INFECTED

JON CASIMIR - 1986

Sifting through the wreckage of England’s broken dream, MATT JOHNSON (aka THE THE) arrives at the conclusion that decay is simply part of the natural order. But that doesn’t stop him getting angry at its cause and effect, not to mention the blind complacency of his compatriots. After three aborted attempts by the international operator to connect me with London, someone finally picks the damn phone up, and then drawled at me in the slowest, flattest English monotone I have heard….

‘Matt’s not ‘ere. E’ll be abaht ten minnits, OK?

Take 5 – Ten minutes later, Matt Johnson blearily picks up the receiver…

‘Ello?’

What time is it over there Matt?

‘About half past ten in the morning.’

Are you always up this early?

‘No, I had to get up early because you were phoning up. What time is it over there?

About 7.30 at night. We usually do phoners a lot later than this.

‘They (CBS) said that this is the only time you could do it!’

They lied.

‘Fucking bastards! I’ll remember this…’

Matt Johnson, the beginning and end – if not always in the middle – of a band called The The (pronounced with emphasis on the second ‘The’), doesn’t always get on with his record company.

‘Ever since I’ve been with CBS, ‘he smirks,’ our relationship seems to have been based on fairly aggressive tactics on both sides. I enjoy that though. I think it’s healthy in a way. I don’t like cosy situations; I like there to be a bit of tension…’

Flashback: If you were listening to an ‘alternative’ radio station in 1983, you couldn’t have missed a song called ‘Uncertain Smile’ – the handiwork of our Matthew, released under his attractively anonymous alias. That song, one of the few really memorable songs of the 80s, was lifted from an album called Soul Mining – Matt’s third, but only the second to see release. (The other album, The Pornography Of Despair, languishes in a tape can somewhere).

Soul Mining was an introspective, often depressing affair….a sort of existentialist manifesto for the failed and failing urban lover. It’s tunes were simple, direct and utterly compelling. Its lyrics varied, from the exposed nerves of This Is The Day and Perfect to the open-heart surgery of The Twilight Hour. Often twisted and claustrophobic, they also cut with and edge of sarcasm, slashing across lines like ‘I’m just a symptom of the moral decay/That’s gnawing at the heart of the country’ (The Sinking Feeling).

Soul Mining never sold in great number, but three years after its release it’s still selling consistently – long after the hit albums of 1983 have checked in at the Hotel Oblivion. The The has become a benign disease, spreading around the world slowly and almost invisibly, taking hold of people insidiously. Radio stopped playing the songs, but the records kept disappearing from the shelves and Soul Mining sounds as fresh now as it did three years ago. Matt tells me that’s because it was a couple of years ahead of its time. But that’s nothing: the new one, he says, is at least five years up on anyone. Roll on 1990.

For now, it’s 1986, and Matt’s come out of hiding. For 24 months he’d been ‘drinking and thinking’, wondering why his records hadn’t sold in the millions, watching the news on the television and the slow rot of London through his flat window. Letting things germinate. In January he wrote a song called ‘Sweet Bird Of Truth’ – swirling, desperate tune, it’s bone bleached white and brittle by a repetitive Arabic death chant…’Hussan Hussan Hussan!’ The song told of the loss of an American fighter pilot in a bombing raid over the Arabian Gulf. Three months later, shorting before the scheduled release date of what was to be the Big Comeback, the speculative song turned into reality and Matt found himself at loggerheads again with his record company.

‘I mean, do you find the devil masturbating offensive?’

‘CBS didn’t want to release it as a single because it dealt with a sensitive issue. I wanted to rush it out so it wouldn’t look as if I was writing a song about an event after it happened. I wanted it to come out straight away. Eventually it came out as a limited edition deleted on its day of release), but it’s on the album anyway. Anyone who wants to get it will be able to.

‘It was pretty strange when it (the American bombing of Libya) happened. It felt pretty odd; it wasn’t that unexpected, though. You don’t need to be a prophet to see what’s going to happen. All you have to do is watch the news.

‘Actually, there’ve just been some new things that have strained relations with CBS, too. I’ve done a video for the whole album, and CBS don’t want to pay for a couple of the tracks because they think they’re unsuitable. They’ve got scenes with me in a brothel in Harlem with a prostitute on the bed. There are certain things I want to do that they won’t let me, which they deem to be pornographic and obscene….

‘I’ve got a painting of the devil masturbating, which I wanted on the sleeve of the album, and they won’t let me put it on. Then there was a still from the film with the gun in my mouth. They said we can’t use that either because the chain stores won’t stock it. Things like that are a pain in the arse. It’s a question of not getting you record in the shops, which I want to do, or toning it down.

‘You don’t need to be a prophet to see what’s going to happen. All you have to do is watch the news.’

No-one track pony, Matt put his head down after the disappointment of Sweet Bird Of Truth and resurfaced with the followup, Heartland. Give me one single for 1986 and I’ll take Matt’s Heartland, hands down, no contest. A four-minute documentary of a country in decline, it addressed itself like a scalpel to the heart of modern England, a sick, sad and confused’ nation fumbling for an identity in the face of all-consuming American cultural Imperialism. Like The Smiths, though, Matt falls just short of contempt, displaying an almost perverse love for his subject, a willingness to cling to the wreckage.

‘Beneath the old iron bridges/Across the Victorian parks/And all the frightened people/Running home before dark/Past the Saturday Morning Cinema/Lies crumbling to the ground/And the piss stinking shopping centre/In the new side of town/I’ve come to smell the seasons change/And watch the city/As the sun goes down again.’