Matty Healy is not someone who’s afraid of ruffling a few feathers. The divisive frontman of has landed in hot water for snogging audience members, got a whole festival cancelled in Malaysia for kissing his bandmate, initiated an online beef with Yungblud by impersonating him in the manner of someone who can’t string two words together, caused a stink over some real beef by eating a raw steak onstage, and had Taylor Swift fans panicking when it was rumoured that Swift and the 1975 singer were an item. But one such hi-jinks Healy got himself into resulted in one of the Wilmslow quartet’s best songs.
, taken from their 2020 album , is also one of their heaviest, a thrashy, punky number that’s done and dusted in two and a half short, thrilling minutes. Back in 2019, he told this writer the chaotic tale behind the song’s creation. The story begins with the band playing a festival in Alabama immediately after the state passed a draconian abortion ban in 2019.
“I was going, ‘Listen, I can’t not say anything, we’re in Alabama and it’s happening now’,” Healy recalled. “I knew I was at a music festival, I knew I wasn’t at a Trump rally so I knew there was gonna be people on my side. It’s an open-carry state and I walked in with no metal detectors, it was a weird vibe.
My whole fear is that you don’t have to be John Lennon or believe you’re John Lennon to get fucking shot in America, so the engines are running and we come off stage and all the security.
