Matt Healy only sang about his drug addiction because he got clean.
The 1975 frontman has admitted he didn’t want to write about his issues with substance abuse – which he opened up about on new track ‘It’s Not Living (If It’s Not With You)’ – while he was going through it because he didn’t feel he’d have enough to say.
Detailing each song on new LP ‘A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships’, the star told Pitchfork magazine: "I wouldn’t have written about heroin unless I had gotten clean. ‘I do it’ was never a good enough reason for me to talk about it.
"I don’t think Kurt Cobain tried to romanticise drug addiction; because he was so publicly the coolest person in the world, and grunge was so dark, he was telling his truth. Whereas Pete Doherty was a different character.
"That was the thing that I was always scared of: being an obnoxious celebration of that kind of sickness. I just felt so lucky. I hadn’t lost anything really. And that’s normally why people go to rehab, because they lost so much they can’t bear to lose anything else. But I was lucky."
Matt – the son of ‘Loose Women’ star Denise Welch – admitted he decided to write about his own experiences with heroin through a character named Danny on the new track, even if it’s "obvious" it’s autobiographical.
He added: "I think I’m trying to consciously hide it behind being somebody else, writing about their struggle and their strife.
"Like, ‘So I’ve got this friend, right? And he’s got this really weird rash on his gooch?’ [laughs] That kind of vibe. So it’s like, ‘Well tell your friend that he should…’
"But it’s quite obvious it’s about me, because there’s been a real reluctance for me to talk about it. I didn’t want to talk about being a heroin addict for five years – having actual nightmares of the idea of it being uncovered. So there was a humorous reluctance to disclose it in this song."
The 1975’s Matt Healy didn’t want to sing about heroin addiction before he got clean
