"Sincerity is Scary": Breaking down the performance of the 1975 "At Their Very Best"

Issue #1--Introduction

1 June the 1975

This date inscription, found inside a book found by controversial frontman Matty Healy would eventually inspire the name of a remarkably successful band. Historically June 1sts throughout the years have brought massive changes for the band, either a new aesthetic signaling a new era or a first single. Ahead of the band’s singular public performance at this year’s Glastonbury festival, and ahead of what is already said to be a “pretty extraordinary” new album, the only way to say goodbye to the Being Funny era is to unpack everything that went into the album, the band’s live show titled (Still) At Their Very Best, and what it could all mean for what’s to come.

In the spring of 2023, I worked on a 5,000 independent research project on a topic of my choice, in fulfillment of the requirements for master’s degree program. Initially thinking about nostalgia, the culture cycle, and Tumblr era, I focused in on one band, The 1975, and their latest live show which was currently on tour in the United States and was generating headlines. As I looked closer, I discovered that what the band was doing was unlike any other live performance currently touring, and given that it was the ten year anniversary of their debut album, the performance pointed to elements of nostalgia and self-reference at play. I remember thinking what was happening with this show was so layered and there was so much more to unpack than just a simple artist-performing-live concert experience so I wanted to use these new tools that I had been developing to do that. I looked at their stage show and broke it down with consideration given to the genre presentation, persona presentation, use of liminal space, sincerity vs artifice, use of a rock star performance vocabulary, commentary on masculinity, and the band’s use of transmedia both in the show and more broadly in their careers. Over the next several months, I’ll be breaking down my research piece by piece to both expand and update what I originally submitted, especially to include examples and changes from the second-leg of the tour which toured in late 2023. This is the kind of long-form, in-depth research I’ve always enjoyed reading and have always wanted to write.

“Nostalgia is a sickness” — Matty Healy, February 1, 2023

A streetlight flickers on a stage. Lights shine through a window like a car coming up the driveway. The sound of the car locking, footsteps approaching, and keys jangling can be heard. The show is starting. This may sound like the beginning of a Broadway play but is actually the start of a live music concert. British band the 1975’s most recent tour that ran from 2023 through 2024, titled (Still)…At Their Very Best is part stage play, part live music performance.

In support of their fifth studio album Being Funny in a Foreign Language, the tour has received media attention in the form of headlines such as “Creepy behaviour or pop performance? 1975’s Matty Healy reignites debate about onstage kissing” and “The 1975’s Matty Healy Ate Raw Steak While Touching Himself At MSG.” The lead singer’s actions have been viewed out of context by outsiders looking in, but long-time fans of the band know that there is always than meets the eye.

Of course eccentric frontmen and bizarre live shows aren’t new. We can look back through the rock canon and find parallels in other performances, but what’s particularly striking is that none of this is even particularly new for this band. In looking through past interviews, it has been discovered that frontman Matty Healy has been talking about themes that are now present in this live show as far back as 2016. As much as this live show feels like a rumination of eras past, more importantly it feels like of a culmination of themes the band has played with throughout their career.

The original idea for this research centered around the ever-quickening nostalgia cycle, the idea that pop culture recycles every twenty years, but in recent times, it is thought that the nostalgia cycle is speeding up, following in line with what Mark Fisher cautioned in his work Ghosts of My Life¹. Curious as to how nostalgia played a role in the resurgence of early 2010s culture, namely the social media website Tumblr and the bands featured prominently at the time, I sought to identify who were these bands and what was the culture present at the time. This led me to identifying the 1975 as one of the major bands of the time, which led me to their latest tour, in which nostalgia seemed to be amongst the elements at play. The question then transformed to how nostalgia has impacted, influenced, and could be a lens through which to view the At Their Very Best tour.

As I continued to research the show and it became apparent that the show had a “highly choreographed, yet loose-feeling production that, at times, feels more like a stage play than a concert,” I decided to broaden my focus and unpack the many interconnecting elements within the show. Ultimately what this research was looking to answer was “What’s really going on here?” Inspired by Christopher Small’s idea of Musicking², which includes the social, participative nature of experiencing music in community, and through the examination of the extra-musical by using a transmedia approach, this research was interested in what was happening within, around, and in addition to the performance of live music within the band’s live show. As this show was unique amongst other concurrently touring shows that were touring by artists within the same pop genre culture, but it was not totally unique in its use of rock theatricality, this research delves deeper into the various layers of meaning that can be extracted from the performance on stage.

Initially when looking to examine this live performance, I was interested in nostalgia and how the band was using that as part of their performance, particularly coming up on the ten year anniversary of their first album, but I was also interested in their use of self-referencing both in this show and throughout their careers. Throughout the examination, I came to identify several themes at play within the show: the use and presentation of persona, the use of liminal space, the use of a rock star performance vocabulary, a commentary on masculinity, a tension between sincerity and artifice, the band’s use of transmedia both in the show and more broadly in their careers, and finally the concept of Hauntology as it appears both in the show and within the band’s fanbase and general concertgoers alike.

To identify and unpack these themes in an effort to answer the question, a method of transmediality was used. Transmedia as a methodology comes from Media Studies and Narratology where scholars have used the term in relation to storytelling and how “multifaceted representations [are] deployed simultaneously across multiple media platforms.”³ It has then been applied to popular music where “dealing with transmedia aesthetics reveals that popular music is very much about creating an artistic identity by all possible means.”⁴ Transmedia can refer to “alternating media types”⁵ which include “musical sound, audio-vision and performance”⁶ as well as “the overall phenomenological spectrum of popular music, including gesture, (moving) image or fashion.”⁷ Transmediality has specifically been applied within to popular music to examining pop personae before⁸, but “the relevance of [this] approach extends to other spheres of (popular) music.”⁹

Although the object being examined is the live performance of At Their Very Best, transmediality was used to diversify the media channels in which the show was analyzed. The first media channel analyzed was a professionally recorded concert film of the show filmed on 7 November 2022 at Madison Square Garden in New York City. The concert film, released for streaming on Amazon Prime Video in January 2023, provided a controlled baseline viewing of the show, assuming this is the version of the show the band felt was most representative of the show they planned, evidenced by their approved of its release. Also examined were user generated videos posted to the social media platform TikTok that audience members in attendance filmed and posted from each show. Even though the videos themselves are mere snapshots of the concert experience and in no way are wholly representative of the show that was performed on that date in that city, the TikTok videos did show variations in Healy’s performance and other changes made to the show each night as the band traveled from city to city in the US and the UK.

The last media channel used to inform this research was Healy’s comments given in video interviews published to Youtube and in articles on the set design for At Their Very Best published in trade magazines like Variety and Rolling Stone UK. Most of the video interviews come from press cycles in 2019, 2020, and 2022. A few interviews prior to 2019 were also included. The selection of the videos came from author’s discretion as well as videos recommended by the Youtube algorithm based on watch history. The articles come specifically from 2022 as they are directly related to the 2022-2023 tour. These comments provided by Healy help to establish a premeditation and long-term contemplation of the themes later identified in the live show. These are not new themes for the band to be exploring, but rather this show exists as a culmination of years’ worth of exploration done by the band throughout their career thus far.

In this research, the album that the tour was supporting was purposefully being excluded from examination for a number of reasons. As established by Lydia Goehr¹⁰, it is typical in many popular music genres that the album is the work and the performance is a substantiation of that work, but in this case, Healy’s performance on stage makes the show a work in and of itself in the same way that in jazz the live performance itself is the work. It has also been established that the band makes pop music, but performs rock gesture so as the album is a product of their music making, what is ontologically known as the work (the album) and the performance of the work are operating in different genre cultures and therefore cannot be judged by the same expectations. The album showcases Healy at his most sincere lyrically, while the performance element of At Their Very Best shows the band, and namely Healy, at their most theatrical. Through the performance of the persona he has chosen, Healy was obfuscating his vulnerability by making the audience question what was real in what was happening on stage and what was not. For the audience, they were not totally in on the joke and even some media outlets ran headlines taking Healy’s actions out of context and treated them very seriously. But from the stage set designed by Tobias Rylander to look like a deconstructed house to the tightly choreographed, but still loose feeling performance by Healy, it was ultimately that—a performance.

The live show was unlike other shows touring at the time and being putting on by the band’s contemporaries, amongst the likes of which were Taylor Swift and Harry Styles. Both Swift and Styles employ the use of the large LED screens which Rylander explained were deliberately not made part of the set for the 1975’s show. Where Styles’ show is ultimately about the fan service and Swift’s is about the celebration of her entire catalog (hence the name Eras Tour), the 1975 are doing something else entirely, which the research aims to unpack thoroughly.

One of the things that interested me in working with this topic was that it was current. This was the band’s most recent tour, completing at the end of 2023. The band’s final live performance before the start of the next album cycle will be their appearance at Glastonbury Festival in June 2025. Whether this performance will be the end of the SATVB show or the beginning of the next phase in the band’s career remains to be seen. The exciting and yet challenging thing about working with something recent is, for better or worse, there isn’t any academic literature on this particular tour or era of the band. But luckily for me, there were several articles published in Variety and Rolling Stone UK that talked about the stage show and spoke with designers involved in the process who were able to “lift the curtain” and give some insight on the show itself.

Another point for the relevance of this research is the fact that some audience members, and particularly members of the press, did not seem to understand the performance element of the show. As evidenced by the headlines published during the tour’s US and UK legs, the media took Healy’s actions very seriously and did not seem to account for the possibility that he might be performing a persona. For the media, Phillip Auslander’s concept¹¹ of delineating between the artist as a human being, the artist as a persona, and the artist as a character in a song does not exist. For those outside of the academic field of popular music and those outside of the fandom of the 1975, the three versions of Matty Healy as an artist are one in the same. But for those inside who possess a knowing about Healy and how performance in popular music typically works, the artist split in three is quite clear. What Healy is doing is also unique in the way that he is pulling back the curtain and pointing to the fact that he knows he is performing and that he is specifically performing this rock gesture. His comments in interviews, both in press for the newest album and previously as part of press cycles for past albums, particularly 2020’s Notes on a Conditional Form, Healy has been thinking and talking publicly about many of the ideas that now find their way into the show of At Their Very Best. Part of the goal of this research is to breakdown the show on a thematic level with the depth of knowledge of an insider of the band’s fandom as well as with the help of methodology and theory from the field of popular music studies.

1. Fisher, Mark. 2014. Ghosts of My Life. John Hunt Publishing.

2. Small, Christopher. Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening. Middletown: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 2010.

3. Hansen, Kai Arne. “(Re)Reading Pop Personae: A Transmedial Approach to Studying the Multiple Construction of Artist Identities.” Twentieth-Century Music 16, no. 3 (2019): 501–29. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1478572219000276.

4. Jost, Christofer. “Popular Music And Transmedia Aesthetics: On the Conceptual Relation of Sound, Audio-Vision and Live Performance.” Essay. In Reinventing Sound: Music and Audiovisual Culture, edited by Enrique Encabo, 11. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015.

5. Jost, “Popular Music And Transmedia Aesthetics.” 2. 2015.

6. Jost, “Popular Music And Transmedia Aesthetics.” 3. 2015.

7. Jost, “Popular Music And Transmedia Aesthetics.” 4. 2015.

8. See Hansen, “(Re)Reading Pop Personae: A Transmedial Approach to Studying the Multiple Construction of Artist Identities.” Twentieth-Century Music 16, no. 3 (2019): 501–29. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1478572219000276.

9. Hansen, “(Re)Reading Pop Personae.” 502. 2019.

10. Goehr, Lydia. “Musical Production without the Work‐Concept.” The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, 1994, 176–204. https://doi.org/10.1093/0198235410.003.0008.

11. Auslander, Philip. “Musical Personae.” TDR / The Drama Review 50, no. 1 (March 1, 2006): 100–119. https://doi.org/10.1162/105420406776092313.