Amber Bain – aka the Japanese House – has already started her set at the Barfly in Camden when a small party sweeps up the stairs into the room where she is playing. There are a handful of people from Dirty Hit, her label, along with three of the four members of her labelmates the 1975, including Matt Healy, the group’s singer and leader, and her producer. They find a tiny pocket of space in the back corner, and heads begin to turn. Within seconds, the three of them begin to receive a stream of supplicants, looking for a hug, a kiss on the cheek. Guitarist Adam Hann – no relation – receives the fewest. Drummer George Daniel is next. But Healy doesn’t so much get approached as have a receiving line of fans awaiting his benediction. He smiles. “These are my people,” he says.

It’s only moments, though, before it’s too much, and Healy and Hann signal to the sound engineer to let them into the soundboard area so they can watch the show without being bothered. Everyone who is aware of their presence keeps turning, craning, looking with various degrees of ostentation, from the poorly disguised stretch-and-turn to the outright and unapologetic stare.

A few minutes from the end of the show, the 1975’s manager decides they need to leave before the rush. The party leaves en masse, and is instantly pursued by a buzzing, kinetic swarm. “I feel bad leaving early,” one young woman says, trying to fight her way to the stairs. “But I have to get a photo.” One boy, closer to the fleeing group than the girl he’s with, shouts back: “Quick! Quick! Give me your phone! I’ll get them!”

But neither succeeds. Healy, Daniel and Hann are shepherded into a side corridor and away. In the Japanese House’s dressing room, Healy laughs. He’s used to it.

He has to be used to it, really. After a decade or so of trying to be pop stars, Healy and his bandmates have become the real thing. Their self-titled first album was a UK No 1 in autumn 2013, its cunning amalgam of more pop styles and techniques than you could shake a stick at – a bit of emo, a bit of R&B, a bit of funk pop, a bit of the Streets – striking a chord with a young audience for whom Healy’s self-lacerating lyrics must have seemed like a dramatic step towards adulthood. But you don’t have to be a kid to like them: the 1975 were a band I expected to hate when I first heard that album. Instead I was taken aback by both their sense of ambition and by Healy’s lyrical frankness: he wrote not about the party life of the 20-something, but about the fallout from the party. He might not see the link, but I heard something in common with another of my favourite lyricists, Craig Finn of the Hold Steady. There was a groping for emotional and intellectual clarity – not always fulfilled, but attempted – that seemed a world apart from most of his pop contemporaries. Then, two years ago, I interviewed him for the first time, and I’ve rarely been so taken aback by someone’s desire to spill everything. At one point I had to say to him that he really shouldn’t be telling me all this stuff, because I would be duty-bound to print it, and it would rebound on his personal life. It was one of the rare interviews that you find yourself fascinated to transcribe.

The 1975’s current single, Love Me

And so I’m unusually excited about their second album – I Like It When You Sleep, for You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware of It, due next February – which is the one that should turn their already large and fervent fanbase into a huge and seething following.

A few weeks before that Camden gig, on a broiling day in Los Angeles, with the temperature rising past 100F, I had found Healy and the album’s producer playing tracks from the record in the studio. It’s a panoramic album, a step on from their debut. It’s awfully long – but Healy says it needs to be to capture what has happened to him since he last wrote a set of songs. It veers from the Bowie-meets-Gabriel art-funk of the lead single, Love Me, through She Lays Down, an acoustic ballad about his mother’s postnatal depression, to Ugh, a strange splurge of a song that is Healy reflecting on his relationship with cocaine, to She’s American, a sharp pop song about being an Englishman desired by American girls. It’s good. If this is the album that determines whether the 1975 become U2 or Big Country, they’ve staked everything on the former outcome.

Sitting on the studio’s terrace, sucking on a terrifyingly strong joint, Healy considers his desire to be not just a star, but a huge star, the kind still talked about 30 years later. “I sometimes have a fear of wearing that on my sleeve,” he says. “But there’s no room for shrinking violets, not when everything’s been done. The only thing my generation has left is to do things better than they were done before, and you can’t do that if you want to be an indie band who pretends they don’t care so they don’t get judged on being shit.” He has not changed in his approach to interviews, evidently.

I started being immersed in worlds I’d never experienced before. Big pop stars come along and want to get off with you

The strange thing is that Healy hasn’t found becoming a star all that easy, or that fulfilling. It took 10 years to happen, with the group moving through a succession of identities – Drive Like I Do, the Slowdown and more – getting rejected by record companies with many of the same songs that then became hits when released as the 1975. And that long lag meant that by the time he became a star, it couldn’t live up to his expectations. “I thought it would be like: ‘I’m not the person I used to be! Now I can walk into a room and talk to all these people who three years ago I was fucking wanking in a cubicle looking at!’” Instead, he says, it became a world of consumption – the inevitable drink and drugs, but also consuming the presence of other famous people. “I started being immersed in worlds and social hierarchies I’d never experienced before. So big pop stars come along and want to get off with you or be your mate, and you start consuming that.”



And when he met people he admired, he had a gift for embarrassing himself – on finally meeting his hero David Byrne backstage at a festival, all he could manage to do was drop a bag of Haribo at his feet and blurt out, “Soz, mate!”

The rise to fame, and the pressures it has placed on Healy, are recurring themes on the new album. Not in a Thom Yorke-esque God-I-Hate-Being-In-A-Rock-Band way – Healy can’t help but be funny – but in the sense that he’s taking a microscope to his life and finding it wanting. In the ballad Somebody Else, he confesses to no longer wanting a lover, but still picturing her body with somebody else; in Change of Heart – written at his low point, earlier this year – he is told “I’ve been so worried about you lately / You look shit / And you smell a bit.” And in The Ballad of Me and My Brain, perhaps the oddest song ever recorded by a band with fans who scream through a gig, he spends four minutes trying to locate his psyche. The people who say the 1975 are just another boyband couldn’t be more wrong if they claimed Jeremy Corbyn was planning an alliance with Ukip.

Matthew Healy, with Adam Hann behind, performing in Atlanta, Georgia, 2014. Photograph: Chris McKay/WireImage

Last autumn the attention of another celebrity took him to another level, a secret garden of fame. Taylor Swift was pictured at a 1975 show, and rumours abounded that the pair were an item. He was drawn into her world – “The things that surround her are like Barack Obama. I fell for her a little bit, but everyone falls for Taylor Swift” – and then discovered, to his horror, what it meant to be linked with Swift. “The day after she’d been to a show of ours, someone sent me a screenshot of E! News with the headline ‘Who is Matt Healy?’ That freaked me out. I’m not ready to indulge in that world and I’m not ready to be judged by that world.”

This all came as the group were approaching the end of two years of solid touring in front of crowds that were growing ever bigger and ever more voracious. It was like, Healy says, being in a “really glamorous version of Dawn of the Dead. Instead of being followed by zombies, it was iPhone-clutching kids. There’d be 100 kids between the tour bus and the stage door, when I’m in my boxers with a hangover. So my first reaction with human beings is in a resentful, semi-clothed situation – ‘Matty! Matty! Matty!’ – and I’d be, ‘They don’t even care about the music! They’ve just got their phones out!’”

Healy found himself tumbling towards a crisis, which arrived on 6 December, onstage in Boston. “There was girl stuff,” he says. “There was family stuff. There was financial stuff. There was drug stuff. I remember hearing the crowd and having an identity crisis. I thought: ‘If you want to see a show, I’ll give you a fucking show. If you’ve come to see the jester drink himself into a slumber, I’ll give it to you.’ I felt like I’d become an idea as opposed to being a person.”

At one point, a fan shouted, “I love you, Matty!” He’s ashamed of his response. “What did I say to the poor fucking girl? ‘You don’t have the right to love me. You don’t know me. I love you but you don’t get to love me.’ Jesus. Can you imagine your favourite band shouting that at you? What a dickhead. What a horrible thing to say to a kid who fucking does love me.”

At the show’s end, Healy fell to the stage and refused to leave. “George carried me off, cos I would have stayed there, apparently. I just wanted to sit there and do something you don’t. It was so blurry and of such a particular colour: I remember everything as orangey yellow.”

The easy reaction to take – and one we see again and again when members of groups with startlingly passionate teenage followings hit a wall, as opposed to troubled stars with middle-aged male followings, like Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy – is to say: suck it up, pal. You’re in a band. People love you. You’re making money. Grow a pair.

Healy also faces the problem of being judged by the identity of his parents – actors Denise Welch and Tim Healy – and the presumption that this meant he was destined for showbiz success, despite the fact they are TV regulars with some famous friends, rather than record label executives. But that’s unfair; if Tweedy is entitled to the benefit of the doubt, so is Healy.

The passion of the teenage fans is one of the things that makes the 1975 fascinating. Their passion, in combination with Healy’s outspokenness, makes for a sometimes combustible combination. He says he has “the fear of appropriating issues to look intelligent – Sting syndrome” – but he also says, “I have 450,000 young women [followers on Twitter] and I genuinely believe the empowerment of young women is the most important thing in the world and will lead to the destruction of injustice. So what do I do with that? I try to guide them.”

A young Matt Healy with his parents Tim Healy and Denise Welch at home in 1997. Photograph: Rex Shutterstock

As fans are wont to do, they seize on his every word, but sometimes those words aren’t thoroughly thought through. He’s a patron of the British Humanist Association, and dedicatedly opposed to organised religion. Unusually for a public figure, he has also included Islam in the list of religions for which he has no time (“I saw a film about Islam the other night, with people saying things like ‘I’m a Muslim and I’m white’ or ‘I’m a Muslim and I’m an American’ or ‘I’m a Muslim and I’m a patriot.’ You didn’t see any ‘I’m a Muslim and I’m gay.’ Or ‘I used to be a Muslim and I’m fine’), which last August saw him get himself in trouble on Twitter.

He had tweeted: “Isis are cutting little girls heads off and you want to challenge a non-religious, humanist perspective? I don’t understand the world at all.” When challenged by a young Muslim woman running a Harry Styles-themed Twitter account, he responded: “I resent being ‘educated’ by a Harry Styles fan account.” Suddenly, across the internet, he was being accused of being both Islamophobic and sexist. “I lost my cool, and my cool is my thing,” he says. “It was like I’d walked outside with my fucking boxers on. I really did feel like I’d gone on stage and forgotten my trousers.” So why did he do it? “What I was really saying was: don’t start trying to educate me on fucking Islam when you’re 13. If you’re telling me to stay in my lane, stay in your lane.” Farida Hashem, the young woman in question, whose original account is now closed, has told the Observer she was in fact 19 when the incident occurred.

Does he not see that saying young women need to be empowered and then telling them to pipe down when they disagree with him is completely contradictory? His expression rather suggests the thought has never occurred. “Yeah, and I suppose they are,” he says, after a pause. “I may not be as progressive as I’d like to be. There are some innate structures of thought within me that I’m really embarrassed about. I’m not as bright as I’d like to be, I’m not as clued-up on jargon as I’d like to be. I’m learning, and I do get pissed off. Young girls scare me, the things they come out with and ask about.”

Later that evening I have dinner with all four of the band. Hann is amiable but quiet; Daniel open and friendly; bassist Ross MacDonald sardonic and funny. And in the dynamic – Healy faces the other three across a roundtable – you get a sense of how they must sometimes view him. They tease him, gently but persistently, about his self-centredness – he complains about a woman he’s convinced is stalking him, and they roll their eyes; he talks about his need to have a rental sports car for some of their remaining period in LA, and they point out that the last time he did that he cost them a ton by returning it several days late. It’s funny, and sweet, but it also highlights the fact that Healy is the group’s leader, and won’t have it any other way. Without him as the decision maker, the lightning rod, he says, “We wouldn’t have been as big a band. Or as good a band. Or as honest a band.”

‘I’ve done drugs, had girlfriends. I’ve changed! I’m not scared of saying that shit’: The 1975. Photograph: Katherine Anne Rose/Observer New Review

The paradox of the 1975 is that they manage to be two different things that don’t usually occur in the same package: they’re a weird art-rock band who happen to be most popular with teenage girls; they’re more Japan than Kajagoogoo. Their range of references and influences – Bowie, Gabriel, Talking Heads, the Blue Nile, the British Expeditionary Force, Prince and a score more – is impeccable, and if one of the definitions of an artist is someone who feeds their own life into work unsparingly, there’s cause for Healy to make the claim for himself. He talks excitedly about the band’s new stage show, and the influence of visual artists James Turrell and Robert Irwin, and about how the new record is “a cacophony of ideas … a truly expansive musical statement”, about translating “sonic space and delivery and minimalism” into music. And he talks about his responsibility to try to say something with his music: “That new Justin Bieber song – ‘What do you mean? When you nod your head yes but you wanna say no’ – can we stop talking about girls who don’t know what they want? Can we stop talking about nothingness? No one’s asking you to inspire a revolution, but inspire something.”

It’s part of the social fabric. It’s part of going out. I don’t have a problem with cocaine any more

How difficult that can be, though, becomes clear when Healy starts talking about his desire to be honest, and his responsibility towards his younger fans. “A lot of the things that have happened to me, I can’t start talking about to young girls and young boys. I can’t start talking to kids about drugs.”

Hang on. An hour ago you played me a song about your relationship with cocaine! “Yeah, but …” he says, sounding like a guilty schoolboy. “That’s kind of …” he pauses, momentarily and unusually flummoxed. “Now you’ve said that, I think what that is, is me having quite a nonchalant attitude to cocaine. It’s part of the social fabric. It’s part of going out. I don’t have a problem with cocaine any more” – two years ago, he told me he had been addicted – “That song is me being flippant about cocaine: ‘Stop pacing round the room using other people’s faces as a mirror for you.’” The flippancy is quite startling in a group with a following so young. It’s amazing he hasn’t yet been crucified in the Sun or the Daily Mail, given his complete lack of apology for enjoying drugs. In June, a video surfaced on TMZ showing him smoking a bong on the street with a group of young fans in LA. One’s first reaction was: good grief, what kind of fool lets himself get filmed like this? He’d been to see Ed Sheeran, he explains, and had been drinking in the dressing room with a variety of celebrities. Then he’d gone to an album launch party, where he was so drunk that, he says, “I was a wanker to Justin Bieber. I think he tried to get me kicked out a couple of times.” When he left the party, pretty much insensible, he was greeted by a group of fans who handed him a bong. “I thought, ‘Well, I don’t want to be a frump.’ So I just hit it. And then I realised the cameras were there. I thought, in my state, who the fuck’s going to watch this? Watch me smoking weed? The next day I saw the videos of me, and it turns out I didn’t just hit it. I stood there for 10 minutes. It wasn’t my proudest moment.”

As he is prone to saying: young man in band takes drugs – what a surprise! But if he’s being so flippant about them, making drugs into a punchline, isn’t he glamorising them?

“With every song that could be accused of romanticising that behaviour, it’s always delivered with a profound disdain for my own behaviour. But I am an adult, and I can talk about those things. The thing is, I do want to talk about what’s happened in the past three years, and what do you think has happened to a kid who’s gotten in a fucking big band? Everything! I’ve done drugs, had girlfriends. I’ve changed! I’m not scared of saying that shit.”

That’s the thing with Healy. He says absolutely anything, sometimes contradicting himself from sentence to sentence. He makes up words – he keeps saying “immersiated” when he means immersed – and he’s grandly, fabulously pretentious. He must be a horror to handle – afterwards, his manager wants to know exactly what has been said about his love life, an inquiry he waves away breezily; his publicist wonders if she should stop him talking for so long – but, goodness, he’s smashing company for a writer. He’s a pop star, in all his sincere, ridiculous, insecure glory.

The band play Newcastle 02 Academy tonight and tour the UK until 28 Nov

The themes of the new 1975 album

A recurring theme of the second 1975 album, I Like It When You Sleep, for You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware of It, due in February 2016, is Matty Healy’s state of mind – it pops up repeatedly, on the none-more-80s Change of Heart, on the peppy pop song Paris, and notably on The Ballad of Me and My Brain. “A lot of our songs are snapshots, but that’s very much a story,” he says. “There’s a sense of resignation to it – depression is part of my family history. An identity crisis, the deconstruction of relationships and my struggle with consumption – those have dictated the narrative.”

The cornerstone of the record, however, is If I Believe You – a soul ballad whose structure would have lent itself to Solomon Burke or James Carr, but glossed with electronic effects rather than Muscle Shoals horns. It was inspired by Healy and drummer George Daniel’s love of gospel music, and features a gospel choir, of whom Healy says: “If I was five years old, and my dad said, ‘That’s God, that is,’ I’d believe in God to this day.”

Stylistically, the album is more wide-ranging than their debut, yet it manages to sound more focused and better edited, both lyrically and musically. “Me and George say: ‘The older we get, the less we play.’ My love for minimalist art and architecture – the things I’ve become interested in as a grownup – have fed into this record. I want the songs to feel like 1975 songs, not necessarily sound like them. Take Chris Martin – you can put his voice across anything and it will sound like Coldplay. I don’t want that: I want it to feel like the 1975.”