It’s the couple that no one could have predicted for their 2023 bingo card.
Long-time friends Taylor Swift and The 1975’s Matty Healy have reportedly struck up the unlikeliest of romances after her shock split from British actor Joe Alwyn, according to The Sun.
The pair, who first met in 2014, are said to be “madly in love” and apparently set to make a public appearance together this weekend at the 33-year-old singer’s Nashville leg of her sold-out Eras Tour.
News of the new romance comes just weeks after it emerged that Taylor split from her boyfriend of six years Joe, 32, after the pair “struggled” with their “career differences”.
The rumoured union between the two stars follows Matty’s mother, former Coronation Star Denise Welch, posing with Taylor backstage at a gig earlier this year.
It’s fair to say the reaction to the news on social media has been somewhat mixed.
A deliberately provocative figure, Healy has been embroiled in his fair share of controversies — in fact, in 2016, he was accused of misogyny after describing the notion of dating Taylor Swift as a “de-masculinating, emasculating thing”.
So, despite Swift’s history of dating Brits (Joe Alwyn and, famously, Harry Styles), the contrast in, well, vibes, between the two (slightly cringe queen of pop vs very pretentious indie rocker) has left many confused about the couple’s compatibility.
One Twitter user, @ dying fires, said “accusing a woman of dating Matty Healy should qualify as libel and defamation of the highest degree”.
So who is The 1975’s outspoken frontman, who else has he been romantically involved with, and why he is so frequently in hot water?
Finding fame with The 1975
The son of actor Tim Healy and actress and television presenter Denise Welch, Healy was well acquainted with the spotlight long before he started internationally-acclaimed indie band The 1975.
Growing up in Newcastle and Cheshire, where he attended a private school before being kicked out for starting fights, Healy told the Guardian in 2016 that he didn’t apply himself during school, viewing it as “just a tedious imposition, getting in the way of me being a pop star”.
He spent three months at a music college before dropping out, after which he worked at a Chinese restaurant.
At aged 13, Healy formed The 1975 alongside schoolfriends lead guitarist Adam Hann, bassist Ross MacDonald, and drummer and producer George Daniel.
Ten years later, the group set up their own label, Dirty Hit, with manager Jamie Oborne and started releasing EPs in 2012.
The band released four EPs before releasing their debut self-titled album The 1975 in 2013, which topped the UK Albums Chart. Following this success, they released four subsequent albums, I Like It When You Sleep, for You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware of It (2016) A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships (2018), Notes on a Conditional Form (2020) and Being Funny in a Foreign Language (2022).
Healy has been open about his struggles with alcoholism and substance abuse, and the impact that it has had on the group. He spent seven weeks at a rehab clinic in Barbados in 2017, paid for by his bandmates, and has been clean since then – many of the songs on A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships were written about his stay.
Past relationships: FKA Twigs and Halsey
In 2020, the rumour mill began to spin that Healy was dating British singer-songwriter FKA twigs. The two then made it Instagram official in February 2020 after Matty shared a photo of them at the NME Awards.
A source told The Sun: “Sadly things haven’t worked out. Those around them thought this was going to be it but it hasn’t been the case. There was no massive row or fallout. When lockdown ended they both found themselves pulled in different directions with work commitments. The whole thing is still very raw and, naturally, she is upset but she’s got her friends around her who are supporting her.”
Previously, Healy had dated model Gabriella Brooks for four years from 2015 to 2019, when a source told The Sun that Brooks had dumped him after tiring of his party lifestyle.
“Matty is great when he’s on form but he isn’t the easiest person to be with and leads a very unconventional life,” the source told the paper. “There has been a lot of strain on their relationship, not helped by him being on tour a lot this year. He parties a lot at home when he’s there and Gabby had just had enough. She doesn’t want to lead her life like that.”
It was also rumoured for a while that Healy was briefly in a relationship with singer Halsey in 2015 after they attended one of The 1975’s concerts. The same year, Halsey collaborated with Healy on their track Ghost, further fuelling the speculation. There was later suggestion that their breakup was an inspiration for one of Halsey’s songs, but they later denied it.
‘I am NOT being Taylor Swift’s boyfriend’ – accusations of misogyny and social media controversies
One reason some fans are shocked and confused by Healy and Swift’s rumoured union dates back to comments the Brit made about her in 2016.
In response to dating rumours whirling about the pair at the time, Healy told the Guardian: “If I had [properly] gone out with Taylor Swift the first thing I would’ve [thought was] ‘Fucking hell I am NOT being Taylor Swift’s boyfriend.’ You know, FUCK. THAT.”
“That’s also a man thing, a de-masculinating, emasculating thing,” he added.
He later told the Guardian that his comments came from a place of not wanting to come off second best in a clash of two big egos.
In February 2023, Healy provoked more backlash after appearing on the podcast The Adam Friedland Show. During the episode amongst other things he stated that he would “f*** Friedland’s sister because ‘she’s hot’”, and mocked rapper Ice Spice, speculating that she was Chinese, Hawaiian and Inuit, and attempting impressions of these accents (she’s actually Dominican and Nigerian).
Described by NME as having a “sensei-like mastery of…shitposting”, Healy has also regularly courted controversy on social media.
In August 2014, he was accused of Islamophobia and misogyny on Twitter after tweeting that “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”, and when criticised by a nineteen-year-old Muslim woman running a Harry Styles Twitter fan account, he tweeted that he “resent[ed] being ‘educated’ on religion by” by a fan account.
In the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, Healy tweeted, “If you truly believe that ‘ALL LIVES MATTER’ you need to stop facilitating the end of black ones” alongside a link to the 1975’s “Love It If We Made It,” released two years earlier, and was subsequently accused of using the Black Lives Matter movement to promote his own music.
He then apologised, tweeting: “Sorry I did not link my song in that tweet to make it about me it’s just that the song is literally about this disgusting situation and speaks more eloquently than I can on Twitter,” before deactivating his account.
While he still posts on Instagram, he hasn’t been seen on Twitter since.
However, Healy has also been an outspoken activist, standing up for women’s reproductive rights onstage in Alabama, speaking out against misogyny in music on stage at the BRITs, and expressing solidarity with black, Muslim and gay Americans following the election of Donald Trump in2016.
Matty the nepo baby? Famous family members
As well as being in one of the most successful bands in the world, Healy’s ties to the spotlight also come from closer to home.
The son of none other than Coronation Street legend and TV presenter Denise Welch and Benidorm actor Tim Healy, Matty actually briefly tried his hand at acting, playing an extra in Waterloo Road, which his mother starred in.
Healy’s younger brother Louis is also an actor, best known for playing Danny Harrington in Emmerdale.
Last month, Matty also revealed another bizarre connection to the acting world, telling a Brisbane audience that when he was fourteen, his mother’s godfather, English screenwriter Ian La Frenais, based the Flushed Away rat, Roddy St. James, on him.
