This past weekend, North London’s Finsbury Park opened up for festival season, welcoming the glitter-cheeked hordes for a triple bill of gigs, headlined by Jamie T, Pulp and, on Sunday, one of the most-discussed bands in the world right now, The 1975.
Sunday’s event was an all-day affair, taking in the Springsteen hero-worship of super-producer Jack Antonoff’s Bleachers, as well as The Japanese House, Cigarettes After Sex, emo royalty American Football, and more, with most of the acts on the bill tying in to 1975 lore. Antonoff co-produced the band’s latest LP Being Funny In a Foreign Language, while American Football are a known influence. Their iconic 1999 self-titled album cover, which features a white house with a pointed roof – a symbol of American suburban ennui – is referenced by The 1975 onstage as part of their current Still At Their Very Best tour (frontman Matty Healy mounts a similar roof to perform the emo-rap-influenced track “I Like America and America Likes Me”).
The first half of the night was dedicated to Being Funny In a Foreign Language (the highlight of which was Healy bringing out his father, the actor Tim Healy, to perform a sweetly husky-voiced version of “All I Need To Hear”). The second focused on the hits.
An apartment was assembled onstage like a TV set, with camera operators and makeup artists also swirling around. The conceit: that everything is a performance, with Healy as this fictional show’s belligerent star, swigging from a wine bottle, playing the role of the most annoying guy at the afterparty (the extent to which you believe this is an act is up to you). One minute he vamped for the synthy live mainstay “Love Me”, and the next he sang mournfully about Sainsbury’s on “The Ballad of Me and My Brain”.
Over the course of a marathon two hours, the band veered between fan service (“Medicine”; “Sex”) and the crowd-pleasers – “It’s Not Living (If It’s Not With You); “Somebody Else” – you’d expect from a big event like this. And while the set occasionally felt haphazard, particularly towards the end, it is beyond question at this point that The 1975 are a well-oiled machine with the catalogue and ability to successfully headline large, open-air events with their eyes shut. They would not be playing Finsbury Park the day after a newly reformed Pulp were that not the case.
The variable at any 1975 show, then, is not really the band’s quality, but how the current media perception of Healy colours their performance, and what effect that has on what is happening on stage.
On Sunday night, that was an interesting question. There are a number of conversations currently surrounding Healy – from his recent appearance on the edgelord eye-roll of a podcast The Adam Friedland Show, which has now been deleted from streaming platforms, to his reported brief relationship with the biggest popstar in the world, Taylor Swift – some of which he addressed on stage. At one point, he noted: “Some stuff I got right, some stuff I got wrong… There’s a lot of things I’ve said, jokes that I’ve made, there’s probably a couple of f***ing songs I’d take back if I had the chance.” Ultimately, he told the crowd, “I’m f***ing proud of myself”, to great applause.
Despite the recent furore, neither casual listeners nor the band’s diehards seemed put off – in fact, in typically irony-steeped 1975 fan style, many Gen Z-ers roamed Finsbury Park in shirts emblazoned with slogans like “I Hate Matty Healy” and “Matty Healy? Never Heard of Him”).
After a particularly spiky version of “People” – a raw-edged final song that seemed to betray a level of frustration – Healy finished the show by crawling through a TV screen, having taken bites from a raw steak and knelt before video clips of Andrew Tate (this is also part of the other At Their Very Best gigs, though it usually happens in the middle).
It was a fitting denouement to a show by a band and frontman who seem, for better or worse, to constantly be asking how much is real and how much is performance. And though this gig, with its slightly baggy set and elephants in the room, may not have been quite The 1975 at their very, very best, the band’s commitment to that question, plus their enviable discography, still made it a show worth seeing.
