TheThe

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TheThe

It’s a worn cliché to describe music made by passionate, maverick souls as “timeless” but on returning to the songs of TheThe, via the singles retrospective “45 RPM” it’s hard not to think of them as chronological outsiders. Matt Johnson’s unique, prescient, fevered songs resonate with basic truths about the human condition and the way of the planet, so that they seem to exist beyond the perishable GM dictates of fashion and style.

Listen closer, however, and it becomes clear that TheThe songs are not so much “timeless”, as full of time- packed with an awareness of precious moments, vanishing hopes, urgent social pressures, fervent memories, so that they might better be thought of as melodic timebombs, waiting to go off in the new century. Though Johnson’s creative life was nurtured under the sodium glare of London street lamps in the late 70’s and early 80’s, reacting to punk and fighting against the trite Thatcherite pop of the early MTV era, there’s a vast scope on “45 RPM”. His genre is all his own. It’s a music of long shadows, channelled anger, feverish passions and sweetly disturbing poignance. It’s pop and rock, blues and soul, country and polemic. It spans alienated electronics to twisted funk soul; guitar tumbling swing to crimson ballads; rants and prayers to diaries and hymns.

The glaring, jarring wonder of Johnson’s collected chart entryism, is the fundamental assumption underlying all 15 tracks, that songs matter, music matters, lyrics matter, and they should be firmly built on urgent truth, with truth on top. Everything here sounds like it HAD to be made (which may partly explain why there have been so few TheThe records over the years). Bringing the songs together within “45 RPM” makes it clear that this wandering East London refusenik belongs up there with the great emotive voices of heart and insight; Jarvis Cocker, Elvis Costello, Nick Cave, Suggs at his best, even a Stipe or a Bowie.

Contemplating the span of time covered in “45”, from ’82 through to 2002, Matt Johnson says; “I’ve had some fantastic experiences, peak experiences, but also some moments that were completely overwhelming where I felt I was pretty much losing my mind. But interestingly, I suppose a lot of the early songs that I was writing, in a way foreshadowed some of the experiences I was to go through later in my personal life.”

Matt Johnson was a couple of years too young to be hit by the full impact of UK punk. His urge to make music was a matter of inner demons more than surrounding scenes. The son of an East End publican who used to put on gigs, he grew up with John Lee Hooker, The Kinks and Small Faces dropping by his dad’s hostelry. Going through phases of fascination with The Beatles, Motown and Glam Rock, he left school at 15 and started forming try-out bands.

The advertisement placed in the NME, which recruited synth player Keith Laws to the earliest version of TheThe, read ; “Influences; The Residents, Syd Barrett, Throbbing Gristle, Velvet Underground.” They made their debut as a prototype electronic duo at London’s Africa Centre on May 11th 1979 and began to claw their way onto indie labels 4AD and Some Bizarre, the former releasing a 1981 debut “Burning Blue Soul” as Matt Johnson. Within 3 years, Matt’s nom-de-studio, TheThe would release the most critically-acclaimed album of the year, 1983’s synth-noir classic “Soul Mining”. A further two years along Johnson’s journey into the heart’s darkness, he’d be risking death, strapped to a metal caged chair on top of a boat on the Amazon for “Infected”” the movie.

Charting the limits of the soul within a pop career, while surrounded by big business and cynical 80’s music, was never going to be a smooth ride, but Johnson had a dedication that bordered on insanity. Behind the crafted heartsearching on “45 RPM “ lies an epic story. Studio psychosis in New York and Hunter Thompson-style road trips with manager Stevo lie behind the recording of early singles “Uncertain Smile” and “Perfect”. The mammoth 1986 “Infected” album project- which led to TheThe breaking through commercially with singles like “Sweet Bird Of Truth” and “Heartland” saw Johnson hanging with Tom Waits in New York, and heading for personal meltdown, filming the stunt-filled, groundbreaking longform video in South America.

No phase of TheThe’s progress has been without drama to match the intensity on record. By the time of the globally railing “Mind Bomb” album of 1989- with its banned religious war-alerting single “Armageddon Days”- Johnson was pushing engineers and producers towards nervous breakdowns and mind-surfing on meditation, grape diets and magic mushroom tea. Controversially, he recruited ex-Smiths guitar ace Johnny Marr to join the band and toured the world, topping off with three wild nights at London’s Royal Albert Hall.

The evolution of Johnson’s writing is tightly bound with his personal odyssey. The beautiful singles from 93’s UK No 2 hit album “Dusk” – “Love Is Stronger Than Death” and “Slow Motion Replay” – are shaded by family bereavements. Having shipped out to New York, preferring to conduct from afar his ongoing tussle with the meaning of Britishness, he pulled off a vindicatory feat, covering Hank Williams songs on 1995’s “Hanky Panky” (including ‘45’s stomping “I Saw The Light” single).

It was voted as one of the country albums of the year in the US. As Johnson relocates from NY to Sweden, the personal stories accompanying the new songs on ‘45’ – “Pillar Box Red” and “Deep Down Truth” are bound to be equally vivid.

The refusal to accept that politics, economics and religion are too ‘heavy’ for mere pop music has led to many a misperception about Johnson. His acerbic insight was regularly seen as presumptuous. However, against the recent tidal wave of music as blank noise ’45’ reveals him as a precious, threatened species. After years of being regarded as overzealous due to the desire to talk about globalisation, environmentalism and religious extremism, (both in song and interview) Johnson has entered the new century with a back catalogue of lyrics more in tune with recent events than anyone.

Concerns of country and planet do not, however, dominate on ’45 RPM’. There is as much there about sex and city, relationships from a woman’s eye view (“DecemberSunlight”) and (as long term friend and collaborator Johnny Marr points out) “the idea of change, of something changing, your life changing”. Few who recall the song from the 80s, and many who will discover it in the 2000s, will be able to resist a soul-shiver as the words from ‘This Is The Day’ touch a shared raw nerve of hope and frustration: “This is the day your life will surely change/This is the day when things fall into place”

TheThe - Bomb