Matty Healy doesn’t want The 1975 to be as big as the Foo Fighters.
The ‘I’m In Love With You’ singer admits the band have no commercial ambitions and would much rather be a “small emo band” than one of the world’s biggest groups.
Asked if he wants to top the charts, Matty said: “If I started caring about that now it would f****** stink. I said this ages ago, everyone wants us to become a huge rock band and we want to become a small emo band. If we become Burial, I’m way happier with that than f****** Foo Fighters, do you know what I mean? I love the Foo Fighters, but I couldn’t do that. It’s funny, there’s something about me that is very poppy and the stuff that comes out is poppy, but the references never are.”
The 33-year-old star – who recently revealed the band decided to do their own tour instead of accepting a huge paycheque to support global megastar Ed Sheeran – admitted he and his bandmates are “not concerned about growing old as a band and continuing to put out records.”
He said: “I’ve been offered all the wrong things for the right money. I’ve never taken [those offers], and it’s not that I’m proud of myself, but that part of me has been tested. I’m not particularly concerned about growing old as a band and continuing to put out records, because we’re not remotely commercially minded. Which inherently keeps us, I don’t want to say credible … We’re just four nerds who are obsessed with alternative music and pop culture, it’s no deeper than that. I’m not worried about us being like, ‘Oh s***, we need do a f****** remix with Marshmello.’”
And so when the ‘Chocolate’ hitmakers won their first BRIT Award in 2017 for Best British Group, it was hard for Matty to “really grasp it”.
He explained in an interview with Music Week: “If I won a f****** BRIT now I’d be like, ‘Oi, oi!! You f****** [what]!’ But I was this fever dreamy, suspicious… I couldn’t really grasp it. We became this new thing and people started using crazy words like ‘Radiohead’ and that’s where ‘Notes…’ came from. I was like, ‘Fuuu** this, I don’t know how to react, I don’t know what to do.’”
The ‘Somebody Else’ band won the same prize at the 2019 ceremony, and also scooped British Album of the Year for ‘A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships’.
The 1975 release their new album ‘Being Funny in a Foreign Language’ on October 14.