Long overlooked in the tales of how post punk ended up becoming the mainstream, Matt Johnson is now rightly regarded as many things: a songwriting genius, a musical visionary and a true artist willing to swim against the current. It makes for a fascinating story and Neil Fraser must be commended for getting it all down on paper.
Published in 2018 as Johnson was going back out on the road as The The, one of the reasons that it works so well is because Fraser was never an obsessive fan. Rather, he encountered Johnson through his conservation work while East London was being regenerated (or gentrified) in advance of the 2012 Olympic Games. So it means he has a more critical eye than most and is likely to find interest in areas that others might not.
One such example is when Johnson’s father notes the type of people that he worked with in the East End docks:
I’ve always been a voracious reader, but when I worked in the docks I was staggered at how many self-educated and literate men worked as stevedores, dockers and tally clerks. The bible for many of them was The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropist. Karl Marx was another favourite. One docker would recite and quote Congreve, Dante, Byron, whole poems and complete quotations; another man was fond of the Greek philosophers; others would talk of Proust, Kafka and Joyce. Some of the most enjoyable moments of my life were spent working in the docks, talking of life, politics and the infamy of the ruling class. It broadened my reading horizons, and I read Camus, Tolstoy, Dickens, Hemingway, Mark Twain, Mailer, Kingsley Amis, Sillitoe, Stan Barstow and others. But my real hero was George Orwell.
Encountering so many self-taught types not only influenced Johnson’s parents but also their three children who would go on to becomes musicians, artists and directors.
Devoting plenty of chapters to Johnson’s upbringing, his interest in music and his recordings, the reader is in heaven due to the forensic detail as well as the observations on how it all came about. When discussing the single ‘Heartland’, I was amused and elated to read this segment:
The song had been banned by Radio 1, for the use of the word ‘piss’, but as most intelligent observers noted, this was an accurate way of describing the sort of soulless shopping centres in the deprived heartlands of Britain. The moral arbiters of taste didn’t see it that way and demanded that an edit of the track with the offending phrase removed was done before airplay could be granted. ‘Heartland’ may well be Johnson’s greatest achievement. Historian and analyst of UK foreign policy, Mark Curtis, thinks so. “I heard Infected when I was a postgrad student at the LSE. It was probably ‘Heartland’ that really struck me first – just an extraordinary song and words.
Correct. How can you not love the end lyrical run of how:
The ammunition's been passed and the Lord's been praised/
But the wars on the televisions will never be explained/
All the bankers gettin' sweaty beneath their white collars/
As the pound in our pocket turns into a dollar
This is the 51st state of the U.S.A.
On the other hand when discussing the disappointing 1989 album Mind Bomb, Johnson lets us know that
Mind Bomb was done on magic mushrooms; I had piles of books… I was meditating… doing all sorts of really deep, freakish things and getting into all this heavy Islamic stuff. Also Daoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism. I was trying to use consciousness as a type of microscope/telescope to delve deeper into the world around me. Ultimately, I did freak myself out a bit as I probably went too far but, in the end, everything seemed to simply boil down to love and fear and the realisation that all we see in this life is a manifestation of one of these opposing frequencies. I was also keenly aware, though, how the ego can pollute these kind of enquiries and mess everything up.
That might explain it.
Running to nearly 500 pages, this is a biography well worth tracking down.
Neil Fraser, 2018, Long Shadows, High Hopes: The Life and Times of Matt Johnson & The The. Omnibus Press. ISBN-13: 978-1785582301
⏩ Christopher Owens was a reviewer for Metal Ireland and finds time to study the history and inherent contradictions of Ireland. He is currently the TPQ Friday columnist and is the author of A Vortex of Securocrats and “dethrone god”.
I simply loved Mid Bomb by The The.
ReplyDeleteWalking over to the doctor's this morning I listened to the full album after reading this, even though you thought it disappointing.
It is one of my all time favourite albums. Rab Kerr recommended it and The Trinity Session by the Cowboy Junkies to me in the H Blocks. Once I listened to both albums which he lent me I bought them myself. I was surprised to see it referred to as disappointing.
Seems a great read.
Mind Bomb
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