The current success of The The is a textbook case of ‘better late than never’. The band, which revolve around central member and leader Matt Johnson, had a run of hit albums in the 80s with a sound that pinballed from emotive synth-pop to experimental rock to lounge-y ballads and atmospheric soundscapes but, after a family bereavement, Johnson retreated in the 90s and halted The The altogether not long after their 2000 album NakedSelf. But, after sporadic live returns in recent years, they recently returned with a new album titled Ensoulment and over the past week they have been winning rave reviews for the euphoric shows performed on their UK tours. The The have always been a serious band, both politically and emotionally, but in a recent interview with The New Cue, Johnson said it is a different matter behind the scenes, relaying advice he’d been given in his early career by the late, great Leonard Cohen.
It was back when Johnson, now 63, was in his early twenties that he was summoned to a dinner with Cohen. “His manager was my lawyer for a short period of time, and he called him Lenny,” Johnson remembered. “He said, ‘I want Lenny to advise you', because I’d just signed a big contract with CBS, which was Leonard Cohen's record label as well. And so his manager arranged a dinner with us and I was a bit starstruck. I've never been starstruck since but I was a bit starstruck then. He was a lovely chap, very warm and humorous and charming.”
One of the things that Cohen advised him about, Johnson said, was to be wary of letting people paint him in a particular light. He said that, despite the dark nature of his music, there was always a lot of laughter in The The. “He warned me,” Johnson stated. “He said, ‘You've got to be careful to avoid being pigeonholed’. He was bemoaning the fact. This was obviously long before the internet but what he said was, ‘It's as if there's a giant computer out there and every time a journalist types in the name Leonard Cohen, up comes gloomy and depressing and it drives me mad’, and he was laughing when he said it. Of course, the same thing happened to me that he warned me about. It's the nature of the lyrics, I suppose. But the way I compare is like you get the cliché of the comedian where they're laughing on stage but they're very depressed behind the scenes. Well, I'm the reverse. The music's quite intense, but behind the scenes, we're actually laughing.”
The The’s UK tour wrapped up at Brixton Academy last week, with the band reconvening for more laugh-a-minute backstage antics in the US in mid-October.
