For most singers in bands, their dreams are forged staring at the posters on their walls and by the music blaring out of their speakers. But not for The 1975’s leader Matty Healy. Nope, the charismatic and controversial Matty had an upbringing that was not like yours or mine, unless yours includes having a parent who starred in one of the biggest TV hits of the 80s and juggled having his rock star pals over with the tradie mates he'd made in the pub. Speaking to this writer back in 2014 about his famous parents (his dad is actor Tim Healy and his mother is Loose Women and Coronation Street star Denise Welch), Healy looked back on his childhood home with a little incredulity.
“I grew up around rock stars,” he recalled. “In the 80s, when my dad was in Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, it was like a political figurehead for a movement in Thatcher Britain, the whole going overseas to get work. At that time my dad was a political presence and he was cool and he was from the north-east and his mates were Mark Knopfler and Thin Lizzy, I was a kid and they were my dad’s mates.”
His dad, Healy explained, never had any airs or graces and never forgot his roots. “My dad is very salt of the earth,” he explained. “Everything I’ve ever got, I’ve worked for. My dad’s given me bed and board but he’s rags to riches, I’m not the son of Angelina Jolie, I’ve not had it on a plate.”
The people who stopped off at the family home, he said, were from totally different sides of the spectrum. “I always had this amazing juxtaposition of having a life in the media but surrounded by my dad’s mates, his welder mates. All my extended family are common as muck and awesome, working class. It was a wonderful juxtaposition. The only famous people my dad knows are people he’s worked with: everyone else are people from the pub, people that he met at the darts. I’d be sat at home and all I used to do was watch videos of Michael Jackson, Prince and Otis Redding on repeat. I remember watching a Michael Jackson video and my dad’s mates would be expressing how when they watched it, how unrelatable he was and how much of an alien he is. I remember thinking, aged six, ‘Well I’m a lot more like him than I am like you!’”
Somehow, all those varying influences sunk into Healy, the motormouth singer whose world was spinning on a different axis from the very start. And there was still one more crucial element to add into the mix, Healy saving the best for last. “Christopher Biggins was a mainstay in our house!” he declared, finally lifting the lid on where The 1975 frontman got his taste for theatrical bombast from.
