THE RETURN OF A POSTMODERN PIONEER

Troy Johnson - SLAMM /SAN DIEGO - 2000

After the ‘80s closed, The The, one of the titans of post-punk London, slipped rather quietly beneath even the underground’s radar. Matt Johnson, the sceptical genius behind The The, had always been notorious for taking years creating albums. His zealous fans sometimes felt as if they were the victims of the artist’s perfectionism; at the same time, they held Johnson to an impossibly high standard. No matter how much time had gone into making an album, no matter the liters of human sweat, it would be trashed at the slightest hint of blemish or compromise.

For being the first to use a drum loop on a rock record, among other innovations, Johnson was heralded as an eloquent noise guru long before that had become fashionable. Nevertheless, to his fans, he was often just considered late. Average length between The The albums; Three years.

‘I’ve always taken these longs gaps between albums,’ Johnson explains. ‘It’s cost me dearly commercially, not playing that kind of game. It’s like rolling a ball up a hill. As soon as you roll it to the top of the hill, you let it roll back down again. It’s made my career much harder than it should be.’

Time in the pop music world moves like sand through an hourglass with an inch-wide neck. Whole movements sometimes came and went between The The albums. Johnson and The The were victims of his own patience, as well as his pride. He believed in the cynical, slow burn industrial music he created; he didn’t believe in his label’s efforts to violate the whole for the sake of a ‘hit single’. Thus, three The The albums went unpublished during his 17 year stay at Epic Records. Epic wanted to sell records; Johnson wanted artistic freedom. Rather than accede to the compromising demands, he trashed the albums, pushing his already reclusive public persona deeper into the shadows in the process.

Measured by verbosity, record company ineffectiveness is one of Johnson’s favourite subjects. ‘You’re dealing with people really don’t like music – they’re lucky if they understand it,’ he says. ‘They could work in any industry, they just happened to choose music because I think the music industry tolerates incompetence more than other industries. A lot of the people that you deal with – if they were working in other industries, they’d be fired on the spot. ‘There is that real philosophy that exists in these big companies that it would be a perfect industry if they could just take the artists out of the equation. Which, to a degree, they have done with all these boys bands. They’re not troublesome. They do what they’re told – they’re like the Monkees. They look the right way. Once they out live their usefulness, you just replace them with clones. But I don’t want you to get the idea that I’m cynical – I’m sceptical.’

Johnson has always operated as a sole creative entity flanked by great musicians. The most permanent The The line up, which came together in the late 80s, included ex-Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr, ex ABC drummer Dave Palmer, and bassist James Eller formerly with Julian Cope. This band released Mind Bomb in 1989, which raised the band visibility in the U.S. largely on the strength of Johnson’s smoldering duet with Sinead O’Connor, ‘Kingdom Of Rain.’

Though he’s kept a low profile since, Johnson never really disappeared. As recently as 1993 ‘Dusk’ broke into the British charts at No2. In 1995, Johnson paid homage to one of his song writing heroes, Hank Williams, and released a country/industrial album of Williams covers. The unlikely union was grotesquely appropriate, considering that Williams shared Johnson’s cynical outlook of capitalism and the human experience.

‘I wanted to do a series of albums where I could be free of the pressure of being a song writer’, Johnson explains of the mysterious genre-bending., ‘I could just be a singer. It’s kind of how I started off as a teen in a band. It’s kind of nice when you can sing without people interpreting what you mean by it. I just thought I could learn something from these people, just like yesterday.’

If it weren’t for Epic’s refusal in 1997 to release Gun Slut – an album reportedly so ‘arty’ that it got him banned from the label’s building – there would be no glaring gaps for The The career, NakedSelf is the first release since that 1997 abortion. And Epic similarly refused to publish it unless Johnson went back and inserted a few hit singles. Not willing to alter not ditch this album, he found saviour in Trent Reznor – an artist who cites Johnson as a primary inspiration for Nine Inch Nails. Reznor signed Johnson to his label, Nothing Records, along with the rest of the current The The, which includes ex-Iggy Pop guitarist Eric Schermerhorn, ex MC 900 Foot Jesus drummer Earl Harvin, and Kenny Rogers’ former bassist, Spencer Campbell.

In a seeming betrayal of his technological leg-end, Johnson made the album in analog on 16 track tapes. ‘There’s so many options made to musicians now, I think if you really narrow down the options you’re forced to be more creative,’ he explains. ‘There’s so many doors you can walk through you end up standing there paralysed. Sometimes you’[ve got to force yourself to make a decision. The more tracks you have in a studio, the more you’re inclined to keep putting off the decision-making process until the mixing process. You end up being a bit apathetic. Suddenly you have to work with fewer tracks, you’ve got to start thinking quicker, and making more decisions.’

NakedSelf consists of Johnson’s classic, exposed-nerve, ponderous soundscapes, with lyrics that combine frustration, criticism, and inner struggle with timid optimism. On this album, for the first time, he focuses on his developed love for the guitar.

‘The thing that I love about the guitar over the keyboard,’ he explains, ‘is that it feels so much more physical because you hold the instrument and you feel the vibrations in your body, as opposed to sitting at a piano or an organ where you get slightly more detached from it. With a guitar – it’s one of the most physical instruments.’

NakedSelf was created with live performances in mind. These days, Johnson prefers to perform with a full band and has sloughed off much of the technology that allowed him to do it all himself. ‘(Inserting drum loops and working alone) was very out of a limb at the time, obviously it isn’t now’, he says. ‘But I always felt that was the way things were going to go. The way I worked has now become the norm, so I guess I was way ahead of my time with my interests. I’ve been through all that one-band stuff and now I enjoy having lots of musicians to work with.’

The The’s return, unlike many novelty reunion tours, has a sweet smell. That’s because Johnson’s star was never eclipsed by the music scene – he eclipsed his own star, pulling back into isolation and non-production. He left his fans at the alter – they didn’t leave him. That difference is crucial to his comeback.

It also puts pressure on Johnson and on the new album. There’s something noble in his reluctance to take success and run, as if it were the last slab of bread left in the Depression. After all, once you start believing you own hype, the magic fall away, the spell loosens. Don’t you create best when you’re hungry, when the only chance left is the one you’re about to take?