REMEMBER MUSIC WITH A MESSAGE?

Neil McCormick - THE DAILY TELEGRAPH - 2000

MATT JOHNSON’S POLITICISED SONGS MADE THE THE KEY A BAND OF THE EIGHTIES. NOW HE’S BACK AND AS PASSIONATE AS EVER.

‘I’m not an economist – I am a song writer,’ Matt Johnson suddenly announces in the midst of an extended spiel about the dangers of globalisation, in which he has been smoothly reeling off facts and figures about the relative economic growth of America, Europe and Japan. I get the impression that his remark is intended to remind himself rather than his interrogator about the true nature of his vocation, but, if so, it is ineffective. A question about why he recently switched labels from Sony to Nothing (part of the Universal group) leads to a thoughtful analysis of the parlous state of the music business, replete with such un-rock ‘n’ roll phrases as ‘hostile takeovers’ and ‘downsizing’.

Yet, despite the close cropped, receding hair and sharp but sober taste in dark suits that make him look more like an executive than an artist, it would be a mistake to imagine that Johnson’s interests lie in the business rather than the music. If Johnson is a singer – song- writer who becomes animated when discussing such topics as AOL’s recent take-over of Time-Warner, is it because it is in the domain of politics and economic that he finds much of his inspiration – the impact of global forces on the lives of individuals.

Although he releases recordings under the rather irritating group name The The, it is the 37 year old Johnson, who is the definite article, a one-man band whose floating team of collaborators has included Neneh Cherry, Sinead O’Connor, Jools Holland and Johnny Marr. Raised in the East End of London, he rose to prominence in the early Eighties, becoming a hero of the Left-leaning rock counter-culture with unequivocal lyrical and musical assaults on the worst political and social excesses of the decade, on albums such as Burning Blue Soul (1981) and Infected (1986).

Time magazine called Johnson an ‘existentialist blues singer’, likening 1989’s apocalyptic Mind Bomb to ‘a version of TS Eliot’s The Waste Land set to a pulsating backbeat’. His appeal, however, could be ascribed as much to his penchant for bright, hook-laden pop melodies as for his intense, often unwieldy lyrics. He is perhaps the only songwriter who could (or would even attempt to) cross a cheerful, upbeat melody with the chorus ‘I’m just a symptom of the moral decay/That is gnawing at the heart of the country’, as he did on his classic That Sinking Feeling.

Johnson’s lyrics encompass economics, industry, trade: ‘People think I’m miserable,’ he says, but I’m actually quite frivolous’…

Given his lyrical bent, it is hardly surprising that he has a reputation as (in his own words) ‘a miserable bugger, but he cheerfully asserts that this is quite undeserved. He insists that ‘like the reverse of the comedian who turns out to be a manic depressive’ he is ‘actually quite a frivolous character’.

I saw precious little evidence of this frivolity during our brief encounter, but I would not dispute that Johnson is exceedingly good company; friendly, bright, interested in engaging with the world.

If Johnson has mellowed with age, artistically he seems to be travelling in quite the opposite direction. After a five-year silence, The The return with NakedSelf (released at the end of this month), perhaps Johnson’s darkest work to date. The subject matter is social isolation, spiritual numbness and the destructive effects of rampant consumerism. The bleak tone of the lyrics finds an echo in the brutality of the rhythm section and sheer sonic strangeness of a battery of (mis) treated guitars. It is a recording with a hard, aggressive surface through which his trademark melodies takes a while to emerge.

‘New York’ll do that to you,’ Johnson quips. Seeking creative regeneration after completing 1995’s Hanky Panky (a collection of Hank Williams cover versions), Johnson relocated to the city that never sleeps. ‘It was like moving to Rome at the time of the Roman Empire. America is where everything emanates from, so I wanted to climb into the belly of the beast. It has brought a lot of my political inclinations to the boil again.’

Johnson confesses to a growing sense of nostalgia about Britain, the target of much of his ire during his Eighties heyday, although he admits that the country he has developed such fondness for ‘may not exist anywhere other than my imagination’. When he gets on to the subject of foreign ownership of national assets, he almost sounds like a Little Englander: ‘Our water is largely French-owned, our electricity is American, the car industry is split up between the Germans and Americans, the Japanese own 6,000 pubs and the Swiss have virtually taken over our food industry.’

This former outspoken critic of Thatcherism does not object when I suggest that he is, in fact, somewhat conservative by inclination. ‘I’m probably conservative with a small ‘c’, in the sense that I think if something’s not broken, why fix it? But I’m not a Conservative. I consider myself to be a democrat in the true sense of the word. The whole debate about Left and Right is misleading, because it puts communists on one side and fascists on the other, and then in the middle you’ve supposedly got the democrats, which includes moderate Left and Right.

‘I don’t agree with that at all. I think on one side you have democracy, which is active participation by the people that make up the community, and on the other side you have communism, fascism and business-run-corporatism. I think these are totalitarian forces. America is really run by corporations. It’s difficult to put these ideas across because people go, ‘well, he’s a loony Leftie,’ but I think the debate is about our level of participation in society.

These are not the kind of ideas that usually get expressed in a music column. Which is perhaps what makes Johnson so valuable. The same conviction and idealism that underlie his conversation shine through his art, imbuing his songs and performances with an almost physical sense of passion. Although I have never been an enormous fan of the way he has artificially welded rather heavy-handed political imagery on to light hearted pop music, I welcome his return to the fray.

Johnson himself is realistic about the influence he can hope to exert. ‘Dance music and rap stand imperiously on the top of pop culture’, he points out. ‘I’m sort of like an old vaudeville act – doing my thing, wondering if anyone’s paying attention.’