After big hits in the 80s, success went to his head – and his life fell apart. Johnson explains how he came back after grief, illness and 24 long years
Just over six years ago, Matt Johnson announced the The’s first shows in 16 years, including a prestigious concert at the Royal Albert Hall. Then he started to panic: “No one’s going to come. No one’s going to remember who I am. I didn’t want to humiliate myself.” He hadn’t released an album of original material since NakedSelf in 2000 and it had been even longer since 1986’s highly political, Top-20 album Infected went on to spend 30 weeks on the album chart.
However, his songs hadn’t gone away; the accordion-driven This Is the Day, from 1983’s Soul Mining, had even become a cultural touchstone. “People have got married to it, been conceived to it; it gets used in a lot of films,” Johnson says with a smile, relaxing into a sofa upstairs at the band’s nerve centre in east London. “If I could compress its plays over the years, it’d be No 1 for weeks.” The gigs duly sold out within minutes.
