COULD YOU PUT SOME LIME IN IT?
JOHNNY BLACK - MORE MUSIC – 1983

Matt Johnson, better know as The The, is a wind-up artist. As we settle onto our seats in Pollo’s Café on the seamy side of Soho, he winds up our waitress mercilessly.

Having set his heart on a lime milk shake, he pretends not to understand that the café only has strawberry or chocolate flavour, and insists on lime milk shake, until the unfortunate woman is almost banging her head on the wall. Finally, he lets her off the hook, and agrees to a strawberry shake. As she walks away he shouts,

‘But could you put some lime in it?’

It might have been a cruel thing to do, but it was done with obvious good humour and the image I had gathered from reading his press cuttings – that he was somehow difficult, opinionated or egotistic – evaporated rapidly.

He looks very young. Too young, and too slight, to possess the dark brown voice that caresses the songs on his new album, Soul Mining (Some Bizzare). Too young to have suffered as much as his lyrics and music suggests. Far too young to be hanging around with all those degenerates at Some Bizzare record offices.

He laughs loud.

‘Yes, I suppose I am the odd one out there. Maybe there’s a moral in that?’

Maybe there is, but we decline to explore it, choosing instead to plumb the depths of his soul. After all, both his albums (his first was Burning Blue Soul for 4AD Records) have included the word in their titles, although his blend of electronic pop and ethnic rhythms could hardly be described as soul music.

‘I use the word to mean spirit,’ he explained. ‘Not that I’m religious. Agnostic, I suppose. I don’t believe in a god but I do believe in something. And the way to find it is to go deeper into yourself’

So that’s where we go. Back to the day when Matt and brother Andrew (better known as Dog, the illustrator for Sounds) formed a band.

‘I was about twelve, We didn’t have any money for instruments, so we stretched rubber bands round tissues boxes to make twanging noises, and used cardboard boxes for drums.’

Due to these limitations, this fledgling band didn’t play songs as such, restricting themselves to making rhythmic noises until Matt managed to buy a cheap guitar.

‘We used to play local coffee bars…until they threw us out,’ he recalls, ‘but even then I always wrote my own songs.’

At fifteen, Matt found himself a job as a tea boy in a Soho recording studio, a position he used to learn about recording techniques, while making his earliest recorded ventures, on cassette albums.

The The came into existence early in 1979, when Matt and synthesist Keith Laws began playing dates with backing tapes, attracting attention from 4AD Records. Not content with one recording deal, Matt also formed a studio outfit, called The Gadgets,

Who subsequently issued two albums on Final Solution.

By the time his single, Uncertain Smile started attracting radio airplay in 1982 he and Keith had parted company, but Matt decided to retain the group name for his solo efforts.

Uncertain Smile was recorded in New York, with produced Mike Thorne and, although the end product was a classic single, Matt and Thorne had not worked well together. Some months later, recording another single, ‘Perfect’, the working relationship broke down.

‘Mike is a fairly traditional producer, from a classical musical background and I found him a bit too twee. I wanted to get more aggression and rawness into the sound’.

New York also disappointed him in another , more personal, sense.

‘I was very lonely back then. I was going out every night to all those New York discos, looking for something that I hadn’t found in London. I expected to be cheered up, but I don’t even like dancing. Now I’ve realised, if you don’t like to, you don’t have to go.’

Returning to England, he completed Perfect with Paul Hardiman as producer, a liaison which has continued onto the current album.

The something he had sought in New York turned up back in England.

‘Finding a girlfriend changed me a lot, When you’re in love, everything seems much better, even if you haven’t got any money.’

(Everybody says a bit Ahhhhhhh!)

Even the miracle of love can’t stave off tonsillitis, which Matt succumbed to, while he was busy recording the new album, and which developed into a virus. It left him weak, in intense pain and temporarily blind.

‘Losing my eyesight was horrific, but it was my own fault in a way, I had been very lazy and had to make up for it by working non-stopp for ages, which left me very open to illness.’

‘People’s faces were just like white blurs, and I was in such pain that I couldn’t turn my head, or read, or watch television.’

As a result, he spent long days listening to the World Service just thinking.

‘I really learned to appreciate things, like my health and my senses, the kind of things we take for granted. I remember now how vivid all the colours seemed when my sight came back.’

Most writers draw their material from their own experiences, but Matt Johnson seems to do it even more than most. The back cover of Soul Mining, for example, drawn by Andrew, shows a man with his head being thumped by a hammer.

‘Yeah, that’s me,’ he confirms. ‘When I was doing the album it felt like that, it was one of the worst periods of my life, and the pressure of having to do an album made it worse. I often think there must be a less heartbreaking way to make a living. Sometimes I wonder if I’d even do it at all if there was no money in it.’

That remark might sound cynical, but he adds, ‘I put so much of my own character into what I do, that I leave myself open. If I was doing it purely commercially, I’d just decide on my image, go through the motions and it wouldn’t be so painful, because I wouldn’t be giving so much of myself to it’.

Another aspect of Matt’s fragile character comes out in the title song, Soul Mining, which includes a description of someone floating down a cold dark tunnel, in a wet box.

‘He’s the part of me that used to fall in love with girls that never fell in love with me. It’s such a simple thing, everybody does it, but it can completely destroy you at the time.’

At one point, the title of the new album was to be The Pornography Of Despair, and a certain amount of confusion surrounds the name change.

Matt cleared it up swiftly.

‘It’s actually another album entirely. When I started work on this album. I went into a 24 track studio and did some demos but, by the time I got round to actually recording the final version, I had so much new material that I decided to record the new songs. So, Pornography Of Despair is the title of those demos, which are actually good enough to be an album and I still want to release them, maybe as a limited edition.’


Not being too fond of live work, it’s unlikely that The The will be packing them in at your local jive dive in the near future.

In fact, Matt’s much more concerned with simply finding a place to live.

‘I’m staying in about three different places right now, but what I need is somewhere permanent, where I can gave a desk and a typewriter and just get settled down to working.’

It seems to worry him a little that, since his illness, he has never quite returned to the high rate of work he once managed, perhaps because he’s understandably frightened that it could make him ill again.

‘I think I had much more of a hunger in me a couple of years ago, but I used to burn up a lot of energy in the wrong ways, just throwing everything against the wall to see what would stick.’

With the current album out of the way, he’s burning with enthusiasm for the new material he’s been recording for his next single.

‘I’m just starting to get that hunger back, but for different reasons. I’ve reached a sort of plateau and I know I’ve got to put in a hell of a lot of work, because my sights are set higher now..’

However young he may look, however slight he appears, however fragile his emotions, Matt Johnson isn’t about to blow away on the wind. Although his music has little in common with the likes of The Gist, Aztec Camera or Tracey Thorn, he shares with them the ability to write songs that are at once modern and timeless. It’s a new age.