Describing this internal push and pull to me, he says, “I know that I’m not as smart as I think I am.”Īlong with being a galvanizing pop artist on record, Healy has also stood up for women’s reproductive rights onstage in Alabama, railed against misogyny in music on live television at the BRITs, and invited climate activist Greta Thunberg to make a four-and-a-half-minute speech on a song. Listening to a 1975 song can feel like being stuck between two Matty Healys, with one of them rolling their eyes at the other. He’s got a knack for pithy lyrics that sum up the cursed millennial condition: “Modernity has failed us” or “My generation wanna fuck Barack Obama.” On Being Funny, due this fall, he openly wonders, “Am I ironically woke? The butt of my joke?” and it might feel like he’s in grave danger of disappearing up his own ass. Healy is a hopeless oversharer who sings about love, sex, loss, and the ridiculousness of fame. This candidness extends to his songwriting. The cool professor to Healy’s overeager student, Houston recalls the first time he saw the singer in the shop and thought, Who the fuck is wearing snakeskin boots? On this Saturday in July, as he takes a break from video and photo shoots surrounding Being Funny in a Foreign Language, the 1975’s fifth album, the 33-year-old arena rocker is more casual, in an untucked button-up, white trousers, and beat-up Adidas sneakers. He has since befriended staffer Ben Houston, who guides us through a private showcase of precious wares in the shop’s fortified inner sanctum. He started coming here around eight years ago, after the 1975’s debut album kickstarted the quartet’s ascent from scrappy emo-pop boy band to one of the most daring acts of the last decade, leapfrogging genres at broadband speed, with Healy as their polarizing millennial mouthpiece. The 1975 frontman is standing inside Peter Harrington, a small, pristine bookstore in central London that caters to obsessives seeking rare editions and artifacts, Shakespeare folios from the 17th century and slightly stained dinner invitations handwritten by Oscar Wilde. “It’s always the fucking crazy shit in here, man. “That’s raunchy, that’s great,” Healy adds, nodding in approval. He’s peeking at a surreal threesome sketched out by John Lennon in 1969, following his marriage to Yoko Ono, that depicts two distinct John Lennons pleasuring their new wife-one above her waist, the other down below. “There’s someone else eating her out,” Matty Healy observes, quietly agape.