The The’s Matt Johnson on pop, politics and his death-defying return

Just over six years ago, Matt Johnson announced the The’s first shows in 16 years, including a prestigious concert at the Royal Albert Hall. Then he started to panic: “No one’s going to come. No one’s going to remember who I am. I didn’t want to humiliate myself.” He hadn’t released an album of original material since NakedSelf in 2000 and it had been even longer since 1986’s highly political, Top-20 album Infected went on to spend 30 weeks on the album chart.
However, his songs hadn’t gone away; the accordion-driven This Is the Day, from 1983’s Soul Mining, had even become a cultural touchstone. “People have got married to it, been conceived to it; it gets used in a lot of films,” Johnson says with a smile, relaxing into a sofa upstairs at the band’s nerve centre in east London. “If I could compress its plays over the years, it’d be No 1 for weeks.” The gigs duly sold out within minutes.
The The’s HQ houses all manner of releases and memorabilia. Johnson first arrived in the building when he was 21 and it was the Ultravox singer John Foxx’s Garden studios; the likes of the Cure and Depeche Mode recorded classic albums here. Johnson loved the place so much he eventually bought it.
Like its owner, it has had its ups and downs – Johnson closed it as a commercial studio in 2012 – but recently he has been here recording Ensoulment, the first album of new the The songs in 24 years, as well as running a label and publisher called Cinéola. “I didn’t expect it would be so long,” admits the amiable and thoughtful 62-year-old. “But I was completely burnt out.”
As Johnson tells it, his long farewell from music started in 1989, when his younger brother, Eugene, died suddenly from a brain aneurysm while Johnson and his band – which at that point included Johnny Marr – were away touring the The’s third album, Mind Bomb. “It was a hammer blow to me and the family,” he says. “We delayed the tour by three months, but then it was so difficult, because I’d be on stage singing and I kept seeing my brother’s face.” Johnson poured his feelings into the song Love Is Stronger Than Death. “And then I went into a dark and reflective place.”
He held the lineup together long enough to make 1993’s Dusk, but by the time NakedSelf ended a seven-year silence, the band had gradually fallen apart. Exhausted by the double whammy of Eugene’s death and a brutal, changing music business, the singer realised he had no more to give. “I didn’t even pick up a guitar for the next seven years,” he says with a sigh. “It’s bonkers, isn’t it?”
He found that songwriting had left him, other than being able to write instrumental pieces for film. (He has scored his brother Gerard’s films Tony, Hyena and Muscle, along with Nicola Bruce’s Moonbug.) “I was always writing words, but could never finish anything,” he says. “I had hundreds of pages of notes. I’d get a nice chord, but then nothing.”
In 2016, Johnson was filming The Inertia Variations, a documentary about his disappearance and chronic fatigue syndrome, when his older brother Andrew, the The’s sleeve designer, died from a brain tumour. Johnson wrote We Can’t Stop What’s Coming, his first song in 16 years, and dedicated it to Andrew. When he was later filmed singing it for a live broadcast, it was the first time he had sung in well over a decade. “So many people have asked me: ‘What were you thinking about?’” he says, chuckling. “I was thinking: ‘Please let me remember the first line.’”
But as soon as the songs had begun to flow again, the comeback was derailed by the pandemic. Johnson was taken to hospital – not with Covid, but “a pharyngeal abscess that went wrong”, he says, describing the condition as “like having a small python wrapped around your windpipe”. Johnson needed an emergency operation, but was reluctant: “I’d just started to come back, so I was going: ‘I’m a singer, dah-ling! You can’t cut me up!’ They assured me that he was a very good surgeon and that otherwise I ran the risk of dying.”
Being hospitalised in the early stages of a pandemic was a surreal experience. “A lot of the hospital was in darkness, cold, everyone masked up,” says Johnson. “Because I’d been given morphine, I was thinking that maybe I’d actually died and this was a halfway house. My instinct was to get myself moving. So I’d be pacing the wards in surgical stockings with a drip, thinking: ‘I’ve got to get a song out of this.’”
These experiences inspired the song Linoleum Smooth to the Stockinged Foot. He found that, having struggled to write songs before the pandemic, he found that he was suddenly able to come up with a whole album. Ensoulment mixes favourite the The themes such as love and death with newer ones such as the education system, AI and, in the comical Zen & the Art of Dating, even online romance (a hapless man is “bullied by his bodily urges”).
Cognitive Dissident, Some Days I Drink My Coffee by the Grave of William Blake – his reflections on a changing London – and the hilariously titled Kissing the Ring of Potus (about the neocon “coup that nobody noticed”) are Johnson’s most politically charged songs since the 80s, when he sang sarcastically on Heartland: “Let the poor drink the milk while the rich eat the honey,” or addressed those “reared on a diet of prejudice and misinformation” in The Beat(en) Generation.
These are depressingly timeless topics and his new songs are similarly driven by a quest for justice and fairness. “My parents were very fair-minded people,” he says. “Politically motivated, mistrustful of the ruling class. My mum treated everybody the same and that always stuck with me.”
Johnson grew up in the Two Puddings pub in Stratford, east London, a Kray twins haunt before his father, Eddie – the landlord from 1962 to 2000 – turned it into a live venue that hosted the Kinks, the Who, Rod Stewart and many others. “As kids, we’d hear the music coming up through the floorboards. Then, when the pub was closed, we’d get on the band’s equipment and bash around.”
He formed a band at school using cardboard boxes for drums and became a “terrible truant”, eventually being rumbled when the teacher came round to ask: “‘Is Matthew feeling any better? He’s not been in for weeks.’ My dad said: ‘If you carry on like this, you’ll end up as a dustman.’ But something inside told me I would become a musician.”
On Ensoulment, Johnson sings of how, “faced with a future to which my kind is consigned”, he “escaped with an empty head but an open mind”. After leaving school at 15 and throwing himself into post-punk, befriending Wire and Cabaret Voltaire, he recorded a single for 4AD, Controversial Subject, in 1980. He was then contacted by the young entrepreneur Stevo, who included the The on the compilation Some Bizzare Album alongside Soft Cell, who subsequently scored the biggest single of 1981 with Tainted Love.
“Record companies asked him: what else have you got?” Johnson says. “So Stevo pulled this trick on Decca Records where he got them to pay for an expensive trip to New York for me to record Uncertain Smile, but they didn’t own the tapes.” After those recordings started a bidding war, he took a deal with CBS, who had Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen: “It was like signing for Real Madrid.” He returned to New York to start work on Soul Mining. He recalls “yellow taxis, drugs, smashing up hotel rooms – which taught me a lesson when I got the bill. But it was a gateway to a magical world.”
But Johnson never took to becoming a pop star. “It left a trail of destruction in my personal life, because for a while it went to my head,” he says. “Drugs. Alcohol. Being disrespectful. My partner walked out on me and I worked very hard to get her back and it was a hard lesson. Fame is like inhaling a toxic substance.”
After turning his back on fame and pop in the 00s, he has endured “a lot of debt and belt-tightening” and what he calls an “ego death”: “I went from a beautiful loft on Broadway to ending up back at my dad’s house in my old room, but it was good for me. My head went back to normal size.”
A father of two sons, 27 and 12, Johnson also relished spending time with his father again. In the 10s, he even became a local activist, fighting property developers and councils in his beloved East End, which he found “eye-opening and demoralising. There’s this illusion that we live in a democracy, but once you get involved, you realise that decisions are made in closed-off rooms. They’d say things like ‘it’s good for the community’ to sell things off when the community were literally in front of them at meetings, crying.” He briefly toyed with becoming a councillor, but decided “the prospect made me sick” and that he was much happier making music.
Two nights before that Royal Albert Hall show, his father died. On stage, Johnson was “standing there, looking at the box where he would have been, thinking of Andrew and Eugene. It was incredibly intense.”
After so much loss, Johnson says he has become “a kinder person and very grateful for my family, friends and the career I’ve had”. He’s rehearsing to tour again and running Cinéola, and he says he was up all night mixing his soundtrack for Gerard’s latest film, Odyssey. He grins: “I’ve gone from the laziest man in music to the hardest-working.”