JOver six years ago, Matt Johnson announced The The’s first gigs in 16 years, including a prestigious concert at the Royal Albert Hall, and then panicked: “Nobody’s going to come. Nobody’s going to remember who I am. I didn’t want to embarrass myself.” He hadn’t released an album of his own material since NakedSelf in 2000, and it had been even longer since 1986’s highly political top 20 album Infected spent 30 weeks in the album charts.
His songs had not disappeared, though; the accordion-driven This Is the Day from 1983’s Soul Mining had even become a cultural landmark. “People have latched onto it, been conceived by it; it’s used in lots of films,” says Johnson, smiling, relaxing on an upstairs sofa at the band’s east London nerve centre. “If I could condense his tunes over the years, it would be at No. 1 for weeks.” The concerts sold out in minutes.
The The’s headquarters houses all manner of releases and memorabilia. Johnson first came to the building when he was 21, and it was Ultravox singer John Foxx’s Garden Studios; artists such as The Cure and Depeche Mode recorded classic albums here. Johnson liked the place so much that he eventually bought it.
Like its owner, the studio has had its ups and downs – Johnson closed it as a commercial studio in 2012 – but he has recently started recording Ensoulment, The’s first album of new material in 24 years, and also runs a label and publishing company called Cinéola. “I didn’t think it would take this long,” admits the personable and thoughtful 62-year-old. “But I was completely burned out.”
As Johnson tells it, his long departure from music began in 1989, when his younger brother Eugene died suddenly of a brain aneurysm while Johnson and his band – which at the time included Johnny Marr – were touring for The’s third album, Mind Bomb. “It was a huge blow to me and the family,” he says. “We postponed the tour for three months, but then it was so difficult because I was singing on stage and I kept seeing my brother’s face.” Johnson poured out his feelings in the song Love Is Stronger Than Death. “And then I went to a dark and reflective place.”
He kept the lineup together long enough to record Dusk in 1993, but by the time NakedSelf ended a seven-year hiatus, the band had gradually fallen apart. Exhausted by the double whammy of Eugene’s death and a brutal, changing music business, the singer realized he had nothing left to give. “I didn’t even pick up a guitar for the next seven years,” he says with a sigh. “It’s crazy, right?”
He found that he had lost his ability to write songwriting, apart from the ability to write instrumentals for films. (He composed music for his brother Gerard’s films Tony, Hyena and Muscle, as well as Nicola Bruce’s Moonbug.) “I was always writing lyrics, but I never finished anything,” he says. “I had hundreds of pages of notes. I had a beautiful 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’s cover designer, died of a brain tumor. 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 over a decade. “So many people asked me, ‘What were you thinking about?'” he says, giggling. “I thought, ‘Please let me think of the first line.'”
But just as the songs started flowing again, the comeback was derailed by the pandemic. Johnson was hospitalized – not for Covid, but for “a throat abscess that went wrong,” he says, describing the condition as “like a little python wrapped around the windpipe.” Johnson needed emergency surgery, but hesitated: “I was just getting better and I thought, ‘I’m a singer, darling! You can’t cut me open!’ They assured me that he was a very good surgeon and that I was in danger of dying otherwise.”
Being hospitalized in the early stages of a pandemic was a surreal experience. “Much of the hospital was dark and cold, everyone was wearing masks,” Johnson says. “Because I’d been given morphine, I thought maybe I’d actually died and this was a halfway house. My instinct was to move. So I walked around the wards in surgical stockings with an IV and thought, ‘I have to make a song out of this.'”
Those experiences inspired the song “Linoleum Smooth to the Stockinged Foot.” After struggling to write songs before the pandemic, he found he was suddenly able to produce an entire album. Ensoulment mixes popular themes like love and death with newer ones like the education system, AI and, in the comical “Zen & the Art of Dating,” even online romance (an unhappy man is “victimized by his physical urges”).
“Cognitive Dissident,” “Some Days I Drink My Coffee by the Grave of William Blake” – his meditations 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 1980s, when he sarcastically sang “Let the poor drink the milk while the rich eat the honey” in “Heartland,” or addressed those who “grew up with prejudice and misinformation” in “The Beat(en) Generation.”
These are depressingly timeless themes, and his new songs are equally driven by the search for justice and fairness. “My parents were very fair people,” he says. “Politically motivated, suspicious of the ruling class. My mother treated everyone equally and that has always stuck with me.”
Johnson grew up in the Two Puddings pub in Stratford, east London, a haunt of the Kray twins before his father Eddie – the landlord from 1962 to 2000 – turned it into a live concert venue that hosted the Kinks, The Who, Rod Stewart and many others. “As kids, we would listen to the music through the floorboards. And when the pub was closed, we would sit on the band’s equipment and party.”
He formed a band at school, using cardboard boxes as drums, and became a “terrible truant.” He was eventually caught when the teacher came by and asked, “Is Matthew better? He hasn’t been in for weeks. My dad said, ‘If you carry on like this, you’ll end up as a garbage man.’ But something inside me told me I was going to be a musician.”
On Ensoulment, Johnson sings of how he “came away empty-headed but open-minded” “in the face of a future destined for the likes of me”. After leaving school at 15, diving into post-punk, befriending Wire and Cabaret Voltaire, he recorded a single for 4AD in 1980, Controversial Subject. He was then contacted by young entrepreneur Stevo, who released The on the album Some Bizzare with Soft Cell, who went on to score the most successful single of 1981, Tainted Love.
“Record companies asked him, ‘What else do you have?'” says Johnson. “So Stevo did this trick with Decca Records, getting them to pay for me to go on an expensive trip to New York to record Uncertain Smile, but they didn’t own the tapes.” After those recordings sparked a bidding war, he signed a deal with CBS, which had Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen under contract: “It was like signing with Real Madrid.” He returned to New York to start work on Soul Mining. He remembers “yellow cabs, 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 wanted to be 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. Disrespect. My partner left me and I worked very hard to get her back and that was a hard lesson. Fame is like inhaling a toxic substance.”
After turning his back on fame and pop in the ’00s, he had to endure “a lot of debt and austerity” and what he calls an “ego death”: “I went from a beautiful loft on Broadway to my old room in my dad’s house, but it was good for me. My head went back to its normal size.”
Johnson, father of two sons, 27 and 12, also enjoyed spending time with his father again. He even became a local activist in the ’10s, battling property developers and councillors in his beloved East End, which he found “eye-opening and demoralising”. There is this illusion that we live in a democracy, but once you get involved you realise decisions are made in closed rooms. They would say things like ‘it’s good for the community’ to sell things, while the community would literally stand in front of them crying at meetings.” He briefly considered becoming a councillor but decided that “the prospect made me sick” and that he was much happier with music.
Two nights before this show at the Royal Albert Hall, his father died. On stage, Johnson “stood there, looking at the box where he would have sat, and thinking about Andrew and Eugene. It was incredibly intense.”
After so many losses, he has become “a kinder person and very grateful for my family, friends and the career I’ve had,” says Johnson. He is rehearsing for a new tour and directing Cinéola. He also says he stayed up all night mixing his soundtrack for Gerard’s latest film, “Odyssey.” He grins: “I’ve gone from being the laziest man in music to the hardest-working one.”