Yet another controversy has erupted around The 1975's frontman, Matty Healy. What on earth has he done this time, you may well ask: a reasonable question about a man with a track record in gnawing at raw meat and getting tattoos in the middle of his live shows.
On this occasion, Healy has threatened to slap the controversial US rapper Azealia Banks in a heated exchange on X (formerly Twitter).
It all started when Banks, known for her contentious views and public spats, said Charli XCX — engaged to Healy’s 1975 bandmate George Daniel — “used to be soooo pretty. Ugh”.
Some back-and-forth ensued (Healy called Banks “a failure”, she insulted his fiancée and said he “looks like Frankenstein”) before Healy had enough, posting on X (and quickly deleting): “I’ll f****** slap you so hard I’ll get a Guiness [sic] world record for the highest a rat some bitch calls a wig has ever flown.”
X users were quick to call out Healy’s threat. “Matty Healy threatening to slap a black woman here just further proves how trash he is,” one said.
After deleting the post, Healy said: “Nah I can’t say I’m gonna hit a girl that’s insane I’m sorry. You can’t just keep being so mean about my mates and my mrs it’s really hurtful gets me well defensive.”
Nah I can’t be saying I’m gonna hit a girl that’s insane I’m sorry. You just can’t keep being so mean about my mates and my mrs it’s really hurtful gets me well defensive
— Truman Black (@Gooodmorninguys) December 4, 2024
This is far from Healy’s first controversy.
In July, his band was sued by the organisers of the Malaysian music festival Good Vibes, who were seeking nearly £2 million in damages. During their headlining performance of the 2023 festival in Kuala Lumpur, Healy launched into a rant about the country’s anti-LGBTQ+ laws and snogged his bandmate Ross MacDonald.
Shortly afterwards, the band’s set was cut off and the rest of the festival was cancelled. "All right, we just got banned from Kuala Lumpur, see you later," the frontman yelled before leaving the stage.
And this was not Healy’s first rodeo when it comes to staging divisive protests, which feel like misguided attempts to help marginalised groups without understanding the nuances.
His insensitive comments have also landed him in hot water over the years. After inappropriate jokes he made about rapper Ice Spice on a podcast made headlines last year, Banks laid into Healy: “Does Matt Healy know that no one actually thinks The 1975 make good music and that he’s a lame poser with a trash cliche band name that actually means nothing,” she said.
Read on for a whistle-stop tour of Healy’s most provocative moments.
The podcast appearance
In February 2023, Healy provoked fury when he appeared as a guest on an episode of The Adam Friedland Show. During the podcast, the singer mentioned messaging Ice Spice on social media, leading to a wider conversation about the rising Bronx rapper. The show’s hosts, Adam Friedland and Nick Mullen, speculated about Ice Spice’s heritage, suggesting that she is Hawaiian, Inuit and Chinese, and mocked each accent. Healy can be heard laughing along with the group.
Healy also made some derogatory comments about women. He encouraged the hosts to impersonate Japanese people working in concentration camps, complaining that fellow singer Harry Styles had been given a “pass” for “queerbaiting” (when straight artists knowingly court and encourage speculation around their sexuality to appeal to fans in the LGBTQ+ community). “Gay men don’t have a problem with somebody pretending to be gay, they just jack off to it,” Friedland then remarked.
“I just feel a bit bad, and I’m kind of a bit sorry if I’ve offended you,” Healy later said during a live show in Auckland. “Ice Spice, I’m sorry. It’s not because I’m annoyed that me joking got misconstrued. It’s because I don’t want Ice Spice to think I’m a dick. I love you, Ice Spice. I’m so sorry.”
In an interview with the New Yorker, Healy insisted: “It doesn’t actually matter. Nobody is sitting there at night slumped at their computer, and their boyfriend comes over and goes, ‘What’s wrong, darling?’ and they go, ‘It’s just this thing with Matty Healy.’ That doesn’t happen.”
At Glastonbury 2023, Rina Sawayama — signed to the same label as The 1975, Dirty Hit — appeared to call him out. "So, tonight, this song goes out to a white man who watches Ghetto Gaggers and mocks Asian people on a podcast," Sawayama said, specifically referencing two comments made by either Healy or the podcast hosts. “He also owns my masters. I’ve had enough.” Healy is a shareholder in Dirty Hit, though he resigned as a director in April 2023. Sawayama also seemed to refer to the incident during a subsequent date at Lisbon’s Nos Alive festival.
The ableist joke
Healy deactivated his burner account on X last September after an ableist joke he made unsurprisingly backfired.
Insensitively posting that the band Boygenius inspired him and his bandmate to start a band called ‘Girlr*tard’, the singer said: “Yeah this never goes well does it” before temporarily deleting his account.
The Good Vibes cancellation
At The 1975’s now-infamous Good Vibes headline show, Healy told the audience that he was “furious” to be playing in a country where homosexuality is illegal in an expletive-filled speech. “And that’s not fair on you, because you’re not representative of your government,” he said. “Because you’re young people, and I’m sure a lot of you are gay and progressive and cool.”
Branding The 1975’s appearance there a “mistake”, he added: “I am sorry if that offends you and you’re religious and it’s part of your f**king government, but your government are a bunch of f**king [ableist slur] and I don’t care anymore,” he continued. “If you push, I am going to push back. I am not in the f**king mood.” During a performance of I Like America & America Likes Me Healy also kissed MacDonald, the band’s bassist, onstage.
The protest was likely intended as a display of solidarity with the country’s marginalised queer community. However, it almost immediately attracted substantial criticism from LGBTQ+ rights activists in Malaysia. Some feared that he would provoke further hostility and ignite tensions with conservatives in government; others branded him a “white saviour” for criticising the country’s political climate before promptly leaving with few consequences. The government has pledged to tighten entry requirements for international artists hoping to play in Malaysia.
When the remainder of Good Vibes was cancelled due to his comments, others pointed out the financial losses would most affect independent food vendors and small local artists.
In July, Future Sound Asia, the festival’s organisers, filed a lawsuit against the band seeking £1.9 million in damages. They claim the band and their management knew the rules they needed to abide by, which banned swearing, drinking and smoking on stage, removing clothing and talking about politics. A month later, the band were ordered to pay the organisers.
The on-stage protest in Dubai
In 2019, The 1975 were banned from Dubai after Healy staged an on-stage protest against its anti-LGBTQ+ laws. He kissed a male fan from the front row midway through the band’s song Loving Someone. It is illegal to be gay in the UAE. Recounting his version of events the following year, Healy told The Times: “They [the venue] had given me a list of shit that I couldn’t do and they said there could be no ‘gay propaganda’. As soon as the big gay pride flag comes up in the show, all the security guys come running down to the side of the stage, trying to pull us off it.”
When Healy spotted a fan holding up a homemade sign saying ‘marry me’ he went down into the pit to hug him. “He said, ‘Can I have a kiss?’ and I was, like, ‘Why not?’” He claimed that following the show, he was almost arrested, and hunted down the fan on social media to check that he was safe. Healy left the country overnight and was broadly criticised for potentially putting a young fan in danger by involving him.
“When I got to Japan I was reading about it and I felt pretty irresponsible and then a bit, well, ‘F**k that’,” Healy said. “Of course, I’m not going to put people in danger, but I genuinely want to be an ally for people who don’t have a voice if I happen to have this big voice in pop culture. Those are the fundamental things I stand for.”
The Nazi salute
Diluting all of Healy’s contradictions into one hulking great outpouring of hope and despair, Love It If We Made It is possibly The 1975’s greatest song to date: “Modernity has failed us,” it grandly declares. As well as alluding to police brutality against black men, and sportspeople ‘taking the knee’ as a symbolic act of anti-racist protest, the lyrics quote Donald Trump’s now-infamous taped comments during filming for Access Hollywood in 2005 and reference Kanye West’s support of the US president-elect. "’I moved on her like a bitch,’ excited to be indicted,” Healy sings, “Unrequited house with seven pools, ‘Thank you, Kanye, very cool’".
Footage later emerged of Healy performing the song during an unspecified live show, and during this particular lyric, he appeared to march on the spot before giving a Nazi salute. Presumably, it was intended as a satirical gesture aimed at West’s well-documented antisemitism; the rapper was banned from Twitter after posting an image of a swastika inside the Star of David and praised Adolf Hitler in an interview with Alex Jones. Almost immediately, people began questioning whether Healy - who is not Jewish — was right to perform the deeply offensive gesture, even as an act of satire. “Satire or not, this is irresponsible and super lame to do on stage in front of a crowd of people,” one Twitter user wrote.
tw // antisemitism
— nat 🥯 (@natonfilm) January 26, 2023
why is no one talking about the fact matty healy did a h!tler salute on stage?? pic.twitter.com/QXdza5gzuX
The on-stage persona
During the band’s most recent tour between November 2022 and August 2023, At Their Very Best, Healy cultivated a satirical, rock-star persona. He swigged red wine from the bottle, chain-smoked, faked masturbation on a sofa, humped the onstage camera crew, and munched on raw steaks. It’s unlikely to be everyone’s cup of tea, but the whole act felt like it was setting out to parody certain aspects of toxic masculinity.
More puzzling, though, was a routine that Healy introduced for a portion of the tour; while performing the band’s early hit Robbers, he kissed random audience members. It’s hardly an original ‘bit’ — everyone from Elvis and Bowie to Bruce Springsteen has incorporated it into a live show. Healy asked for consent before each kiss and could also be seen checking a young fan’s ID beforehand in one widely circulated video clip. This incident made some fans feel uneasy. Questions were also raised about the uneven power dynamics between huge stars and their fans.
idk why but matty healy biting a fan's id to make sure she's not a minor and kissing her after is sending me 😭 https://t.co/EVfbX57utp
— mariana ♱ (@filmsatellite) December 15, 2022
