WARNING!

Marc Issue - THE BEAT MAGAZINE - 1987

The following interview with Matt Johnson of The The, conducted by Marc Issue, includes certain words, phrases and ideas which some readers may find offensive.

The day I went to interview Matt Johnson, I found him in the world famous offices of Some Bizzare, vetting the guest lists for the premiere of his video album, Infected, with his world famous label manager Stevo.

A suggestion had come through from the record company releasing the new album that certain ‘celebrities’ should be invited to the premiere, by way of a sweetener for the popular press. Controversy raged.

Whilst it was clear that the scabrous illiterate hacks from the daily newspapers would be more likely to write about the event if they spotted established persons of the Epic roster gracing the proceedings with their presence, it was felt that publicity gleaned from the backs of such people was not the sort of publicity required. No celebrities of that nature were to be invited. It does the heart good to see that there are at least a few people in the fly, foxy world of pop promotion who don’t believe that any publicity is good publicity. It was all the more heartening to see that Matt Johnson can afford the luxury of principles at this very crucial juncture. Had he been greener, he might have acquiesced to this (very usual) sort of arrangement. But he ain’t green. He has been here before….

Matt Johnson, otherwise known at The The, is a young south Londoner, who at the age of 25, has spent roughly half his life as a musician, at first as a casual performer in youth clubs and all sorts of odd joints (employing home made instruments constructed of cardboard boxes and rubber bands!!! Fact!), later as a member of The Gadgets, a relatively undistinguished Noo Wave Combo, and more recently as a sole member of The The.

His remarkable talent for pertinent lyrics and memorable music has been evident from a very early stage in his public career, and he has been tipped for great things for a very long time. His first solo album, Burning Blue Soul, was released in 1981 by the newly hatched 4AD label. It was hailed, but cautiously; the material was submerged in dollops of raw sound which frankly did little to enhance the content.

1983, however, Soul Mining announced to the mainstream that Matt Johnson was a new force to be reckoned with. Soul Mining has Massive Commercial Potential written in large letters all over it. Record buyers, bless their little cotton socks, were excited. Even journalists were excited for a change.

The record company, flushed as they were with their recent giant hits with Michael Jackson and promising new comers Wham!, were beside themselves with excitement. Dollar signs flashing in the eyes of the faithful, they asked young Matt when he would bring forth the inevitable next one.

‘There isn’t going to be a next one,’ said Matt Johnson. And he simply dropped out of the public gaze for nearly two years.

Dramatic or what?

Whilst it is very true that voluntary retirement ages have been sliding slowly down, 22 is a little bit previous, don’t you think? And whatever happened to Matt Johnson, anyway?

Where on earth have you been all this time?

‘After Soul Mining I spent a year just talking about that album. I spent the first half of 1984 in America, and my enthusiasm for it all just dried up. I felt that I really didn’t know which direction I wanted to go, just bored, fed up with music. I decided to get my domestic situation in order, ‘cos I’d been living out of plastic bags more or less since I’d left home, I didn’t have a place to practice, or to relax, so I decided to get my life straightened out and take stock.

‘I took so long away that I lost any urge to write songs. It was fortunate that I could afford to do that – if I hadn’t been able to, things might have been different but luckily, I had a bit of money from the record advance.

‘If I’d have done another one straight after Soul Mining it probably would have sounded too similar. It would have been an easy option, from a commercial point of view particularly for America, because that album was very easily accepted.’

Following a successful album immediately with a similar one seems to be a difficult thing for people not to do.

‘Lots of people in bands are scared of people forgetting them. They’re scared of taking a break, scared perhaps of losing whatever it is they’ve got. They’re scared of another band coming up behind them and stealing their thunder….I’ve always felt immense self-belief – in my own work, anyway – and I knew that I would come back with a stronger album than the last one, as I will do again with the next one!

‘I’ve always considered music to be a by-product of my life, and you’ve got to live a life to comment about it. I think many bands get themselves into this situation where they do an album, then promote it, do a tour, and by the time they’ve finished that, they’ve maybe got two weeks off and they’re back in the schedule again. That is not my idea of fun: the reason I got into music is because it’s supposed to give me the freedom to do what I want to do.

‘It’s important to live a life and mature as a person. It’s unhealthy to be involved in music the whole time. I use a lot of sporting analogies in my work, to psych myself up. I find it inspiring to tell myself that I’m coming back into the ring after a lay-off.. did you hear that Sugar Ray Leonard is making a comeback? He’s going to fight Hagler!’


Whaat? He’ll get battered!

‘I’ve got a lot of respect for someone like Marvin Hagler. I find him quite inspirational, just the pure discipline and motivation of the man, the ability to keep your feet on the ground with every success that you have, to keep looking up instead of looking down.’

And so, onwards and upwards. The new album, Infected, is amongst the best albums of the year, and a giant leap from its illustrious predecessor. Johnson’s sound and ideas are dovetailing together beautifully. Infected is painted on a massive canvas, taking time-honoured compositional technique (Tin Pan Alley Classicism), rolling it up with state-of-the-art split level noise deployment and delivered in a wild variety of voices – most of which emerge from one rather versatile larynx.

You have a great variety in your voice on record…

Yeah, it can be quite deep, much deeper than my speaking voice. On this album it’s quite aggressive, more confident really. On Soul Mining I had tonsillitis, I mean I was quite sick generally, and the songs were sterilised in the production, a lot of the venom and the aggression was taken out of them – this time I deliberately kept it all in, and a lot of the mistakes and other things. I was more sure of what I was singing about, which makes a big difference: I don’t believe you can sing with …..vigor, if you’re not sure about your subject matter.

‘I was pleased with the way the blues influence had come through on this album

because I’d been listening to a lot of blues over the last couple of years. Although I’d always liked Blues I’d never really sat down and listened to it. There was one tape in particular, of various people, that I spent about two weeks just listening to the blues. I couldn’t write. I’d completely dried up so I just sat listening to this tape, drinking. I was tracing back to the roots really…’

What ‘Let’s have another drink and talk about the blues?

Yeah, it fits very well with that romantic idea doesn’t it? Looking for the answer in the bottom of the glass. You can fit in better to your surrounding when you’re listening to that stuff. I found with the blues that there was a purity there; although that music, like contemporary hiphop, is very macho and egotistical in one sense, another sense it is very unselfconscious, unaffected. That’s what I tried to get back to with this album.

‘I was going to be working with Tom Waits on Heartland, Out Of The Blue and another couple of tracks I don’t remember; Heartland because I saw that as being about similar sentiments that he is writing about in America. Really, I had the songs very thoroughly worked out already, the demos that I sent him were very explicit, But I wanted the sound of the album to be very diverse. The stuff with Roli (Mosiman, formerly of The Swans) was more electronic, and harder. I wanted to get back some of the rawness of the first album, Burning Blue Soul, though obviously this is a much better album. That’s what was lost during the period of Soul Mining, which was more sterilised and much more poppy than perhaps it should have been. I have never had two tracks with the same instrumentation. It’s given me a lot of ideas for the next album which will be off in another direction again.’

“It’s frightening that Radio One’s censorship extends beyond the station, into record shops and people’s homes.”

By way of a bonus, there is a video album completing what American leezhure moguls may well be calling The Infected Carn-cept even as I write. Shot in London and on location in New York and, erm, Bolivia, Infected - The motion picture (as it might have been called, but wasn’t) is another striking piece of work altogether. It was a large collaborative effort, directed partly by Peter Christopherson, partly by Tim Pope and partly by Mark Romanek, it does for the music what most promotional videos merely stab at: it provides an expressionist and provocative counterpoint to the lyrical content – few of the tracks are taken literally in the film. The video album taken as a whole makes up in daring originality what it may lack in overall coherence – which comes of putting the project together at breakneck speed on a limited budget.

‘I wanted it to be a reflection of my ideas and my personality, and for the people I worked with to have empathy with my work. I wanted to represent the songs, and the last consideration was whether MTV would show it. The people I chose to work with like Tim, Peter, and Mark, were people who would work with me rather than for the record company. That was very important. Also I do consider video to be a relevant art-form in itself and it’s something I want to get more involved in in the future. There are a couple of film projects I’m going to be getting into over the next year or so….

‘The bulk of the video was done in a month, probably the most intense month of my life. Too many things went on to describe . I had some terrible low points in Bolivia, with a hard schedule and altitude sickness, and if we had’ve been in Britain in that state I would have packed it in and gone home, but you can’t if you’re on the other side of the world. I was getting vertigo just looking at maps, seeing how far away from home I was: the plane journey took thirty-eight hours, getting back, it was horrific. But there were incredible high points as well.. most of which I can’t really talk about….’

Matt Johnson is a fortunate man, in the very obvious sense that record companies wishing to exploit his conspicuous and undeniable talent see that they must accommodate what they perceive as his eccentricity. I t is a rare talent indeed that is conspicuous enough for a major company to see that far. Would that radio programmers were as sensitive. These self-styled guardians of the nation’s morals are very unhappy about the record. The reactionary BBC banned the Infected single from daytime radio play, on the grounds that a line in the song namely ‘from my scrotum to you womb’, would be offensive to some listeners. Presumably those who never took Biology lessons at school.

‘First of all they asked my to remove the offending line, which I foolishly did, and then they said they still wouldn’t play it because people could still by the record. That’s really worrying, to think that their censorship extends beyond their station, into record shops and people’s homes.’

So providing people are unable to buy the record, they would be prepared to play it?

‘They said that if I’d make the radio version commercially available, then they would play it, but I drew the line there. I’m prepared to lose that single and anyway, I’m more concerned with the International scene that just with Radio One. Forget it! I know that Infected wasn’t as successful a single as it should have been in this country. But you can’t let those people have their own way. Wait till they want me to appear on one of their programmes.’