“It’s very depressing to me that we are still dealing with the same issues we were dealing with 40 years ago,” Matt Johnson says, noting that many of the themes on classic The The songs – alienation, feeling powerless in the face of corporate greed and governments who don’t have the good of the people in mind, the search for connection in an increasingly distanced world – are as relevant today as they were in the 1980s. With the turmoil of the last decade, it’s good to have Johnson and The The back.
Ensoulment is the first The The album in a quarter century and comes eight years after Johnson reactivated the band following 17 years of hibernation. Those recent years have been both tumultuous and prolific. Matt’s brother, Andrew (Andy Dog), whose artwork has graced many The The albums, died in 2016 and inspired 2017 single “We Can’t Stop What’s Coming.” More activity followed: The Inertia Variations documentary, Radio Cineola broadcasts, and then the 2018 The Comeback Special world tour. With a stable lineup of The The, including longtime collaborators James Eller (bass), DC Collard (keyboards), Earl Harvin (drums), and Barrie Cadogan (lead guitar), Johnson began work on the new album only to be sidelined by 2020, which, in addition to the COVID pandemic, found him in the hospital with an acute throat infection that gave him a “close shave with the grim reaper” that could’ve also taken his voice.
All this, plus Brexit and many UK and US elections, added to the flavor of Ensoulment. Working again with producer Warne Livesay, with whom he made Infected and Mind Bomb, it has all the hope, humor, and paranoia, the scope and intimacy, and the way with melody you expect from a The The album. “Left is right / black is white / inside out / hope is doubt,” he sings on the album’s opening song “Cognitive Dissident,” and it’s like nothing has changed. For better and worse.
We talked to Matt via Zoom this summer about about Ensoulment, The The’s upcoming tour, his relationship with New York, climbing out onto one of The Chrysler Building’s iconic eagles for the “I Saw the Light” video in 1995, and how the more things change the more they stay the same. It should also be noted that, while specifics of the upcoming US election were not mentioned, our talk happened just before Biden dropped out of the race.
Hi Matt. How are you? And where are you?
I’m in London Town. It’s rainy. Well, it has been rainy. We’ve had a shocking summer, so it’s quite rainy here at my studio. We’ve just taken a break from rehearsals. And then we’re due to carry on, well, actually over the weekend. We’re still in the early stages, but it is going well.
How many of the new songs are you planning on doing on the upcoming tour?
Well, what we’re planning on doing is two sets. No openers. So the first set will be the new album in its entirety, and then there’ll be an intermission of 15 minutes or something, and then we’ll do a second set, which will be the classic The The songs. So a lot of work, but hopefully it’ll be worth it.
Are you dusting off any old ones that you didn’t do on the Comeback Special tour?
Yeah, we are actually, I’m not going to say exactly what the tracks are now because we’re still in the early stages of rehearsals, but at each tour I like to switch things around a bit. I mean, there are some songs that we sort of have to play, the really better known ones, but then there’s the lesser known ones that we like to swap around. And on the last tour we did… What did we do? There was “Like A Sun Risin Thru My Garden,” “Soul Catcher,” “Beyond Love,” “Bugle Boy.” And so we won’t be playing those on this tour, but we’re bringing in some other lesser known tracks as well. And I also like to try to represent each of the albums. So even if it’s just one track, say from Burning Blue Soul or NakedSelf, apart from just the songs off of Dusk, or Infected or Soul Mining.
Are there any Soul Mining or Infected songs that you would like to play, but that just don’t work with the live band you have now?
Not really, because nowadays if we wanted to, you can use samplers and sequences, but there’s so many songs that we would like to play, but there’s just… We’d end up doing a 10-hour set. So you’ve got to think in terms of trying to represent each of the albums, but also the pace of a live set, because what works on an album doesn’t necessarily work live. It’s a case of trying different things out and giving the set a shape. So it’s got a beginning, a middle, and an end. We experiment a lot during rehearsals, just bringing different songs in and out and see what’s going to work. But at the moment, I think we’ve settled on a very strong set, I think.
Awesome. I saw the Brooklyn show that you did on the Comeback Special tour.
Oh, yeah. Brooklyn Steel. Yeah, I remember that, yeah.
At one point during the show you jokingly asked “Does anybody have requests?” And somebody yelled out for “Giant” (from Soul Mining) and at the time you said you didn’t quite have it worked out, the live version. I have to say that is one of my favorite songs of yours, but it’s also one of my top walking around Manhattan songs to listen to on my stereo.
That’s good to hear. Yeah, funny enough, that was the one song… There were a lot of songs that got requested on the note, but that was the song by far and away, the most popular requested song on the last tour and the one that was missed the most. So I’m hoping that we can remedy that this time around.
That is good to hear. To me, the start of the song sounds like emerging out of the subway to a very busy street and then a little bit of disorientation…
That’s interesting; that song developed a whole cult following of its own outside of the album. It was a big club track in the ’80s, ’90s, ’00s. It continues to be; it’s one of those tracks that developed a big cult following just by itself.
I know that London figures in a lot of your work, the new record and many other records, but in a lot of ways, you guys feel like a New York band to me. I know you lived here for a while.
I’ve been fortunate really to live in a few different places. I lived there for seven years, but also I’ve been going to New York since I was about 20 and have some good friends there. So New York has always been a second city to me. It’s always felt like home to me. Even before I went to New York, like many people in the UK as a kid, you would read American comics in the ’60s and ’70s, Batman comics, for instance, in Gotham City, and seeing New York obviously portrayed in the old Hollywood films, so there was a real sense of familiarity the very first time I went there. There was a quote, wasn’t there from, I think it was Wim Wenders’ Kings of the Road maybe, where they’re talking about America colonizing the subconscious, and through Hollywood and through media, it’s this overwhelming sense of familiarity with what should be a very foreign country. And so New York has always been very close to my heart, and I’ve in some ways always felt more at home in New York than I ever have in London, oddly. I am more of a Manhattan boy than a Brooklyn boy now.
When you were living here, that’s where everybody was located, and then things sort of switched to Brooklyn, and things are kind of going back now.
That’s what I heard. Brooklyn is now more expensive than Manhattan, isn’t it? I’ve heard that. And so for cheap rents, people are moving back to Manhattan.
Well, cheaper rents. Nothing’s cheap.
Yeah, cheaper. Not cheap. No, it’s like London. It’s very, very… London is extremely expensive as well.
Speaking of Manhattan, I never look at the Chrysler building and don’t think of you in the “I Saw the Light” video, singing atop one of its iconic eagles.
Oh, whenever I look at the Chrysler building, I also think of me and that video. That was a lot of fun.
Fun? It looked terrifying.
Oh, it was wonderful. Well, the thing was, we weren’t supposed to do what we did with it. I think it was actually the time of the Super Bowl, because we went up there and we had a helicopter flying around the building. But the security guard at the top, he was so busy watching the Super Bowl and eating pretzels that he didn’t notice. We were bringing in cameras and all sorts of stuff. It was a fun day. It was very funny.
But I did notice the last time I was in New York, because I know that Midtown, the Empire State Building always stood kind of by itself, really, didn’t it? And you had a congregation of skyscrapers downtown and uptown, but I’ve noticed that there’s the overdevelopment, there’s that horrible, very thin building, isn’t it there? That’s by Central Park, which I was disappointed to see because I love the old skyscrapers. I’m a bit old-fashioned, the ones from the ’20s and ’30s and yeah, particularly the turn of the century, like the Woolworth Building and Flatiron Building. And I’m not so crazy about the massive modern ones, I’ve got to say. It’s losing a bit of its identity.
OK enough on the past. Congratulations on the new record. It feels like very classic The The, and you really got the whole gang back together – not just the band, which features a lot of members that you’ve played with over the years, but also producer Warne Livesey.
Warne Livesey. That’s right. Yeah, we hadn’t worked together since…
Mind Bomb?
That’s right. Mind Bomb was the last time we worked together. And he and I had always discussed working together again, and it was something we knocked about for years. And he’s English, but he’s lived in Canada for many years. But we’d kept in touch and I felt this was the right project to bring him back onto. And we had a great time, the wonderful band, the musicians are terrific. It’s the same musicians that were on the Comeback Special tour, and obviously James Eller has played with me since Mind Bomb. He was on Dusk, DC Collard on Dusk and Hanky Panky, Earl Harvin on Nakedself as well as the last… And Barrie Cadogan joined me for the Comeback Special tour. A very talented band. And a lot of the album was recorded live.
We went to Peter Gabriel’s place in Somerset, Real World Studios, which I’d never worked at before. And we spent a week down there. We had rehearsed for a week at my place, and we went down there for a week, and because they’re such good musicians, I wanted to record it fairly live. And then we brought it back to my studio to do the overdubs. But I’m really pleased with the way it turned out. I think it fits very well alongside the other albums, which is really important to me.
I was happy to, or surprised and happy to see Terry Edwards in the credits.
Yes. Do you know Terry?
Not personally, but I’m familiar with his work over the years. Gallon Drunk and…
…and The Higsons, and he’s played with PJ Harvey. He’s played with a lot of people. He’s a lovely guy. He’s a very talented player, but he’s a really nice guy, very funny. We had him, Gillian Glover did a lot of the backing vocals, and Gillian works very closely with me running my record label here, and she’s extremely talented. We had Sonya Cullingford on fiddle, a brilliant fiddle player. We had Danny Cummings on percussion who also appeared on Mind Bomb. And then other than that, it was the band, the Comeback Special band.
And to round out the gang, director Tim Pope is working with you again on your videos.
Yes. You are right. And it is very much a family atmosphere, actually. And Vicki Bennett (People Like Us), I’ve worked with them for quite a while. So it’s a real cottage industry, Bill. We have a lot of really lovely people that I socialize with as well as enjoy working with. And yes, we’ve done two videos so far with Tim, and we’re hoping to shoot a third as well.
In the documentary from a few years ago, The Inertia Variations, you said that you’d written a lot of lyrics, but you hadn’t finished any songs. Did the dam break for you with “We Can’t Stop What’s Coming”?
Yeah, and that was, I think, when was that release? Was it 2017? I can’t remember now. Yeah, the dam did break, really. It was part of that big film project, or multimedia project actually, which was The Inertia Variations, which was directed by Johanna St. Michaels. It was a Swedish production, and she’s one of my ex-partners and a talented documentarian. And we did the film, The Inertia Variations, which was based on the poem by John Tottenham, who is an English poet that lives in Los Angeles. And the ironic thing is the poem is a meditation really on inertia and idleness and procrastination. But it was that poem that really… Being involved and diving into that project about inertia actually cured my procrastination and inertia, and it became a very intense project. There was a radio show, we had a couple of art exhibitions. There was a book, a film, and out of that, that new song, “We Can’t Stop What’s Coming,” which I wrote for my older brother, Andrew, Andy Dog, whose artwork was featured on all of our covers.
And it was during his illness and his passing away that inspired me to write that song, and that kick-started my creativity. I’ve continued using his artwork as part of my, what would you say, eulogy to him, continuing the collaboration that we had. He had a lot of unpublished work. And it was ironic really, that my inertia really kicked in, I suppose, or not kicked in, but slowly crept in after my younger brother Eugene died. It was after Mind Bomb, although I did write “Love is Stronger Than Death” on Dusk. That was really inspired, I suppose by his passing. I found it harder and harder to create. And so it’s somehow strange, I suppose, that it took the passing of another brother to then bring me back to full creativity. And since then, I haven’t really stopped working, touring, more soundtracks and a lot of writing.
Apart from part of 2020 when you almost died.
Yes, that’s true. That was a very sobering experience and hopefully not something I have to go through again for a long time.
You not only almost died but you almost lost your voice, too. How long was the recovery process from that?
That was a bit of a war. I didn’t want to have the operation, and they kept saying, “This is not about tone of voice. This is life or death.” So I had no choice, and they were very good surgeons and good doctors, and obviously you have to put your full trust in them. And the recovery process, about six months, I suppose, it really knocked the stuffing out of me. I’ve had a few operations, general anesthetic, but nothing like this. And it really, really knocked it out of me. I felt like I was about 90 years old for about six months, and I had to take it easy. And they advised me not to sing for six months, which I didn’t do. But luckily, it was not the larynx, it was the pharynx. It wasn’t around the vocal cord, but it could have… I was terrified that I’d have to have some sort of tracheotomy, which may have been the case if they hadn’t operated in time. I’m very, very lucky, and I’m grateful that I got through that.
2020 was a hard year for pretty much everybody, but yeah, you had it maybe a little harder than some. I don’t know. It’s hard to say.
Yeah, it was a tough few years for everybody in different ways and hopefully not something we have to go through again in a hurry.
Though this year is shaping up to be just as crazy in some ways.
Well, the world has got crazier and crazier, and I suppose all you can do is get your popcorn, sit back and enjoy the show. We’ve got ringside seats to the greatest show on Earth. It’s very, very strange. Everything seems to be upside down, inside out, and It’s hard to know what’s true and what’s not true.
Yeah. “Upside down, inside out,” which are lyrics from “Cognitive Dissidents,” the first single from Ensoulment.
That’s right.
And speaking of your recovery, “Linoleum Smooth To The Stockinged Feet,” that was sort of about your recovery or just like what was happening while you were in the hospital bed?
I was on morphine and I was trying to… It was a very unpleasant experience, but I was off my head, and it was a very strange time to be in hospital because this was at the start of the COVID crisis where things were suddenly… Lockdowns had only just started, so I wasn’t allowed any visitors in hospital. The hospital itself, large parts of it were shut down. There weren’t that many patients in there, strangely, a lot of the hospital was in darkness. It felt very cold. It was a very strange… All the staff had masks on, so you couldn’t really see their expressions.
Nobody could come and see me. So it was very disorientating. On top of that, I was on morphine and very strong antibiotics, so I felt quite spaced out, morphine, paracetamol, whatever. And so I tried to create something positive from it, so I just started writing lyrics and that’s where the song came to me. And I wanted to try to recreate through the music and through the video that Tim Pope directed, that sense of disorientation, that sense of claustrophobia, that sense of foreboding that I was experiencing during those couple of weeks in hospital where you weren’t quite sure what was going on outside, the atmosphere on the inside of the hospital it was very, very strange. It was a very strange time.
I will say that your songs, even though maybe the production on Infected is very much of its time, I feel like the songs themselves and your lyrics have not dated at all.
No, and that’s unfortunate, really, because the political ones… I wish we lived in a very different world. It’s very depressing to me that we are still dealing with the same issues we’re dealing with 40 years ago. But the same issues were being dealt with further back in time, it’s human nature. 95% of humanity is good, people are good, people are kind, but we have a tiny percentage of psychopaths that rule the world, unfortunately.
“Heartland,” “Armageddon Days Are Here (Again),” those could have been written today.
I know, “Beaten Generation” is another one, and there are some songs on the new album — “Some Days I Drink My Coffee By The Grave Of William Blake,” “Kissing The Ring of POTUS” — that are within that family of songs, really that deal with this unfortunately similar and familiar subject matter.
When I saw the title “Kissing The Ring of POTUS,” I was like, how is he going to rhyme this? And then you did very well.
Thank you. [Laughs] I enjoy that part of the process, when I’m looking through my thesaurus and rhyming dictionaries and dictionaries and writing through, that is, for me, the fun part of being a songwriter. I like to get up about five in the morning with a pot of white tea in my little Japanese iron tea pot, and I’ll sit there for about five or six hours writing, working on the lyrics. That is part of the process I really enjoy. And finding rhymes for difficult words. Also, you sometimes have to cheat slightly because I used the American pronunciation of “Iodine” in “Linoleum Smooth.” In England, we call it iodine, but I had to use iodine to make it rhyme with a previous word. You sometimes got to take liberties as a songwriter and a singer.
Do you have a favorite song off of the record?
No; It varies, depending on what mood. It changes all the time. But I like them all.
One thing I wish the album had…I miss the The The duets. “Slow Train to Dawn” with Neneh Cherry and “Kingdom of Rain” with Sinéad O’Connor are so good.
There are a lot of backing vocals on this, though. Gillian’s voice is wonderful. Barrie Cadogan and Gillian Glover, they provided the backing vocals.
I think your voice sounds great with higher female voices, and those were always highlights, but you’re right you do get some of that on the new album. Regarding your deep whisper, have you ever considered a second career in the world of ASMR?
No, but I’ll have to consider that when my music career comes to an end. [Laughs]
You’re touring here this fall. You’re going to be here in October and November, right in the political thick of it. I couldn’t help but notice you have a three-day gap where you are not playing on Election Day. Was that on purpose?
Yes. Short answer, yeah, we decided to work around that. But it’s going to be interesting. We’ve just had an election here, but there’s an old saying in the UK, it doesn’t matter who you vote for, the government always wins. So we’ll have to see. There is what’s known as a permanent government. I think in America, some call it a deep state. Over here we have a permanent government, so the faces change, but certain policies don’t change. And there’s a lot of disgruntlement in the UK and that’s why the voter turnout was one of the lowest ever. And even though Keir Starmer, a Labor Party won the election with a landslide, he got less votes than his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn. And Jeremy Corbyn was more of a genuine Labor Party leader. Whereas Keir Starmer is more like Tony Blair, he’s pretty much more like a conservative, dressed up as a Labor Party, and people were just fed up. They don’t like the conservative party and they don’t particularly like Keir Starmer. And so you’ve got probably a situation in America where a lot of the population don’t like either candidate, and you’ve got a difficult… What do you do? There’s got to be better people, better qualified to lead a country like America. And it is a tricky one, isn’t it?
It sure is. All I can say for you is pack lots of popcorn.
Yes. Front row seat. We certainly will. We’ll enjoy ourselves. But I’m looking forward to coming to New York though particularly. That was my favorite.
