I said, ‘I’ve got more important things in my life.’ There’s not many junkies that are lucky enough to say that.”Īdds Healy, “A lot of people, when they get to the point of rehab, have lost everything. A week in, I was like, ‘I’m swimming home. “Physically, it was grim, especially coming off ,” he continues. Still, he’s careful not to underplay the reality of getting clean. He says his time there, which also included work with a trained therapy horse, gave him a much-needed opportunity to reflect on his life: “I was there by myself - I mean, I had my doctors and nurses, but for the majority of the time I was in my palatial bedroom. Shortly after beginning work on the LP, he checked himself into a rehab facility in Barbados for six weeks of intensive cognitive-behavioral therapy. In order to make the 1975’s new album, A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships, Healy realized he had to kick those habits before it was too late. Not a particularly good or bad one, just a fast one.” It was easier to mediate that with drugs.” “It was the polarity between connecting with 10,000 people and then going to a hotel room by myself. By the summer of 2017, he was regularly smoking heroin. “We didn’t give a fuck.”īut even as the band’s profile rose, Healy was sinking deeper into abusing opiates and anxiety meds.
“We’d been the best emo band out of Manchester in 2009, and then the worst pop band of 2015,” says Healy, whose parents are famous TV actors in Britain. They spent years alternately mocking the idea of rock stardom and embodying it to the fullest with its nonstop lyrical wit and its shamelessly catchy melodies, I Like It When You Sleep was a breakthrough.
Healy founded the 1975 in the early 2000s with drummer George Daniel, bassist Ross MacDonald and lead guitarist Adam Hann, friends from secondary school near Manchester. “I mean, I was still doing quite a lot of drugs.” Truthfully, though, Healy doesn’t remember all that much about that night. “I remember staring at that, thinking, ‘This is fucking crazy.’ ” “There’s a picture of Michael Jackson playing the Garden right before you go on,” says singer-guitarist Matty Healy, 29. with their second full-length LP, 2016’s chart-topping I Like It When You Sleep, for You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware of It. It was a huge moment for the English pop provocateurs, who had recently broken through in the U.S. On June 1st last year, the 1975 played a sold-out show at Madison Square Garden.