bizzare’, his obsession with his work and the scale of the Infected project must have strained everyone and everything for miles around.

‘I thought I was like the shy sensitive chap I was five years ago….The last year, I did about 700 interviews and to do that many, it’s difficult to keep your feet on the ground and things in perspective. It’s unnatural to talk about yourself so much and it’s difficult not to change for the worse.

Current listening?

‘A lot of blues at the moment.’

All of Matt’s records tend towards violent, dark examinations of his own motivations and those of the world around him. It’s a serious case of the Jean-Paul Satres, I think, Matt disagrees with the pessimism. ‘I’m really quite an optimistic person. I see the songs as facing up to things, dealing with major problems, not sticking my head in the sand, whether they be personal problems or the general political scenarios of the day, and matching up to them. From the time that people are born they are educated to delegate responsibility either in the ballot box or in the confessional box, educated to give up responsibility for themselves.’

Matt added his voice to last series of Red Wedge events before June 11. You are still an optimist?

‘I’d be a lair if I said it made me feel suicidal. We all knew in our hearts that it was going to happen anyway. It depressed me, but it didn’t depress me as much as my personal situation. My work became more political when my personal situation was very content.

‘The political side of that work is very concerned with the American influence both here and in the Third World i.e. ‘This is the 51st State of the USA’ (Heartland), or ‘I can’t see for the teargas and the dollar signs in my eyes’(Angels Of Deception).

‘I detest American foreign policy, that’s what I wanted to make clear, the kind of blundering, blind…’

Words fail him at this point as they do many sane people around the world.

‘The way their national security comes before anyone else’s, and their national security stretches up to the heavens, to the bottom of the sea, it stretches everywhere.’

‘There are certain attitudes I like in America. I love a lot of American modern art, I love Edward Hooper, Tom Waits… there is a lot of romanticism in the American heartland – the old Eastern Cities, Chicago, New York. But I really don’t like the kind of Californian/Texan new America which is growing up. I’m fond, I guess, of America from the end of the last century up until about the ‘50s. Then it started to go really wrong. It’s become cancerous, paranoid.’

If you miss all that subtlety in the lyrics these points are elaborated and visualised in the Infected video, which you may have already seen late night on Channel 4. A collaboration between Matt, Tim Pope, ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson and Angus McIlwain, it turned all eight songs on the record into a loosely connected film. It cost around £300,000, the sort of project you need BIG record company backing for, but it’s paid dividends for all concerned. By Matt’s reckoning it has been seen by around 50 million people, on national and cable screenings in Europe, America, Japan and the Far East, in fact most places that have television. His access to such funds and ultimately to the corresponding audiences he puts down to his notoriously individual manager, Some Bizzare boss Stevo.

‘If it wasn’t for him the film wouldn’t have been made – he got the money. Some things he does might be a handicap but his benefits outweigh his problems. Certainly some people find him difficult to work with’.

‘That number includes certain CBS people, from what I’ve heard (staying well clear of anything libellous here). But a healthy profit smoothes over any difficulties.

‘The music business doesn’t care if you are a Capitalist, Communist or Buddhist – if you are commercially viable they will get behind you. My stuff sells.’

To date it has sold in sleeves and artwork designed by his brother Andy, whose tortured lurid comic figures are collected around songs lyrics and play-in-a-day chord diagrams in Infected 1979 – 1987, the book (that only leaves Infected – the stage play by my reckoning). Matt quite properly declares (brothers being what they are)..

‘I’m a really big fan of his stuff anyway. We share a lot of the same ideas, with similar aesthetics in most things, even down to our sense of humour.’

So what does Matt do for fun? A literary kind of guy?

‘Just one word – guilt, because I don’t read enough. I’d rather write or do my own reading, my own stuff. Films are my main interest, I’ve a collection of around 300 films at home. Orson Welles, Kubrick, Hitchcock and Scorsese, I love Scorsese, my favourite modern director. And I love all those old Ealing comedies.’

I point out at this time that Cannon, who owned the Pathe film library containing all those old classics have just sold them all to an American. Welcome news or not.

‘They’re part of our fucking heritage, it’s like the old red phone boxes, I feel really disgusted that they are gone. And the pound note! I suggest a move to Scotland. Some of us still like the folding green stuff.

After the amount of work put into Infected, there was to have been a substantial gap before the next album, time for him to work on film soundtracks, and obvious area of interest for a man with film obsessions. But the changes in his personal life have prompted him to start writing again, and an album is already being planned, again (thought strictly in the pipeline stuff) with an accompanying film.

‘I don’t mean a Prince type film with dialogue, I don’t know what form it will take, other than it will be shot on 35mm film, not more than a hour long.’

If things work out it will be with the collaboration of Tim Pope (videos for the Cure, Banshees and parts of Infected).

How happy are you with what has been done so far?

‘I’m a bit of a perfectionist, which I didn’t realise I was until recently. Not that every note has to be perfect. If mistakes are made I’ll often leave them in there, as long as it satisfies my instincts, my feelings. I’ll remix something again and again until it is right, not technically perfect but it has be have the right spirit to it. I’m also fairly impatient, and I just want to get more things done.’

We break for coffee and time for Matt to devour Rich Tea biscuits, a craving he seems to have developed since deciding to give up drinking and smoking Fact fanatics and fans of the ephemeral might care to note that his grandfather was a boxer, and he still loves boxing. Big Manchester United fan by the sound of it too. You want a few quotes? Fashion is neatly dismissed as ‘all icing and no cake’, heavy metal is ‘infantile, kindergarten or something’, and drugs ‘I got rapidly bored with. ‘Twice round the world and he comes across as just like anybody else, however much his own publicity might seek to discourage that. Maybe I just met him on a day when certain aspects of his life had brought him down to earth with a resounding crash.

‘Have you ever had your heart broken?’

Andy Dog’s surname is Johnson, brother or Matt and essential visual component of The The. All the sleeves of the records and almost all other accompanying material for press releases, the Infected 1979-1987 book, even a car for Matt’s Bolivian trip for the filming of the video were designed and effected by Andy Dog. Taught at Camberwell School of Art and self taught through years of contributing to and organising underground magazines, and comics, his work is a savage, colourful perversion of comic book styles, readily admitting to American comics as his biggest influence. But this is a little more serious. A press handout declares ‘The bodies I paint are scarred volcanic wasteland threatening to erupt with the poisoned residue of life in the eighties.’ Heavy stuff, huh? But it is easy to see the complete tie-up between that and the illustration of the Infected project. Matt Johnson tells you about it, Andy Dog paints it happening.

‘We’ve always been stabbing away at the same ideas. Since we grew up together obviously we shared all the same childhood experiences. We are trying to chisel away at the same ideas, I think we find it interesting to show different expressions of those ideas. Matt’s presenting a musical facet – it’s not so much about the relationship between the two but perhaps about the gaps between them’.

So Andy Dog is not just illustrating The The songs.

‘It’s never been an intention. I hate illustration, I mean setting out to draw what someone has written, I don’t see the point in that. You should create something that’s beyond the writing.’

In all the work for The The, there’s an obvious tension. Ranging from the un-comfortable isolation of the sleeves of Uncertain Smile and Perfect through to the outright savagery and panic of much of the book Infected. What humour there is, is of the blackest kind.

‘As far as the savagery goes. I don’t think really that it is savage enough a lot of the time, it could be a lot harder. In some areas I’m a bit too timid, and I hold back. My work should be pushing forward.’

‘One artist I really admire is a French guy, I don’t know if anyone has heard of him over here, called Bruno Richards, who is Paris based, and he draws as if he is stabbing the paper with a switchblade or something like that, it’s so hard, so tough, so nasty. It’s not about drawing an act of violence, or a hard image, he’s actually engaged in an act of violence, he’s brutally assaulting his materials. That’s the kind of effect I’m after.

If you are going for violent provocative visuals, you are going to have to be prepared for the reactions you provoke. The track Infected was released as a single on Epic, but instantly ran into trouble over the sleeve, a Dog original of a rubber-gloved devil masturbating. Its intended audience never saw that sleeve.

‘When we did the devil sleeve, which got banned, apart from being, we thought, a very strong image, a symbol of corruption really, it was an attempt to affront the kind of people who are pussyfooting around with sex images, like photographers with models and special effects, that sort of double-entendre. We wanted to say – don’t piss about with it, get really upfront with it, get really upfront with it or forget about it entirely. At the end of the day the only people we offended were the women of the production line at the CBS factory, so it didn’t really work. Upsetting the wrong people again.’

Describing video as a whole new language from the collaboration of still visual art with music, he contributed to the Infected video on the track Angels of Deception.

‘It was a bit of a disaster, I learnt how quickly it all happens – how easy it is to let it all get out of control.

‘By the time I realised things had gone awry, that it wasn’t quite what I wanted, all the money had been spent on it, It was ‘tough luck’ then.’

But that point doesn’t come as quickly as it might, considering The The’s success ensures you know where the next meal is coming from.

‘Yeah, we can afford not to worry so much about the production values, you know. I can afford one extra colour on black and white. That is an advantage.’

So where from here?

‘I am trying to use artwork as an effective weapon in the only way I know how. It’s very difficult to see how it works, how to bring down a government or something like that – with a drawing!’

Or with music, or a video or anything else you care to mention, but that doesn’t seem to stop an awful lot of people continually trying. Gives you a nice warm feeling doesn’t it?