Ahead of their return to the Sydney Opera House, we spoke to iconic songwriter, Matt Johnson, about the latest record, the purgatory of hospital, and the impact of grief on songwriting.

It’s a Friday night, and due to the water being disconnected at my house, I’m forced to share a glass of wine rather than water—virtually—with one of Britain’s acclaimed songwriters, who began his career at just 12 years old. Matt Johnson is the creative force behind the influential post-punk band, The The. Known for his deep, romantic, melancholic, and politically astute lyricism, the band's early albums, such as Soul Mining (1983) and Infected (1986), gained great critical acclaim, leading to the cult hit single, “This Is The Day,” being featured in one of  RUSSH’s favourite films,  Allan Moyle’s Empire Records. Though there have been various lineup changes and collaborations throughout The The's lengthy career—such as working with Johnny Marr of The Smiths or, more recently, Barrie Cadogan—Johnson has remained the unifying voice behind the band.

Grief has been a pivotal influence on Johnson’s periods of silence and subsequent productivity. He released the "Comeback Special" in 2018 ahead of 2024’s full LP release, Ensoulement, the first full album in 25 years. Ensoulement still fits seamlessly into The The’s canon despite the time it took to come to fruition, so I’m curious to know what the unifying themes or threads are that allow it to fit in so cohesively. With classic self-deprecatory and very English wit, Johnson posits that it's just that he “hasn’t evolved.” Johnson quickly corrects himself, saying, “Well, actually, I did,” explaining that the cohesion comes from bringing in his former engineer and co-producer, Warne Livesey—who worked on Mind Bomb and Infected—with whom he had kept in touch for some time.

The result is a record that sounds like musicians playing in a room together, not something pieced together via ProTools. Johnson explains, “That was always the intention, because the musicians are so good that I really wanted to capture the spirit that we had on the last tour. And so when I was writing the songs, it was with that in mind—that they would be played live in the recording as well as obviously played live on tours. When we rehearse, we tend to sit in a small circle. I've got these old wooden chairs, and we sit in a circle, almost knee to knee, and we play at a very low level acoustically, just to build up the dynamics and figure out the parts. So we did that, demoed it, and rehearsed it at my place.” Johnson then took the band to Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios, which sounds idyllic and is like a “cathedral,” surrounded by a moat in the English countryside, to lay down the bones of the record. Johnson tells me that it was a very civilised experience, with the band recording for 10 hours, having one glass of wine, and being in bed by 11pm. No wonder Ensoulement is imbued with a great degree of sophistication.

The world has changed dramatically since Johnson’s last visit to the Sydney Opera House, on both a personal and global scale. Perhaps most notably for Johnson was his hospitalisation during the pandemic. “I got struck down with an infection. It was nothing to do with COVID, but I had some sort of throat situation, an abscess in the throat, and it was life-threatening, so I nearly died. I was hospitalised at the height of the hysteria,” leading to the track "Linoleum Smooth to the Stockinged Foot,” which sounds like an auditory hallucination of purgatory fused with a kind of Victorian literary memory, with policemen and amputations. “But the funny thing was, I was on morphine, and I started jotting things down. I wanted to have something creative or positive come out of the experience [...] I was on morphine in this dark, cold space, in an empty ward, and everyone was masked up, and I wasn't sure if I had died or not, because it was almost like purgatory—a sort of halfway house.” Johnson compared the experience to a Tarkovsky film, which is unsurprising given his label, Cinèola, which is dedicated to ‘music to watch films by’ and his former soundtrack work.

Leaving Soviet filmmaking aside, there is a lot of humour on Ensoulement, particularly if you listen to “Zen and the Art of Dating,” which speaks to the human desire to not be alone and phone addiction while simultaneously eating crisps. “It’s a very British thing, isn’t it? To have crisps at the pub. What do they call it when you have the nuts and the crisps? A pub salad.” Johnson explains the perspectives within the song about online dating and quotes the lyrics. The The have always been a lyrically dense band, so I wonder if there is any anxiety about playing live, especially in such world-renowned venues. Johnson says, “I'm fine now, but the first few shows, I did have moments where I was forgetting. I don't get nerves, I don't get stage fright, and usually, I'm very relaxed. But in Oslo, I think for the first time in my career, I spooked myself because I kept forgetting the words, and it's never happened to me before. And there's a lot of words, there's two sets, a lot of lyrics to remember, and I kept messing up."

Often considered a deeply political lyricist, I decided to probe Johnson on the love song instead, having just listened to “I Want to Wake Up With You” three times ahead of our call. “I often get accused of being a political songwriter, but probably only about 20% of my songs are political.

Most of them are about love and life and loss.” Johnson continues, “I put a lot of effort and care into the love songs. And on this tour we're also playing—one which I hadn't performed in a long time—'August & September,' which was an intense song. It's about a relationship breakup, and then trying to get back together, and then realising you probably shouldn't even try to get back together again.” Even though “I Want to Wake Up With You” speaks to jealousy and possession, Johnson feels it is one of the most tender songs he has ever written and is particularly proud of the second verse that time travels. “And it's not about one particular person; it's a composite of different situations. What I wanted to get at, particularly in that verse, is the attraction between two people, and there's the moment just before consummation, so just that leading up to that point [...] the walls are dissolving, and they're both realising there's mutual attraction.” However, the conversation doesn’t stop and dissolve into post-coital smoke. Johnson continues, “As we grow older, there's the realisation that everything's cyclical, and love, like summers, like seasons, moves on. But it’s part of life. It's nothing to be too upset about. And summer, it doesn't dissipate—it just moves elsewhere. So the idea of one's love and one's affections transferring to a different situation or to a different person is sort of gentle and philosophical. And I was quite pleased with that song.”

While songs written in Johnson’s late teens like “Uncertain Smile” speak to the breakdown of romantic relationships—which is the greatest loss for some teenagers—the loss of his two brothers and the subsequent grief has also been a catalyst for his creativity. “Unfortunately, I've experienced a lot of bereavement in my life, but before that, the most distressing things that happened to me were relationship breakups or these sort of unrequited infatuations, which then invest those songs with a certain intensity. Grief has a different intensity.”

For Johnson, who lost two of his brothers at tragically young ages, he “can't think of anything worse than grief, really, especially for my parents. I mean, losing a child, I think, is the worst thing that anybody can go through.” However, the unbearable grief of losing family members has allowed Johnson to feel things more deeply than he had in the past and fostered a need for greater human connection and creativity. “I remember after my older brother Andrew died in 2016, that's what really stimulated me to get back to songwriting again, doing what I love. My appreciation of life and of friendships has only intensified and increased, having gone through those things. Even on tour, I was saying to some of my bandmates, I just never take it for granted. Maybe some musicians do, but I really try to keep a very fresh, grateful attitude because it's—you know—I'm doing a job that I love. Each day you arrive in these interesting new cities, meeting good people, good audiences. And I really, I probably appreciate it more now than I did during my first tours, where I think, like many young musicians, there's a lot of egotism involved, a lot of impatience—you know, more and more and more success, and nothing's very satisfying. I certainly went through a period like that, and in later years, having gone through very powerful personal experiences, I think what you say is right, it certainly intensifies love of life.”

For information on The The tour dates, visit https://www.thethe.com/

Want more music? Read our review of Thom Yorke's recent performance at the Sydney Opera House.

Feature image via The Sydney Opera House.