EMOTIONAL RESCUE

Stanley Jefferson - Melody Maker– 1986


Out on several limbs, by no means all of them his own, Matt Johnson is slowly unveiling The The again. Stanley Jefferson sidled over to check on the patient’s progress.

This is the way it has to be. Not Anglophobia and slumping ever outwards through grimy towns and past waving girls. No wind or rain, or gritty eyes, just something very precise and very measured in a medium sized corner of Matt Johnson’s record company. Some blood and feathers, some vast ships in tiny bottles bobbing between us, and right in the middle, some records.

The first is A Pop Single called ‘Heartland’, by The The; Matt Johnson’s sanely mad tumble of ideas smartened into sufficient neatness to get into the passing out parade, but quite likely to whip a howitzer out of its top pocket and blast the neighbours to kingdom come.

‘Heartland’ is one of the few songs written in the last 10 years where the words mean more than ‘Isn’t lurve a bitch especially now the sun’s come out baby’, and yet where you can still listen to them without nodding off. Kind of ‘Ghost Town’ meets ‘Ever Fallen In Love’ played on a ghetto blaster in a piss-stained precinct.

‘Heartland’ is almost a hit and almost invisible, but it’s nibbling, swelling. INFECTING. The start of something..

Somewhere else in the room there’s a record called ‘Sweet Bird Of Truth’. A sprawling, terrifying roar through the mouth of a fighter pilot over the Middle East. Pop as in Bang and, through the crackle, an ambiguously moving mixture of machismo and regret. ‘Sweet Bird Of Truth’ was deleted the day it was released and sold out in less time than it takes to hijack a Jumbo Jet. This surprised some people.

The third record might be glittering or a throbbing open sore. It’s and LP called ‘Infected’.

You scare your record company, don’t you Matt?

‘They fucking should be scared. I try to keep them on their toes, it’s healthy..’

Johnson sits across the bank managerial desk from me, scratching God-knows-what into the wooden surface. Ludicrously healthy, effusive and honest about the way things ought to be (‘I love lying to people, winding them up’). There’s a warm tremble pitched somewhere between confidence and arrogance and more smart lines than an office full of old men. Matt’s the kind of guy I could get to like.

What’s this ‘Heartland’ malarkey all about then?

‘It’s about American foreign policy’.

Yes.

‘It’s about the way that Britain used to be a world leader and now it’s a leader at the art of decline.’



‘I can understand why people up in tower blocks in Manchester or Liverpool are doing drugs. That escapism and kind of immediate good feeling must be something when you’re leading such an awful life’.



And.

‘And it’s a song. It’s a very, very good song. It’s the sort of song that could be played anywhere, on any instruments and still make you shiver.’

And is it really important?

‘It’s an observation. It’s important to me and maybe it’ll be important to some others. I mean, it’s not going to change the world or anything, but I’m just getting so sick of the bland, faceless, drivel that seems to be clogging up just about every area of music at the moment’.

For a while, after the success of ‘This Is The Day’, ‘Uncertain Smile’ and the ‘Soul Mining’ LP, it would have been easy to have joined in the parade of popular music but, after hanging around in the vicinity, Matt dived into some bushes for a think. How great was the temptation to scurry after them with the comeback?

‘It would have been easy for me to write another twenty versions of ‘Uncertain Smile’, I’m totally sure about that, but there really didn’t seem any point. How I want The The to operate has never revolved around writing hit singles or copies of what I’ve done before. That’s one of the reasons why I’ve never wanted a band as such. If you have a band, you’re tied down to a certain form of instrumentation for every song. There isn’t a single song of mine where the instrumentation is the same, and that’s so liberating.’

‘Infected’ pulsates beneath our feet, throwing out sad blossoms and fiercely burning fruit. Around us the music business continues its usual blundery existence. Who’s infected who, I wonder?

‘I’ve been lucky in working with Stevo, partly because he can organise and publicise effectively, but mostly because he recognises the value of un-predicatability and not always doing things the obvious way. That helps a lot.

Is it an eccentric LP?

‘It’s a record about western desire, about the venereal disease of the soul, about multinational corporations…’

I beg your pardon?

‘Like Coca Cola. I’ve got this Coke motif running all the way through the songs, like, in the video for ‘Heartland’, there’s this girl drinking from the Coke bottle and all the drink’s running down her chin and her T-shirt. I wanted it all to be tricking into my mouth but they said they didn’t think certain people would have been able to take it!’

Do you fall in love very easily Matt?

‘I used to. I get infatuated easily, especially if the object of that infatuation is just totally unattainable, that always feels so brilliant. Just that MOMENT, you know what I mean?’

That ‘moment’ seems to gush through The The most explicitly in something like ‘Uncertain Smile’, its very title pinning down, in half light, some glorious butterfly that could so easily turn to dust.

‘I do love to concentrate on those really intense moments that everyone experiences. Like, when you meet a really gorgeous girl or you’re walking, like in ‘Heartland’, through a certain area of London. At times like that, things take on a magical atmosphere, a certain electricity. They transcend everyday life. That’s what I’m trying to capture on my records.’

Are you drawn to vulnerability?

‘I’m not sure. I was thinking the other day that what really appeals to me is melancholy. Not obsessive suicide freaks wandering around trying to top themselves all over the place, but the kind of way that melancholy can be used and turned into quite a positive thing. All the best things I’ve written have come when I’ve been at my least happy. I certainly don’t hold with all the starving-artist-suffering-for-his-public business, but I do think that sadness can be quite healthy.’

In the middle of all this diverted energy, this twisty creation, out pops a book from his pocket. ‘The Only Living Witness’ tells the story of American mass murderer Ted Bundy who wanted to kill because it was like possessing a Porsche or a pot plant. The pictures inside show him to be a charming, attractive man, only the testimonies illuminating the bile and the poison and the ugliness fighting, and occasionally succeeding, to get out. It’s in us all they say. In me. In you?

‘I always say, ‘Oh no, I could never kill’, but I think we all get rid of whatever is inside us in difference ways. It might be playing music, it mighty be writing, it might be being a plumber. Obviously, in some cases, it’s being a murderer. My brother was reading this book about the murderer Dennis Nielson the other day, and it’s terrifying to think that there’s probably loads more people like him all over the place. Sitting next to you on the bus or something.

‘The thing is, when you’re not doing anything with your life, it’s so easy for all these different sides of your personality to take over, like apathy and despair. When me and my brothers were young, we used to live above the pub that our dad owned and we used to just lie in bed all day watching videos and ordering food like it was room service or something. Our dad used to come upstairs and say ‘Get out of bed and do something you good for nothing lazy bastards’. I realised that I could quite easily waste the rest of my life just lying there.



‘For my video…..in Bolivia I want all these 12-year-old prostitutes and dwarves dressed up in Marilyn Monroe and Elvis masks to drive a pink Cadillac and re-enact the assassination of John F Kennedy’



‘If you’re creative, it’s so much easier because you’ve always got that to cling to and draw upon. If you’re working on some assembly line or something for years and years, then, one day, you go in and find out that you’ve lost your job, it must be so crushing. You could just go home, lie down and never have anything to make you get up for the rest of your life.

‘You see, I don’t think I’ve particularly got a work ethic, the whole phrase sounds so grey and puritanical. What I HAVE got is the attitude that people ought to be taught to cope with their time, to be able to take advantage of it and really use it. Otherwise they can just fade away.’

Or they shoot smack.

‘In a way, I can understand why people up in tower blocks in Manchester or Liverpool or somewhere, are doing drugs. That escapism and kind of immediate good feeling must be something when you’re leading such an awful life. What does annoy me is all these poor little rich kids taking drugs just for something to do. They’re born with silver syringes in their mouths and they’ve got this whole attitude to doing drugs which is so crap. As far as I’m concerned, let them fucking die.’

Don’t you think everyone needs to be addicted to something?

‘I think they probably do, whether it’s drugs or drink or power or whatever. I’m addicted to people, I just can’t do without them.’

And yet The The remains such a solitary, self-reflective affair.

‘That’s probably because I’m so much of a perfectionist about what I do. I’m only happy if everything is exactly right and the best way for that to happen seems to be for me to do it myself. I’m starting to work with other people and write things that aren’t quite so much geared towards me. ‘Sweet Bird Of Truth’, for example, which I wanted to be kind of microcosm of the situation in the Middle East, is written in the third person. I always thought that I could never write anything other than in the first person, or that I could never write about something which I’d not experienced. It was a good exercise for me to do that song.

‘As well as that, there’s actually a duet on the album that I do with Neneh Cherry. She’s got this incredible voice that goes off in all these different directions and does all these things you never expect. The song’s called ‘Slow Train To Dawn’ and, again, it’s about the perfect moment, where the man’s lying in bed smoking a cigarette watching in the light of it, bead of sweat running along the woman’s back. It’s a great song and I’m not ashamed of saying that.’

Would you enjoy the move away from it simply being Matt Johnson, The One Man Band?

‘Well The The was always conceived as being quite a mysterious, low profile thing. I never had my picture on the sleeves. I always had one of my brother’s paintings. In many ways it was like Public Image Limited’s initial idea of how they should work but, of course, they turned out to be just a bunch of old junkies, far too lazy to follow it through.

‘I’m definitely going to follow it through and, although I still don’t really like the idea of bands, after all the oil and the vinegar always separates in the end, The The doesn’t have to be confined to just me. Of course I would like to get some sort of loosely affiliated band together, but I’d also like to get together some good songs, singers and producers and put it out. I wouldn’t write any of it, I wouldn’t sing or play on the album. I wouldn’t even produce it. It’d come out as The The and, even though I hadn’t had anything to do with it, I’d rake in all the money. It’d be brilliant.

Johnson’s love of the grand folly, rooted in some kind of deep seriousness, stretches to the concert for the ‘Infected’ LP. As you sit reading this, a video for the entire LP is being shot in various far flung climes throughout the world, from Harlem brothels to Bolivian shanty towns.

‘In Bolivia, I want all these 12 years old prostitutes and dwarves dressed up in Marilyn Monroe and Elvis masks, then we’re going to drive through a small village in a pink Cadillac re-enact the assassination of John F Kennedy. It’s going to be like a Fellini film or something.’

Unsurprisingly, record companies being the cowardly custards they are, such verve is frowned upon, and Johnson is squeezed back into the wacko pop singer box. Incidents like the nervous disease that blinded him for a while and atmospheres like the solid. Sledgehammer pop crunch of ‘Infected’ are politely passed over and hidden behind photos of Spandau Ballet on the mantelpiece.

This time, however, he’s going to be rather difficult to ignore. Right now ‘Infected’ is up on the mountain somewhere, trickling into a tiny spring but before long it’ll be flooding through, hacking your senses and turning pink pop milk shakes into neat vodka. Open your arms, your legs and maybe even your wallets. Sometimes infection is the only cure.