When I arrive at the front door (wooden; more ‘garden shed’ than ‘dwelling of the frontman of internationally acclaimed pop-rock act The 1975 ’), I’m quickly shown inside, and down a winding staircase. I lightly trace its bare, grey concrete walls with my fingers as I go through to the living area where Healy is waiting, wearing a faded black Fugazi t-shirt, pristinely pressed cream flares and a necklace that looks like a bike chain. Silver rings adorn his hands and his wavy hair is pushed artfully back from his face. As he greets me, I’m struck by how he seems to match the decor around him – grey, cream, gleamingly clean. He seems as influenced by his surroundings in practice as he is in his music.

If you can mentally conjure the centre of a Venn diagram labelled “millennial Bond villain’s lair” on one side, and “sexy monastery” on the other, the resulting image is probably not far from Matty Healy’s London home.

This “keeping it real” quip probably isn’t as throwaway it might seem: Healy is used to talking to journalists, and it’s highly possible that he feels a need to play up his famous candour. Indeed, his willingness to talk about his life and views extremely transparently has meant that he has been profiled to within an inch of his life in the last year or so, by publications ranging from Billboard to The Fader to The Guardian .

Right now, though, he’s trying not to get in his head about what’s about to unfold. It’s a hot day at the end of August, but the house is cool, and its straight lines and arched doorways feel directly opposed to the close, clammy heat outside. He pours me a glass of water (sparkling) and self-awarely jokes that he’s “keeping it real” as he serves it to me in an aggressively tasteful ceramic cup with a watercolour pattern painted around the sides.

I’m turning up at a fairly pivotal moment for Healy. For one, today “ People ,” the second track from The 1975’s delayed fourth album Notes on a Conditional Form, has come out (the first , featuring climate activist Greta Thunberg dropped in July, fittingly on the hottest day of the year; the album is due in February 2020). For another, it’s also the day before he and his bandmates, George Daniel, Ross MacDonald and Adam Hann will bring their slick, everything-inflected pop-rock to headline Reading and Leeds Festivals , hallowed rites-of-passage for British 16- and 17-year-olds thirsty for booze and sunburn. For a band who grew up attending the festivals every year (Healy says he “slept at the train station, went ten years in a row”) it will be their biggest set of shows to date – if not in physical size then certainly in emotional stature.

I’m initially interested in whether the relentless synthesis of his character by writers has affected him, and how. Healy sits back – we’ve moved to an enormous cream sofa with various _Kinfolk_-esque fluffy and woolly blankets by the side of it – rolling the question over in his brain a few times, before opening the floodgates (Healy, he would be the first to admit, is medically unable to shut up once he gets going). “I’d have to say yes. In the same way that our relationship with our fans has become almost like, this creative dialogue, because the internet is so inherently aesthetic and creative, I learn a lot from there. The internet works in real time, and I’ve had a lot of explaining to do."

Healy sometimes comes under fire for certain actions (though he’s also known for being totally willing to apologise when he thinks it necessary), and he’s courting controversy right now, in fact. Not long before our interview, at a show in Dubai, he kissed a male audience member, defying laws in the UAE against homosexuality. He was criticised online by conservatives, as well as left-wingers who worried he’d endangered a queer person (videos of the incident were circulated). But he maintains that, as the audience member remains safe, he did the right thing.

“I’ve spent five years on stage, looking at exponentially queerer queerer, and more open young people. If you do that every night, you can’t ignore those kids’ faces."

Ever-forthright, he brings the issue up himself. “I believe that if you are a young person and you’re not representative of your government – if you’re a left-leaning person in an oppressive place – the only common understanding you’re going to get is through art and culture. And if I kiss someone in Dubai or whatever, I have to stand up for ideas that promote equality, and that’s sometimes going to get me in trouble a little bit.”