The The 2018 Comeback Special: “Something else becomes apparent. You realise that Matt Johnson is, in effect, telling you the story of his life.”

“Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too.”

(William Hutchison Murray, The Scottish Himalayan Expedition, 1951)

Sometimes, in the moments where nothing happens, you see everything. Fifty-eight minutes into The The’s Royal Albert Hall show in 2018, Matt Johnson takes a moment to wander among his bandmates as they negotiate the instrumental break of ‘This Is The Day’. As his keyboard player DC Collard takes his solo, Matt gazes on at him. The song is soaked into their bones. Its memory lives in the muscles of every musician on stage. So, all things considered, it can look after itself for a few seconds. And although there’s no exchange of words, the expression directed by Matt at his old friend is freighted with over three decades of shared experiences and also perhaps the relief and delight that comes from realising that this still feels good. That when you combine the right songs with the right musicians and an audience that never forgot, it’s like coming home.

It had been sixteen years since Matt Johnson last performed on stage. For most of those years, he didn’t even pick up a guitar. In the previous century, Matt had released a succession of records which – be they personal or political – often seemed to reframe the same question. How do you protect your soul in a system that is constantly asking you to name your price for it? In 2000, the stark, scratchy pop noir of NakedSelf negotiated similar thematic territory to Radiohead’s contemporaneous release Kid A, but hitched to a label that had no idea what to do with it, the record acted as a muted segue into a period of intense emotional upheaval. Barreling between bereavements, births and separations; unsure whether there was a place for The The among all of this, Matt anchored himself to the few certainties that gave him reason to get up in the morning – family and friendships – whilst switching on the news and noting that, day by day, the inexorable rise of neoliberalism and fundamentalism was making the line “only the paranoid really know the score” (from ‘Global Eyes’) seem less tongue-in-cheek than he’d perhaps intended. 

Whatever Matt Johnson’s detractors wanted to stick on him, no-one could accuse him of lacking self-awareness. In 2008, his old friend JG Thirlwell sent him a book called The Inertia Variations, an anthology of verses by the poet John Tottenham, all based around the subject of doing nothing. Upon reading the lines, “You would think by now that people would know better/Than to ask me what I have been doing with my time”, Matt knew exactly why JG had given him the book. As Thirlwell told Matt’s biographer Neil Fraser, “This is Matt! It’s creating self-hatred out of procrastination!” But when you start to believe that you don’t have any more songs left in you, it’s important to have people in your life that don’t share that belief. In her 2018 documentary about Matt – also entitled The Inertia Variations – writer, director - and also Matt’s ex-partner - Johanna St Michaels created an unflinching portrait of a man seemingly hellbent on doing anything and everything other than address the very thing for which he’s best loved. Musician friends drop by his East London HQ to appear on his Radio Cinéola broadcasts. They interpret songs from his back catalogue and he watches happily as they do so. And yet, he never joins in.

But it’s only as a result of the benign but relentless pressure of Johanna that Matt finally completes work on his first song in over a decade, just in time to play it live on his own show. Forced to confront his feelings about the death of his brother (and longtime The The sleeve artist) Andrew, Matt writes ‘We Can’t Stop What’s Coming’ – a muted, careworn meditation upon the destiny that ultimately awaits us all: “We can't hate the river for flowing/Can’t blame the wild wind blowing.” It’s the first time he’s sung publicly in 16 years, and it’s good. It’s more than good. It’s one of the most beautiful songs he’s ever written. It’s a reminder that creativity is an act of will. It’s not a matter of waiting for inspiration to strike. It’s the application of a skill. He’ll put it out on a seven-inch single for Record Store Day and people will come to regard it as one of his very best. It sounds so effortless you can forgive his fans for thinking that no effort was involved. But he knows different.

And the reason all of this is worth dwelling on? It’s because Matt Johnson committed: the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. Within weeks, Matt received an offer from Heartland – the Danish rock festival named after his 1987 single. Almost in spite of himself, Matt agreed to play there, in the process embarking on a road that led to The Royal Albert Hall in June 2018 – a return to the venue where The The had played three sell-out shows 28 years earlier. It took an enormous leap of faith to commit in the throes of grief. The Comeback Special tour was a reference to a comment made by Matt’s oldest son Jackson who, of course, was just a toddler the last time Matt stepped onto a stage. “I think,” he said, “it’s great my dad is making a comeback in dedication of Andrew.” But in calling it The Comeback Special tour, the concerts were also issuing a nod to another show that went by that name. Forty years previously, a rejuvenated Elvis Presley reminded his fans just what it was about his music that they fell in love with: playing an incendiary set of his best-loved songs alongside his most trusted back-up musicians, Scotty Moore and DJ Fontana. 

This back-to-basics approach was mirrored in the process undertaken by Matt when he selected the musicians to accompany him on these dates. No backing tracks, no click tracks, no samplers or sequencers, no in-ear monitors or auto-cues and just one musician from each of The The’s previous touring incarnations. From the Mind Bomb line-up, James Eller joined him on bass. Having joined the fold for 1993’s Dusk, DC Collard decamped from his home in Chicago to play keyboards; and, as just one of a small handful of musicians to play on NakedSelf, Earl Harvin stepped up to the drum podium. All that remained was to choose a guitarist. With his own solo album and tour lined up, Matt’s old friend and colleague Johnny Marr recommended “Little” Barrie Cadogan. “He came down the next day,” remembers Matt, “Such a sweet guy. He gave me a big hug and the whole thing gelled immediately – not least because he looks amazing, doesn’t he? It’s like he just stepped out of 1973.”

There are thousands of films of thousands of rock concerts out there and the challenge most of them set themselves is to put you in the audience. To try and give you a sense of What It Was Like To Be There. It seems like the obvious way to go if you’re filming a concert. Perhaps the greatest thing about Tim Pope’s direction of The Comeback Special is that it doesn’t set out to do that. Using technology that wasn’t available when Pope and The The were last here (for the shows that resulted in The The Against The World VHS release), the cameras are unobtrusive and can go about their work without the need of harsh spotlights. That allows lighting designer Kate Wilkins to lean on her theatrical background to create something truly intimate. And the reason all of this matters is that it allows the viewer to move in among the action on stage like a ghost, clocking the camaraderie and chemistry that reveals itself in hundreds of tiny ways throughout the course of a two hour show: James Eller visibly moved on more than one occasion as he gazes up beyond the diffuser discs hanging from the roof at silhouetted fans dancing in the upper tiers; DC Collard moving with almost sinister stealth from his keyboard to relieve Barrie Cadogan of the bottleneck he quickly needs to lose in order to continue beyond his solo on ‘Uncertain Smile’; and throughout it all, Matt pacing back and forth, mic in hand, by turns a crooner in his own dystopian speakeasy, or an evangelist in search of a higher power, raising his arms to the empty hereafter because, well… a preacher will always need to preach.

It’s emotional too. It’s emotional from the very outset when Matt reveals that two days ago, alighting from a flight in Stockholm, he received a call to tell him that his father Eddie Johnson – a life-long advocate of his children’s creative exploits – had passed away suddenly during a routine hospital stay.  The emotion is in the air and it’s in the songs, but when you’re about to perform a filmed two-hour show, sentimentality isn’t going to help you. In some ways, it seems apt that the second song of the set, ‘Sweet Bird Of Truth’, is one which has its protagonist embarking on an assignment that will require nerve and focus. The parallels are superficial, of course. In the song, a US pilot has been assigned to bomb hostile territory and, in doing so, is forced to reconcile his own spirituality with the actions he’s about to undertake. There’s a moment in the song where James Eller’s bass and Barrie Cadogan’s guitar merge to create a synergy of sublime intensity while Earl Harvin takes Roli Mosimann’s programmed E-MU SP-12 rhythm on the recorded track and makes it swing and roll like only the spirit and sinew of a world-class musician can do. 

This is the section of the show that Matt has given over to political songs. The purpose-built three-mic stand – “distressed to make it look like it’s been dragged off the sunken Titanic” – has the effect of making him look part lay minister, part politician. But while electioneering politicians take to the stage to sell us a future they’re either unable or unwilling to deliver, here’s a song that reminds you of its creator’s ability to portend a future that he dearly hopes won’t materialise. But of course, we all know what happened next. Two years after a cabal of right-wing disrupters forced Britain out of the EU; and several more years since developers decimated the streets where Matt grew up, it’s chilling to watch him sing lines like, “Well it ain't written in the papers, but it's written on the walls/The way this country is divided to fall/So the cranes are moving on the skyline/Trying to knock down this town.” The best songs never die; they stay alive. Like all living things, they grow and change. That’s something that becomes apparent as you see how the passage of time has moulded ‘The Beat(en) Generation’. Accentuated here by DC Collard’s plaintive melodica, it’s more elegy than warning, its autumnal spell abruptly terminated by Earl’s percussion and Barrie’s rockabilly guitar, on ‘Armageddon Days (are here again)’ – a combination that sizzles here like ice in hot oil.

As the show reaches the apex of its arc, something else becomes apparent. You realise that Matt is, in effect, telling you the story of his life. He’s no longer the gauche teenager in ‘Bugle Boy’, drunkenly trying to chat up a beautiful woman in a bar and getting rebuffed for being “pretentious”. And yet the freewheeling ease with which the band play it calls to mind Harry Nilsson’s version of ‘Everybody’s Talkin’. With the passing of time, the song radiates lost innocence – a quality which also confers an unmistakeable poignancy upon ‘This Is The Day’. And if Matt Johnson is no longer that ingenue, neither is he the itinerant hedonist of ‘Dogs Of Lust’ and ‘This Is The Night’, seeking to feed his muse in increasingly extreme ways. Except that, in the moment, he is absolutely all of these things, propelled into the former by a drumming display of irresistible physicality from Earl Harvin and out of the demonic waltz-time dispatches of the latter by a piano solo from DC Collard that shines like a glitterball in an abandoned Locarno. 

And if you’ve been alive long enough, you’ll know that you get to a point in life where you seek out extremes, as Matt did when he felt he needed to “live out the lives of the characters” in his songs to avoid feeling like an imposter. In time, turbulence will find you. Seeing our loved ones die and knowing that this too will be our fate is the almost unbearable price we have to pay for human consciousness. Staring out at the box he had reserved for his father, Matt introduces three songs written in direct response to the loss of beloved family members. First of these is ‘We Can’t Stop What’s Coming’, and what occurs to you as the song nears its conclusion is that its meaning can just as easily be applied to itself. If a song needs to find its way into the world, no amount of prevarication and procrastination will stop it.

Perhaps more to himself than to his mother Shirley, whose illness and subsequent death prompted him to write it, ‘Phantom Walls’ sees Matt, lifted by Barrie’s soulful harmonising, singing that your pain is there to explain “the answers to your questions/[and] Consoles you in blue reflections.” Written in memory of his younger brother Eugene, ‘Love Is Stronger Than Death’ is the song that Matt considers – “both from a technical and lyrical point of view” – to be his best. Even taking that into account, tonight’s performance goes deep. A gospel-soaked memorial to the parents and siblings that momentarily appear on the screen behind him, alongside moments of Matt’s own life, as part of Vicki Bennett’s kaleidoscopic background projections. And the only thing that seems to make sense of it all is the line repeated in the chorus. 

But, with every subsequent viewing, perhaps the most pleasing effect of The Comeback Special is the way it levels out The The’s legacy across an extraordinarily fertile creative period. Matt’s stubborn career-long resistance to incoming trends might have dented his commercial stock at times, but on this particular evening in the Royal Albert Hall, these have, almost by stealth, become standards in our lives. For those of us who lived with these albums and used them as coordinates against which to chart our progress through the years, our experiences merged together with these words a long time ago. In ‘Slow Emotion Replay’, we affectionately remember the dogmatic certainty of our younger years and raise a toast to those people as we sing, “I'm just a slow emotion replay of somebody I used to be.” Placed near the beginning, ‘Flesh & Bones’ is dispensed with imperious verve, leaving you wondering how on earth this didn’t even make it onto an album, let alone be released as a single. And if ‘True Happiness (This Way Lies)’ exists to remind us just how greed seems to be hardwired into our sensory make-up, ‘Uncertain Smile’ swiftly comes along to unwittingly prove the point – as the rest of the band gaze on, DC Collard extends the song’s famous piano solo to more than twice its original length and we still want more. 

But instead, we get ‘Lonely Planet’ as a parting shot. Which actually couldn’t be more apt, because in playing it, The The complete a full circle that began two hours previously with ‘Global Eyes’. In an increasingly impersonal world, all we have is each other. “The world’s too big/And life’s too short/To be alone,” sings Matt as the song’s ascending chord sequence reasserts itself with life-affirming, cathartic zeal. At which point, you feel like gently leaning in and exhorting him not to leave it quite so long next time.

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