The 1975: Back to my old school
A random year plucked from the ultimate Beat classic identifies one of today’s incendiary rock acts. And the fashionable pop purveyors return me to the classrooms of my long gone youth
CURIOUSER and curiouser: I doubted I’d ever be saying this, but I must. The members of arguably the current biggest band on the planet all attended my old school.
Now, this, I have to stress, is neither the Liverpool Institute nor the High School of Performing Arts not a trendy lycée in the racy Paris banlieues or a streetwise comprehensive in London’s edgy Notting Hill.
No. The 1975 were all pupils at a northern England secondary school in the leafy lanes of Cheshire, within easy reach of the bigger, badder Manchester – home itself of generations of cutting edge bands and irresistible dance acts – but still regarded as the height of middle-class suburbanism, not the usual formula manning the rock’n’roll barricades.
Wilmslow is a comfortable commuter town – many, many years ago described as the biggest village in England – a wealthy snoozeville, also one corner of the so-called ‘Golden Triangle’, that prosperous conjunction alongside Prestbury and Alderley Edge which has emerged as the preferred base of many of the richest young men in the UK.
How? This community has become a magnet for participants in possibly the most money-drenched sporting competition of all, the Premier League, and two of the biggest and best club names involved – Manchester City and Manchester United – are a mere dozen miles away.
In this flush of flash, in this well-heeled hood, the players’ cribs may be closer to mansions, the cars are top of the range and beyond and the preened cul-de-sacs and trimmed estates are rarely hotbeds of unruliness, unless the Moët et Chandon corks pop too long and loud into the early hours.
Enough though of this brief and vicarious glimpse into the lives of those rich and famous athletes and their wives and back to their counterparts on the musical scene, the aforementioned and, of late, all-conquering rock group.
Yet, why should the chart-breaking offspring of Wilmslow High School – it was a state, single-sex grammar when I attended half a century ago – be of any interest to Rock and the Beat Generation? Well, the four-piece outfit who have been conducting their own new-age British invasion in recent times, take their apparently obscure name from a literary source, if a rather tenuous one.
In short, the epithet 1975 was plucked from the hand-written scratchings in the back pages of a discarded Jack Kerouac novel, one On the Road. Matty Healy, the charismatic lead singer of the band was given a number of paperbacks when he was visiting one of the Mediterranean islands.
Pictured above: The 1975’s lead singer Matty Healy
Healy told Emily Brinnand of the Guardian as long ago as 2012 that he had gone on holiday to the northern part of Majorca and one day decided to take a long stroll. ‘I came across a house – it was a beautiful Spanish villa that had all of its furniture outside.’ He chatted with the owner, hit it off and he ended up staying there all day.
The singer explained that his host ‘showed me around his house...full of original Beatles records, signed Elvis shit, a photo of him with Hendrix.’ When he ushered him into the library, the young guest was given a pile of books connected to the Beat Generation. Yet it wasn't until around six months later he decided to read one of them, the classic Kerouac item.
He recalls: ‘I found a page of scribblings. It wasn't really disturbing or dark or anything... the important thing that stuck with me was that the page was dated “1st June. The 1975”. At the time I just thought that the word “The” preceding a date was a strong use of language. I never thought it would be something that would later come to be so important. When it came to naming the band, it was perfect.’
Pictured above: Wilmslow High School, my alma mater
As early teenagers in school, some two decades ago, the quartet operated under a number of different identities before eventually settling on the name that would see them embark on a successful professional career, one that has extended for more than 10 years and embraced a string of best-selling and number one albums.
The latest studio record, their fifth to date, last year’s Being Funny in a Foreign Language, has maintained the sequence and a recent live, capacity concert in New York City was recorded for an Amazon Prime in-concert video The 1975 'At Their Very Best' Live from Madison Square Garden, released on that streaming platform in the last few days.
The band, expanded by extra players for their filmed Big Apple appearance, perform an insistent, pervasive pop funk delivered with a neurotic panache by Healy as attention-grabbing frontman. Early hits like ‘Chocolate’, ‘Sex’ and ‘Girls’ have become anthemic emblems to a transatlantic demography from mid-teenage into early 20s. Newer crowd pleasers like ‘Looking for (Somebody to Love)’ have maintained the energy and style: pocket-sized cameos of romance and disillusionment.
The lyrics are scattergun fragments, like cut-up text messages, spiky postmodern haikus, smart throwaways reflective of our contemporary times when attention spans have certainly been condensed. The young Madison Square audience are entranced, mouthing Healy’s sparky, often cynical, thesaurus with an ecstatic hunger. It is, I guess, simply the pop life of now.
But the group’s repertoire is not without its further literate references. The band name we’ve mentioned, yet, in ‘A Change of Heart’, there is indeed a change of heart towards the very novelist who, in a very roundabout way, christened this combo: ‘I’ll quote On the Road like a tw*t’ sings Healy. Having initially resurrected the writer as a headline source for his gang, he swiftly buries him as a symbol of jaded, faded pretension.
Who else creeps into this post-millennial canon? Both Rimbaud and Verlaine turn up in ‘Part of the Band’, just as they do in Dylan’s magnificent Kerouac-like tour de force ‘Tangled up in Blue’, and I wonder indeed whether the 1975 are actually citing Zimmerman rather than the French Symbolist poets directly.
A celebrated continental Situationist is mentioned in ‘Loving Someone’ – ‘Maybe I’m too skeptical, even Guy Debord needed spectacles’ – and the song title ‘Surrounded by Heads and Bodies’ borrows the opening line of the novel Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace.
I suppose we should also add, in the interests of full disclosure, that Healy, who has hit – and survived – a few roadblocks in his own personal journey, is also the son to well-established British television actors, so his familiarity with the show business buzz is more developed than most. But that is not to downplay the achievement of him and his playmates, accomplished musicians, talented composers and assured stage performers.
I suppose in a world of genuinely happy coincidence, in an idealised universe where the spheres truly turn in faultless harmony, I would have an almost perfect sign-off for this account – but sadly not. I departed Wilmslow Grammar School for Boys, my alma mater’s original designation, in 1974 not 1975…
Excellent Simon!