The 1975 live in London: a celebration amidst online furore

NME

“This is a 1975 show? I can’t quite believe my eyes,” says Matty Healy, looking out at a sold-out Finsbury Park. The band are obviously used to playing big stages, having sold out arenas for the better part of a decade now and topping the bill at Reading & Leeds Festivals on two separate occasions, but this is their biggest ever headline gig.

Delayed from 2020, today’s all-dayer is very much a family affair with the band supported by “best friend” Jack Antonoff’s Bleachers, Dirty Hit labelmates The Japanese House alongside influential groups like American Football and Cigarettes After Sex. The only special guests for the show itself are guitarist Adam Hann’s wife Carly Holt for a gorgeous ‘About You’ and Healy’s dad Tim for a ruggedly beautiful ‘All I Need To Hear’.

A reworked version of their meta At Their Very Best performance, tonight’s (July 2) gig starts with various members of The 1975 onstage, getting dressed and setting the stage for what’s about to unfold, with the band performing in a sitcom-style living room.

The concept doesn’t stick, however. “It’s really hard to do the first half of this show when I’m supposed to be all nihilistic and dour,” says Healy before a jubilant ‘I’m In Love With You’. He starts to explain the “crisis of masculinity” narrative the show is meant to explore before giving up. ”Who gives a fuck? This is too much fun,” he declares. What follows is a giddy two hours that sees The 1975 as a formidable live force… when they get around to actually playing the songs, that is.

We know that anthems ‘The Sound’, ‘If You’re Too Shy (Let Me Know)’ and ‘Love It If We Made It’ send festival crowds into sheer pandemonium but tonight also sees the material from 2022’s ‘Being Funny In A Foreign Language’ come into its own. Fierce, focused and with nothing the prove to a devoted audience, the likes of ‘Looking for Somebody (To Love)’, ‘Oh Caroline’, and ‘I’m In Love With You’ are received like old classics, even if they do replace more instant tracks like ‘Chocolate’ or ‘TOOTIMETOOTIMETOOTIME’.

A run of the hyper-raw ‘I Always Wanna Die (Sometimes), the theatrical ‘Robbers’ and the pained ‘I Like America & America Likes Me’ sees The 1975 at their outlandish best, pulling away from conventional rock’n’roll to create something far more intimate.

Still, tonight isn’t the escapist, communal wonderland we’ve come to expect from The 1975, with the entire show underlined by a sense of unease. Back in February, Healy and the hosts of The Adam Friedland Show made a series of controversial comments, with the backlash leading to Healy apparently standing down from his role as Director at Dirty Hit.

Most recently, Dirty Hit signee Rina Sawayama used her slot at Glastonbury to seemingly call out Healy before a fiery ‘STFU!’. “I wrote this next song because I was sick and tired of these microaggressions. So tonight, this goes out to a white man that watches Ghetto Gaggers and mocks Asian people on a podcast,” she said. “He also owns my masters. I’ve had enough!” Speaking to the New York Times about the podcast, Healy said his comments didn’t matter: “You’re either lying that you are hurt, or you’re a bit mental for being hurt.”

Tonight, he’s just as dismissive, flexing to the camera while singing about his “cancellation” during ‘Part Of The Band’, telling the crowd not to feel guilty about the feeling of “sexual ownership” that happens after a breakup and introducing ‘Sex’ as a throwback to a “simpler time where you could write a song about lowering a girl into the back of a van and then having sex with her and everyone on Twitter was like ‘that’s so cool’.”

“I was always trying stuff,” Healy explains, elsewhere in the set. “Some stuff I got right, some stuff I got wrong. But you know what, there’s a lot of things that I’ve said, jokes I’ve made, that I would take back,” he continues, alluding to the situation. “I’m only doing this because I want to make you guys laugh and feel good, because that’s what I think art does,” he says, before adding: “You know what, I’m fucking proud of myself.”

For as long as The 1975 have been a band, there’s been an almost magical sense of camaraderie and community around their live shows. The band, and Matty Healy in particular, has never pulled their punches and they’ve always swung up. Tonight’s renewed defiance goes against all that. “I’m feeling quite emotional. I need to man up,” Healy says onstage at one point, but is met with a chorus of boos. “No, it’s good,” he insists, but there’s a new distance between artist and audience that’s becoming increasingly more uncomfortable.

The 1975 played:

‘The 1975 (BFIAFL)’
‘Looking For Somebody (To Love)’
‘Happiness’
‘Love Me’
‘Part Of The Band’
‘Oh Caroline’
‘I’m In Love With You’
‘Paris’ (Acoustic)
‘All I Need to Hear’ (with Tim Healy)
‘Be My Mistake’
‘If You’re Too Shy (Let Me Know)’
‘The Ballad of Me and My Brain’
‘Medicine’
‘About You’ (with Carly Holt)
‘Somebody Else’
‘A Change of Heart’
‘The Sound’
‘It’s Not Living (If It’s Not With You)’
‘fallingforyou’
‘Guys’
‘I Always Wanna Die (Sometimes)’
‘Robbers’
‘I Like America & America Likes Me’ (‘Real World’ version)
‘Love It If We Made It’
‘Sex’
‘Give Yourself a Try’
‘People’

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