Matt Johnson’s Personal Best
Ahead of the release of Ensoulment, the first The The album in twenty-four years, Matt Johnson talks to Ed Nash about enduring friendships, overcoming loss and the milestone songs of his impeccable musical career.
As an artist, Matt Johnson has always been drawn to the cinematic.
Growing up in his parent’s pub, The Two Puddings in East London, where his father Eddie put on concerts by the likes of The Who and The Kinks, Johnson was surrounded by and fell in love with three of the pivotal artforms in his life - music, TV and film.
Music was to be Johnson’s chosen artistic calling, but from the first note of The The’s debut album Burning Blue Soul his fascination with the immersive nature of the music of films he watched as a child was implicit. With his subsequent albums Soul Mining and Infected, Johnson he took this even further, blending his natural talent as a storyteller with multi-media artforms.
In 1986, he released Infected the Movie, with a video for each song, that took him from the Peruvian and Amazon jungles to a crack den in New York and in 2017, The Inertia Variations, a documentary directed by Johanna St Michaels. charting Johnson’s attempts to rediscover his songwriting muse.
His love of film and TV soundtracks has been reciprocated, in the last year “This is the Day” from Soul Mining featured in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 and Netflix’s One Day and one of his Personal Best choices is appearing in Francis Ford Coppola’s upcoming film Megalopolis. “He's chosen “Lonely Planet” for it, and it's featured at the end”, before humbly adding, “It's nice that that song is getting some recognition.”
As well as a love of artistry, Johnson has always been a vocal opponent of social injustice, and ironically, on the day we speak the news is dominated by the continued threat of idiotic, anti-immigration protests due to take place later that evening across the country, which were thankfully stymied by peaceful protestors.
Having been a teenager when protests erupted in inner cities in the early ‘80s - because of what was later described as institutional racism in the Police - Johnson sees history unfortunately repeating itself. “Periodically, we have these riots, don't we? I remember the ones in the 80s, and funnily enough they pertain to the album that the first track we're going to talk about is on, where I referenced the riots that were going on in 1980 and 81. There was Toxteth and Moss Side, it was all across the UK. It's part of the British tradition that they happen periodically.”
After a 24 gap since the last The The album, 2000’s NakedSelf, Johnson is about to release and tour Ensoulment, a record that fits into his impeccable canon seamlessly, where his love of epic arrangements blend with pared down storytelling.
During his absence from the world of music, Johnson has endured the loss of his beloved brother Andrew, the creative genius behind The The’s artwork and his father Eddie, who passed away two days before his son would play The Royal Albert Hall for The The’s live return with The Comeback Special in 2018.
Both events inspired Johnson to write songs. “We Can’t Stop What’s Coming”, the first The The single in fifteen years, was an elegy to Andrew, where Johnson reunited with his friends and The The collaborators, Zeke Manyika and Johnny Marr, both of whom feature prominently in the stories of his Personal Best. On Ensoulment, “Where Do We Go When We Die?” sees him paying homage to his father.
The The are about to hit the road again, where Johnson will play two sets a night, the first being a performance of Ensoulment, followed by a retrospective set, which will take him to the end of the year. When I ask how he feels about going back on tour, he says, “It feels good, but the big shock was when we did The Comeback Special tour, because I hadn't played in about 16 years” he explains. “Although there wasn't new material, going back into the live situation was a big step, and that was more daunting than this is. It was my most successful tour to date, and so getting over that hurdle meant that I remembered how to prepare and what to do.”
Johnson’s Personal Best choices start at the beginning of The The’s story, and brings him up to the present day, sitting by the gravestone of a fellow rejector of the mainstream, who like Johnson, flourished because neither of them was a dedicated follower of fashion.
“Red Cinders In The Sand” (1981)
BEST FIT: It’s interesting that you’ve chosen an instrumental to start with.
MATT JOHNSON: The reason I've chosen “Red Cinders In The Sand” is because it's an instrumental track. I wanted to make it the first track on Burning Blue Soul because it reflected my lifelong passion with film soundtracks.
In later years I got heavily involved in, and still am, with film soundtrack work. That was always something of great interest to me, because from a young age all of my family loved films. I loved television soundtracks like The Persuaders, the music to Zulu by John Barry, Laurie Johnson, and in later years, I got to learn about people like Ennio Morricone
Burning Blue Soul was originally released under your own name, rather than The The.
It was my first officially released record, but I've since had it re-categorised to The The, because I consider it to be the first The The album release. I’d done two albums prior to that which weren't properly released, See Without Being Seen, which I've recently reissued, was released on cassette, and there was an album called Spirit.
So Burning Blue Soul was kind of my third album, but it was the first one that had a proper release, and that was on 4AD records. At the time, The The was a duo of me and Keith Laws, but I was playing more and more of the instruments and writing everything, so Keith amicably decided to leave the group and I carried it on by myself.
I bought a book at the time, Composing with Tape Recorders by Terence Dwyer, which has become quite a classic book, and it teaches you the techniques of Musique concrète. My interest in Musique concrète was initially stimulated by “Revolution 9” on The Beatles White Album when I was a little boy, I was fascinated by that, and I wanted to find out more about it.
I was also interested in Musique concrète because I very much had a punk ethos, even though I wasn't into punk. I was part of the post-punk generation, and I was friends with bands like Cabaret Voltaire, Throbbing Gristle, Wire, This Heat, Thomas Leer, but I was very young compared to them
You were only nineteen years old when Burning Blue Soul was released, which is remarkable.
I was seventeen when I formed The The and fifteen when I started working in the studio in Soho, I was a truant, and I left school at a very young age. I was about seventeen when I started hanging out with all those guys, and that was a big influence on me. I knew people like Rod (Pearce) from Fetish Records, Geoff Travis at Rough Trade, Daniel Miller of Mute Records, Ivo at 4AD and I knew a lot of the bands.
It was a small scene and pre-internet, so the music you’d listen to was all from word of mouth. I wasn't that aware of Krautrock for instance, I discovered it through my friends Keith Laws and Pete Ashworth, a photographer who drummed with me later on. He introduced me to Can and Keith introduced me to NEU! and Faust.
All of this new experience aligned with my interest in film soundtracks, and learning about experimental tape techniques and making tape loops led to me going into the studio. Initially I went in with Bruce Gilbert and Graham Lewis from Wire, who produced a single of mine and two tracks on Burning Blue Soul.
I remember recording “Red Cinders In The Sand” in an old studio in Forest Gate over the road from my Nan and Grandad. I think it was called Stage One and there was a house engineer, Pete Maben who was very good. This was before samplers, but because I'd been experimenting with tape loops at the recording studio I got a really good education in tape manipulation.
When I started recording with Pete, I brought in a load of tape loops I’d created either in my little studio or the basement at my parents pub. We were overdubbing things and the way we approached it was quite pioneering, because samplers weren't around at that time.
Pete was an interesting engineer because he had a Dub background, and so you hear these massive reverbs. It was an organic sounding reverb, because digital reverbs were in their infancy, and in a small studio like that we had very basic equipment. It was a collision between my early pioneering sampling, Musique concrète, my rudimentary guitar playing and Pete Maben’s Dub background.
I've just finished a new soundtrack for my brother's new film Odyssey. And oddly enough, there’s a track on it which has a loop of drums that aren’t dissimilar to "Red Cinders in the Sand". So it's funny, and I suppose this applies to all musicians, how with things that occur early on in life there are patterns that continually repeat. Things that inspire you when you are very young seem to stay with you in different forms throughout your life.
“GIANT” (1983)
BEST FIT: Before I saw your Personal Best choices, I wondered if given the impact of “Uncertain Smile” and “This is the Day” for The The, that one of them would be included, but you’ve gone for “Giant”, the epic closing song on Soul Mining.
MATT JOHNSON: “Giant” is one of my favorite tracks and what's interesting about it is that although “This is the Day” and “Uncertain Smile” went on to become big hits and featured in films, “Giant” on the other hand became a very cult track. It was very big club track and a big part of the ecstasy scene.
In the early ‘80s, long before the so called Second Summer of Love, I was an early adopter of what was then known as ecstasy, that's now referred to as MDMA. I was signed to the Some Bizzare label which was owned by a chap called Stevo who was managing me at the time, he also managed Soft Cell and a few other bands. Soft Cell and Stevo spent a lot of time in New York in ‘81 and they had a friend called Cindy Ecstasy who was able to get this very powerful ecstasy.
It wasn't illegal at that point because it was so new. Interestingly, it was used in couples therapy when they realised it had psychotherapeutic benefits. Ecstasy became part of the small scene I was in with Stevo, Soft Cell and a lot of our friends. The first time I took it was New Year's Eve 1981 and going into 1982 we were taking it a lot. By this point I'd finished The Pornography of Despair but that was too extreme for CBS, and they didn't want to release it.
I’d also started writing Soul Mining and the effects of that drug permeated a lot of those songs, notably “Giant”, although lyrically it's very introspective. I wouldn't say it's self-loathing, but there's this adolescent angst - if you can still be considered an adolescent when you're 21. It was quite linear and dark. I was into a new world, and like most people that age I was confused about who I was and where I was going in this new adult world that I was now part of. I was living away from home and experimenting.
One thing I've always tried to do in a lot of my songs is if the lyrics are a bit dark, the music has to be joyous because I don't want to listen to depressing music with depressing lyrics. If the lyrics are quite introspective and thought provoking, there's got to be some hope and warmth, something that uplifts.
I knew I wanted it to be the closing song on the album, because there's a roller coaster ride to that song. There's a lot of joyousness and insecurity. On songs like “The Sinking Feeling” and “The Twilight Hour”, it's quite insecure, but there's a lot of hope in songs like “This is the Day” and “Uncertain Smile”.
How did you go about recording it? It’s a nine-minute epic.
I think MIDI was just about to come out, but I certainly didn't have access to it. I wrote it on my 4-Track Portastudio with a drum machine and I played the parts over and over again with my hands because I didn't have a sequencer. We got into the studio with my co-producer Paul Hardiman, he was a brilliant engineer and producer and a really great guy.
I can't remember how long the track was, we recorded what was on the demo and then I got musician friends to replace a lot of the parts I played because they were better musicians than me. I brought in friends like Thomas Leer and notably, Zeke Manyika.
There was a picture of you both in the studio on social media last week, which was lovely.
He came down to a rehearsal and he's a very close friend, I love Zeke. I think his playing on “Giant” is Zeke’s finest hour. I laid various synthesizers down, there's two or three basses and then you have Camille G Hines playing off that with a more melodic bass part. Then we got Zeke to come to The Garden Studio, which no longer exists, but it had the most wonderful live room, it was a very lively and aggressive sounding room, very distinct.
I asked Zeke to play along and see what he’d come up with. He played this wonderful, powerful, cyclical, tribal drumming which was fantastic. We recorded him playing that to the end and we had a Simmons kit, which had electronic drum modules where you’d fit triggers on the drums, and they would feed into these synthesized modules. It was a very early, primitive, drum synthesizer and you can hear it on the record, where the sound changes slightly.
We suddenly had this nine-minute epic and lyrically I set it in a desert surrounded by sand. It's the sun, it’s the heat, it's this very intense environment. And we were thinking, ‘Well, how can we make this even more epic?
I wanted something massive and having been a fan of the work of John Barry - and particularly the film Zulu, with those incredible chants, which still gives me goosebumps when I see that film - Zeke, Paul Hardiman and I started doing a chant.
We recorded them and overdubbed them God knows how many times, again and again and again, to create this massive sound. And then Zeke said, ‘Why don't we do a response to the chant?’. It gives it a very African feel and it's exactly what I wanted for that very cinematic, joyous closing to the album.
And although lyrically, there is this uncertainty, this insecurity, this introspection, ultimately there's this massive joyousness that then overtakes that and takes us to the to the end of the album.
There's a line in “Giant”, ‘How can anyone know me / When I don't even know myself?” And on “Slow Emotion Replay”, from Dusk, you sing, “Everybody knows what's going wrong with the world / But I don't even know what's going on in myself”. I’ve always wondered if they were related to each other.
Yes, I do that quite a lot, I often reference old lyrics in new lyrics. On “Flesh & Bone” and “Heartland” there’s the line “The cranes are moving on the skyline”.
With “Giant” and “Slow Emotion Replay”, there was a quote, I believe by a Greek philosopher, that’s always stayed with me. “The supreme fruit that can be plucked from the tree of knowledge is the consciousness of our ignorance.”
No matter how much you think you know, you still know nothing. It engenders a humility. In cases where we may start getting a bit big-headed and egotistical, it's very important to remember how little we really do know.
“August & September” (1989)
MATT JOHNSON: I'm often considered to be a political songwriter, but most of my songs are about life and love, not politics. “August & September" was about a relationship breakup that was very painful.
My girlfriend had left about a month before, and I went on holiday with friends. I was quite distraught, so I went off by myself to another island and sat in this hotel room, writing. I wrote most of the lyrics of that song in a hotel room. I think I was in Crete or Corfu, it was a Greek island. And I think they’re some of the best lyrics I've ever written, particularly the third verse.
“Then you came back to me
And I went down on one knee
With a glint in my eyes
And a rose between my teeth
And I pushed out my tongue for you to see
That I'd been dying of a thirst for your company
Then you quenched my loneliness with your tears
And our clothes fell away as we rolled back the years
But we couldn’t deny it because we couldn’t admit it
If our love was too strong to die
Or were we just too weak to kill it?”
It’s about trying to repair a relationship that has ended, or maybe should have ended at that point, where you move heaven and earth to bring that relationship back together. There's that uncertainty about “If our love was too strong to die? / Or were we just too weak to kill it?” It was a very passionate song.
It was the experience of being in that hotel, the passion, the intensity of trying to create when I was in such a lot of emotional pain. As in many cases throughout my life, the only way for me to get out of that pain is embracing my best friend, which is my creativity, my muse, which I've been very grateful to have had my whole life. It lifts me out of those places to create and to create something that could be of use to other people.
BEST FIT: Mind Bomb saw The The become a band for the first time and was the start of your musical relationship with Johnny Marr. There’s a great part in his autobiography Set the Boy Free, about the pair of you meeting at an Iggy Pop concert, and Iggy said you should collaborate.
Yes, that's true. Johnny and I knew each other from the pre-Smiths days. I lived in London, he lived in Manchester and neither of us had any money, so it was impractical for us to work together. I used to like hanging out in Manchester and I really liked John, he was good fellow. When he was looking to get a deal for The Smiths, he would crash on my sofa in my bedsit. Then our careers took off and we didn't see each other for a few years.
Then we bumped into each other backstage at an Iggy gig and Iggy said, ‘You guys should do something together’. And we said, ‘Yes, we must.’ Then he left The Smiths, so at that point I contacted him and he came over to see me. We sat up all night chatting and then he joined the band.
The band that you put together for Mind Bomb and Dusk were incredible.
Musically that was a brilliant band, with Johnny, James Eller and David Palmer, who are great, great, players. I played piano on “August & September” initially, but then Wix, who's been Paul McCartney's MD for years, played it. He's a brilliant player, he played accordion on “This is the Day.” And we had various other guest musicians on that, like the great Danny Thompson on acoustic bass.
There's an interesting story with the drums. Have you seen the film Whiplash? You've got to watch it. It's a brilliant, brilliant film about a drummer. When you listen to Mind Bomb, imagine I’m the guy in Whiplash teaching the drummer. I brought Dave to tears because I pushed him so hard, but he now says it’s one of his best-ever drum performances, which was absolutely beautiful. I was thrilled.
Elbow covered “August & September”, and they did a nice version of it. It's one of those songs of mine that is less well known, but lyrically it's certainly one of the best songs I've ever written. It's one of my favorite songs and I am intending to do it on this tour. I haven't played it since the tour in ‘94 I think, and I've changed it slightly, not the lyrics, but musically very slightly, to find a new way into it.
“Lonely Planet” (1993)
BEST FIT: Why did you choose this song from Dusk in particular?
MATT JOHNSON: Again, this a closing track. I wanted something to close the album that was quite big, epic and grand, but that song started very simply actually, the demo was just me on a little piano, with a drum machine and strings. This was the great band from Dusk, which was Johnny Marr, Dave Palmer, James Eller and DC Collard, who is a wonderful keyboard player.
Lyrically it's a song about our relationship with the planet, but it's also about our relationship with our self. It goes from the universal to the extremely personal, with the chorus, “If you can’t change the world, change yourself, and if you can’t change yourself, then change the world.”
As well as writing about societal issues, you’ve been actively engaged too.
I've been been very involved with political rallies. In the 1980s I was very involved with an early environmental group called Ark and I was one of the founding members. Like any sensible person I was concerned about what was happening with the planet, with pollution and the environment generally.
There comes a point where you carry a certain amount of anger and then you realise that you are possibly projecting as well, and that ultimately the sickness that we experience on the planet is a result of the individual people on the planet. If each person was more harmonious in their own life, the problems would vanish. It sounds trite and simplistic, but it's like if there’s a sickness in the body and it's on a cellular level. If a body has healthy cells, it either can't get sick or it quickly overcomes sickness. But you have this situation where you've got a deep, deep sickness on many levels, in different extremes.
And there’s the feeling and the thought of dealing with your own things, affecting the things that you can affect, being kind to people that you come into contact with and trying to make a positive difference. Influence the things you can influence, rather than being eaten up by anger by the things you can't influence.
In recent years I've been concerned that possibly the environmental movement itself has been infiltrated by large corporations, which may be manipulating the genuine concern people have for the environment for corporate ends, it's a complicated situation that we're in.
But one thing I love about that song is at the end, which is, “All the people I've lost, all the people I'll never know, all the feelings I've never shown / The worlds too big. Life's too short.” It's really a cry from myself to everyone else, to make the most of every moment and reach out and try to be a better person.
On the last tour, my Dad died about two days before we played the Royal Albert Hall, which was a hammer blow, because I was very, very close to my Dad and it was unexpected. He would have been in one of the boxes watching the show. I remember singing that song, it was the last song in the set, and as I sang the line “All the people I’ve lost”, I was looking up at where he would have been sat, so that song became very powerful for me.
“Some Days I Drink My Coffee By The Grave Of William Blake” (2024)
BEST FIT: The title is something you literally do.
MATT JOHNSON: I often do, although these days sometimes I drink my iced decaf flat white with oat milk by the grave of William Blake.
That’s not as good a title though!
It’s not as good a title! I've often lived very, very close to there. I used to live in Bunhill Row with an ex- girlfriend in Braithwaite House, which overlooks Bunhill Fields and that was the flat where I wrote “This is the Day”. In recent years, my youngest son's school was quite close to there and I’m around that area quite a lot.
There are two gravestones these days to William Blake. There's one that was there for many years, which says, ‘Nearby lie the remains of William Blake’ but they were never quite sure where exactly he was buried. There was a Portuguese couple who spent fourteen years investigating it and they believe they found the exact point where he was buried, which was twenty feet from the other grave, but he was thrown in a pauper's grave with about eight other bodies.
At the time he was considered a dissenter, and he wasn't very popular because he was an anti-establishment person. And of course, in recent years, he's now lionized by the establishment, and he's recognised as possibly Britain's greatest poet and painter. But when he was alive, he died as a pauper and he was treated pretty terribly. He was very anti- establishment, he was disliked by the establishment, and he was an outsider.
And that's ironic really, as we're now in an age of increasing censorship. There’s going to be more censorship coming across the internet, and there's a narrowing of what's known as The Overton Window, the permitted range of public debate. And yet, when people are dead and buried and no longer a threat, they can be then embraced by the establishment.
How does Blake’s work feed into the song?
I reference a couple of William Blake things, like at the start of the second verse, which is “The green and pleasant land”, and I put “Greedy, unpleasant land.” That song is part of a family of songs that would include “Flesh and Bones”, “Heartland”, “Pillar Box Red” “The Beat(en) Generation” and “Perfect”, which are set in London and are quite political about London and Britain generally. The line “The forever wars, the tyrannical laws, the coup d'etat, the probable cause”, and that we're being lied to, we’re continually lied to, all the time.
But musically it's quite an uplifting song. It's a folk song in a way, and it’s a song that I like sitting and playing on the acoustic, it works very well played on a simple acoustic guitar, as well as with a full band. We even have fiddle on it, which cements the folk credentials.
William Blake not being embraced by establishment could be a metaphor for you and your work and challenging the mainstream?
I've never been embraced by the establishment. I’ve always felt like a bit of an outsider. Not that I'm interested, but The The were always excluded. During Infected I had singles banned by the BBC and we’d never be invited to award ceremonies. Which was good, because I enjoyed that outsider status, in the sense of the freedom it brings, never having a set line up, experimenting and not being worried about offending people's expectations, because it's very important to satisfy yourself.
If I can't excite myself, then I'm not going to excite the audience. I’ve been lucky that I've had a good audience that have stuck with me and put up with my various excursions - doing country album cover versions or experimental film soundtracks.
Some records were more successful than others, but I'm lucky and I'm grateful for the career I've had and to have a receptive audience, because without an audience you’re just a bloke sat in your bedroom with an instrument.
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