HOMING IN ON HAPPINESS

THE COMMONS - 2000


After two decades of angst, The The’s Matt Johnson is veering dangerously close to contentment

England has a long history of producing particularly ungrateful offspring, children that are not content to merely bite the hand that feeds -- they maul it. Among popular music acts, the lineage is as long as it is impressive, featuring such rabble rousers as the Kinks, the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Specials, the Beat, Billy Bragg, the Smiths, the Fall and a slew of others only too eager to rise up and smite the nation of their birth with piercing rhetoric and fierce tuneage. However, there is perhaps no single work that more completely and effectively indicts Blightey than The The's 1986 masterpiece, Infected. A sprawling, scathing attack on the Americanization of Great Britain, the album got The The founder and sole permanent member Matt Johnson banned from the British airwaves on two separate occasions. It also sold over a million copies, proving that Johnson's pointed observations of his homeland resonated with more than just the fringe.

"The reason I was bashing it down is that I loved England and Britain," explains Johnson, reclining on a couch in his dressing room before a recent show at San Francisco's Fillmore Auditorium. Johnson is in town with his band promoting The The's latest album, "NakedSelf", which was released in February on Trent Reznor's Interscope-distributed Nothing Records. "It made me angry to see England clapped out and fucking itself up." Johnson hesitates for a moment before adding, "I have very confused feelings about England."

Perhaps that's why he now lives in New York, a city he fell in love with at the age of 20, shortly before the release of The The's 1983 Sony debut, Soul Mining. Truth be told, it was love — another fixation of Johnson's — that brought him to the Big Apple in 1993. He now lives there with his girlfriend and two-year old son. New York is also where Johnson recorded Dusk (1994), NakedSelf and Gun Sluts, the now infamous album that Sony refused to release.

The shelving of Gun Sluts is another thorn in the side of The The fans — a particularly rabid and completist lot — who are already annoyed by the unavailability of Spirits, Johnson’s unreleased 1979 solo album and Pornography of Despair, the 1982 album that was mysteriously shelved by the singer (there are reportedly only 500 copies in existence). When asked to elaborate on Sony's dissatisfaction with Gun Sluts, his first album of original material since Dusk (a Hank Williams tribute, Hanky Panky, was released in 1995), Johnson is forthright and almost sympathetic to the corporate behemoth’s position. "Well, I can understand, actually," he says. "People were warning me, 'Look, the market's changed. It's all boy bands and dance music.' And when Sony came and heard it they were like, 'Wow, what the fuck has happened to you since you got to New York? It's too aggressive.'" One track from Gun Sluts, "DieselBreeze," made it on to NakedSelf. Johnson says its dissonant, unstructured sound is indicative of most of Gun Sluts.

Following the shuttering of that album, Johnson and his new right-hand man, ex-Iggy Pop/Snakefinger guitarist Eric Schermerhorn, began work on NakedSelf in an attempt to appease the Sony suits. When they once more expressed dissatisfaction with the outcome — a mixture of Johnson’s poignant, acoustic reflections and Schermerhorn’s harrowing guitar textures — Johnson threw in the towel with the label. "I just said, 'Fuck it,'" he says. "'If they don't like the direction I'm going, then what's the point? I really believe in the new direction.'" It didn't hurt that by that point Nothing Records had made an outright bid for Johnson's talents, nor that his contract with Sony was officially up. His split from the label ended a 17 year relationship, one that Johnson recalls fondly, despite the problems. "It was a great relationship in that they gave me complete freedom and we got on very well," he recalls. "I was sad to leave because I thought I was going to be there for the rest of my career, like Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen." Johnson says that although Sony was willing to work with him to make NakedSelf a more commercially viable release, a combination of pride and grass-is-greener optimism fueled his defection to Nothing/Interscope/Universal. It's a decision he now seems to regret. "The typical thing at the moment is that a lot of my family don't even know I've got a new record out," he says with annoyance. "Because the radio play is so bad, because Interscope are just so lame. There are people coming to the shows that are saying afterward, 'Oh, has he got a new album out? We didn't even know.' That's very frustrating." Johnson is quick to absolve Nothing chief Reznor from blame, stating that he gets on well with the brooding Nine Inch Nails mastermind. The problem, he says, is getting the label to care about you when you're not singing about nookie or a genie in a bottle. "You sign with a major and they don't give a toss about you," says Johnson, 39. "The only way they'll prioritize you is if they had to pay through the nose for you. If they get you on the cheap, then you're at the bottom of the goddamned pile, and that's what happened to me."