Few frontmen polarise opinion quite like Matty Healy. The greatest popstar of his generation or an irritant of epic proportions depending on who you ask, there’s absolutely no denying his notoriety, not least because his antics during The 1975’s most recent live dates have been the talk of TikTok for months.
Pulling up in London on the same day the band were nominated for three BRITs – including Album of the Year for 2022’s Being Funny In A Foreign Language – the playfully-titled ‘The 1975 At Their Very Best’ tour more than lived up to its billing. Over the course of two and a half hours, fans were treated to some truly theatrical staging, a plethora of huge hits and A-list interval entertainment courtesy of Taylor Swift.
Playing out across a set cleverly replicating a two-storey house, the first half of the show turned all perceived notions of arena rock on its head. Devoted almost exclusively to material from their latest LP, it saw band members stationed in different rooms while Healy roamed the set playing the role of louche rockstar, mumbling, chain-smoking and alternating swigs from a bottle of wine and a hip flask. Impressively, none of these affectations distracted from the music, be it the piano-powered groove of Oh Caroline, About You’s slow-burning shimmer or the stunning vocal harmonies that closed out When We Are Together.
Nevertheless, it was an enjoyable if worryingly convincing portrayal, made doubly disorientating every time he broke the fourth wall by eyeballing an artfully positioned video camera, embracing a stagehand, or by explicitly acknowledging the artifice in lines like, “So here we are, method acting.” The performance reached its famously surreal climax with Healy alone on stage, stripped to the waist, devouring lumps of raw steak and performing press-ups before crawling into a TV.
Preceding a more straightforward second act in which Healy switched back into conventional frontman mode, Taylor Swift appeared through a door, strapped on an acoustic guitar and gave her latest smash Anti-Hero its live debut, before covering early 1975-track The City. Any worries that the band had been upstaged by the world’s biggest popstar were instantly allayed by the barrage of big singles that followed, including fan favourites Robbers, The Sound and It’s Not Living If It’s Not With You.
“The thing about us is we just keep getting better, baby,” Healy had bragged following Chocolate, displaying some of the cockiness that his critics find so maddening. And yet on last night’s evidence, he’s right: The 1975 might just be the most compelling pop band on the planet right now.
