The 1975 talk fame, money and making music in the studio

Matty Healy doesn’t want The 1975 to be as big as Foo Fighters but the 1975 get “carried away” in the studio and forget they need to play their songs live.

The band’s guitarist Adam Hann says in the run-up to complex parts, such as the nine guitars playing at the same time on ‘I’m In Love With You’ from their latest LP ‘Being Funny in a Foreign Langauge’, and have to adjust it to just three guitars on stage.

“In the studio, we never really think, ‘Can we play this live?’ “That’s not a thing we consider whatsoever.

Sometimes we get carried away and then at the end realise, ‘Oh, S***, this is insane!’

“It wasn’t subversive to be a band from Manchester that sounded like a band from Manchester”

In the mix, they’ve done a great job of balancing this, but at one point towards the end of ‘I’m In Love With You’, there’s nine guitar parts going simultaneously.

The balance is clever so it doesn’t sound like that, but when you open up the stems and think, ‘what are we gonna play?’, you have to pick three parts from these nine to work on.”

Despite having five consecutive number one albums in the UK, frontman Matty Healy recently insisted he doesn’t want The 1975 to be as big as the Foo Fighters.

The ‘Part of the Band’ singer admits the band have zero commercial ambitions and would much rather be a “small emo band” than one of the world’s biggest groups.

Matty said: “If I started caring about that now it would f****** stink. I said this ages ago, everyone wants us to become a huge rock band and we want to become a small emo band. If we become Burial, I’m way happier with that than f****** Foo Fighters, do you know what I mean? I love the Foo Fighters, but I couldn’t do that. It’s funny, there’s something about me that is very poppy and the stuff that comes out is poppy, but the references never are.”

The 33-year-old star – who recently revealed the band decided to do their own tour instead of accepting a huge paycheque to support global megastar Ed Sheeran – admitted he and his bandmates are “not concerned about growing old as a band and continuing to put out records.”

He said: “I’ve been offered all the wrong things for the right money. I’ve never taken [those offers], and it’s not that I’m proud of myself, but that part of me has been tested. I’m not particularly concerned about growing old as a band and continuing to put out records, because we’re not remotely commercially minded. Which inherently keeps us, I don’t want to say credible … We’re just four nerds who are obsessed with alternative music and pop culture, it’s no deeper than that. I’m not worried about us being like, ‘Oh s***, we need do a f****** remix with Marshmello.’”

When the ‘Chocolate’ hitmakers won their first BRIT Award in 2017 for Best British Group, it was hard for Matty to “really grasp it”.

He explained: “If I won a f****** BRIT now I’d be like, ‘Oi, oi!! You f****** [what]!’ But I was this fever dreamy, suspicious… I couldn’t really grasp it. We became this new thing and people started using crazy words like ‘Radiohead’ and that’s where ‘Notes…’ came from. I was like, ‘Fuuu** this, I don’t know how to react, I don’t know what to do.’”

The ‘Somebody Else’ band won the same prize at the 2019 ceremony, and also scooped British Album of the Year for ‘A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships’.

READ NEXT: