photo by Eric M. Townsend

stream Matty Healy's (The 1975) podcast ft. Brian Eno, Kim Gordon, Mike Kinsella, Stevie Nicks, more

May 5, 2020

photo by Eric M. Townsend

The 1975 frontman Matty Healy is launching a new podcast series today (5/5) at 11 AM ET on The Face‘s website, and it will feature Matty in conversation with some pretty amazing guests, including Brian Eno, Kim Gordon (Sonic Youth), Steve Reich, Mike Kinsella (American Football) (who covered The 1975 last month), Bobby Gillespie (Primal Scream), Conor Oberst (Bright Eyes), and Stevie Nicks.

UPDATE (11 AM): All episodes are out now and can be streamed below. You can read the transcripts at The Face.

Here are some cool excerpts, like Kim Gordon on no wave:

Yeah, seeing no wave bands was just kind of mindblowing because I kind of felt like, oh this is what freedom is. It maybe felt akin to what it was during abstract expressionism, which in art I think kind of symbolised a freedom. The art world was kind of intimidating to me. I just kind of fell into playing music basically through an artist, Dan Graham. It just felt like it was… Yes, really inspiring and yet kind of like, by the time Sonic Youth started it was basically the tail end of no wave. There was this kind of experimental noise… not noise, “noise” was actually a derogatory term, nobody used “noise”, except bad reviews of Sonic Youth. But those people like John Zorn and these kinds of players who came out of the free jazz scene and knew music composition. That whole mood downtown, that was just a huge influence, I think. And also, you really can trace it back in a way to the Velvet Underground and pre-Velvet Underground, actually. The Dream Syndicate, with people like Tony Conrad who’s an amazing artist and musician. I don’t know if you know that book, The Dream Syndicate? But Tony played with La Monte Young and John Cale. They would spend hours recording. Actually it was Tony Conrad who told Lou Reed and John Cale that they should put pickups in their acoustic instruments, thus creating their sound, this drone. There’s always been the Velvet Underground and Andy Warhol and blah blah blah… that was a huge, I have to say, influence on me before I moved to New York, just this mythic scene, right? It’s funny, with Sonic Youth we didn’t really identify with the improv scene, we weren’t really part of the no wave thing because we came after that, we were sort of post that. We wanted not to be totally nihilistic, we wanted to create positive stuff out of that as a vocabulary.

And Conor Oberst on emo:

Conor: Yeah. I mean it was, the whole, I guess commercial dawn of emo music. By the time that happened in the early 2000s, to me it felt very disconnected to what I thought of as that style. To me, when I think of emo music, honestly it’s like Sunny Day Real Estate and a lot of those Dischord bands, Fugazi and that shit.

Matty: Indian Summer, all that kind of…

Conor: Yeah, it’s like a branch off of hardcore music where it was kind of like, those sort of spirally, angular guitars, and the guy that said three words held over so many bars of music. It’d be like, “IIIII’mmmmm soooooorrryyyyyyy!” You know?

Matty: Exactly, exactly.

Conor: Like that, to me, is what emo music is, but by the time it got, I mean no slight to those bands, but by the time it got to My Chemical Romance or whatever the fuck…

Matty: That’s what I always use when I’m trying to talk about that.

Conor: Yeah, you know, some kind of like, Hot Topic shit. It actually had gone, in my mind, it had gone just towards pop-punk. To me that was…

Mike Kinsella on starting his first bands and the influence of Fugazi:

Matty: At that time, what were you guys listening to? What were the bands that gave you the impetus, or even maybe gave Tim the impetus that kind of bled down to you?

Mike: I mean, there were obvious ones like The Cure and The Smiths, and I’m sure… I think I was probably in some sort of metal phase that he had already grown out of at that point, maybe. So I was probably into Suicidal Tendencies and Metallica and whatever. He was sort of getting more into like, punk and indie. He sort of found the DC hardcore scene.

Matty: So like Minor Threat and stuff like that?

Mike: Yeah, absolutely. Fugazi was just sort of starting, and already blew everybody’s faces off. Yeah. I mean, it happened quick – there was one independent record store that we were allowed to walk to from a young age, it was in the neighbourhood, and so yeah. I would tag along, and he was able to… He would just pick up… I’m trying to think of like, obviously it was different, it was before the internet. So everybody was into, like I said, Smiths, Cure…

Matty: It’s kind of like that college rock scene and that kind of indie rock scene that hadn’t quite crystallised yet, do you know what I mean?

Mike: Exactly, yeah. So the scenes were sort of blossoming – I guess DC was sort of like showing you, or showing us, impressionable kids, like you could just do this yourself. You don’t need to be in a band that is on the cover of a magazine, you could be in a band and tour and just set up the shows yourself, and have other friends in other cities just set up shows in their basements or their VFW halls. It was really eye-opening and exciting to just be like, “Holy cow, we can just do this!” We don’t need, you know, like a corporate structure in place, so that was great.

Read much more here and listen below.

The 1975 are also one of several artists who donated prizes for the Raffle Against Domestic Violence. They donated a copy of their debut album on vinyl with a signed art card. Learn more here.

The 1975’s anticipated new album Notes on a Conditional Form comes out May 22 via Dirty Hit.