By James Murphy
For the Adelaide league of their world tour, Matt Healy and the rest of the Cheshire cats that comprise the chart topping, Brit Award winning The 1975 took to the Entertainment Centre stage like WWE pro-wrestler Goldberg, with the band filmed in black and white as they walked from their dressing room, up the stairs, until finally being greeted by their adoring fans. The Manchester-based band began their career supporting stadium rockers Muse and the legendary Rolling Stones; an exceptional early tutelage in crafting a live music spectacle. With a decade worth of hits and led by the enigmatic, polarising front man Healy, who has been described as the last remaining rock star, the band delighted the teens who’d been sleeping out overnight for front row possies.
In between the charming opening set by emerging LA based alt-pop star, Wallice, and the headliners, songs by Elvis and Chris Isaac played. With his tangle of Isaac hair and his Elvis hip shakes and thrusts, Healy was giving a nod to his influences and his stage craft. For their touring set, the stage was transformed into a lamp lit living room; in instrumental interludes, Healy would swig from a wine bottle, kneel on the rug while guzzling spirits from a hip flask, or puff on his ever-present ciggie. He explained that the band had “gone conceptual”, and how, while he loved performing on stage, he was sick of performing off it; he just wanted to be a bloke.
Healy is renowned for his bold social media statements, for sailing close to the cancel zone, yet always managing to navigate his way back to safer waters. In true form, his in-between track banter traversed topics such as sexual ownership of former partners, jokes about the disabled and proclamations that they are both the greatest and the sexiest band in the world. Healy has been consistently accused of narcissism; he even wrote a song about it. If millions of adoring fans agree, though, there is no reality gap. A lingering question, is how much of the off-stage persona is a mask; where does stage Healy end and the private Matt begin?
Despite Healy’s prolific on-stage alcohol consumption, the band is tight in their live groove; he’s a libertine but not a baby shambles. Healy stated that they have often been accused of miming because of their live virtuosity. With a lengthy two dozen song set that drew heavily on new release ‘Being Funny In A Foreign Language’ and was short on 2020’s Notes On A Conditional Form, it was a set that had it all, including an audience engagement to the love song ‘All I Need to Hear’, a quantity of sax solos not seen since Springsteen and INXS, and a revisiting of all the hits, including their first, ‘Sex’, written when they were 18.
In an age where the boy-next-door pop star, your Lewis Capaldis and Ed Sheerans, is in vogue, The 1975 are a calculated throwback to the lock-up-your-daughters age.
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