‘I felt alive again’: How a brother’s death restored this musician’s mojo

Just before I interview Matt Johnson of The The, the following things happen – Donald Trump is almost assassinated, which seems to strengthen his chances of returning to the White House; Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, addresses US Congress and is applauded and embraced; and Earth reaches its highest average daily temperature on record.

If you feel like the world is going to hell in a handcart, well, you’re not alone. And as Johnson’s wheelhouse is songs about the imbalance of power, the rise of fundamentalism, the creep of globalisation and the precarious nature of the world we live in, then it would seem to be the perfect time for him to put out a record. But there’s been nothing for almost a quarter of a century.

That’s about to change with the release of Ensoulment, and a world tour that will bring him to Australia in November.

So it’s worth asking the question. Matt Johnson, where the hell have you been?

“I was in New York for seven years,” he says. “Then I moved to Sweden, then I was in Spain for a bit, then I moved to the countryside in England, and now I’m back in London.”

That’s the geography taken care of, but as to what he’s been doing for the 24 years since The The’s last album, well, it’s complicated.

“The gap wasn’t intentional,” he says. “The tour for (2000’s) NakedSelf went for 14 months, but the record company went through a merger and all the people who believed in me were made redundant. And the music industry was going through big changes with Napster appearing, streaming starting to dominate, and revenue from record sales collapsing. I became very disillusioned.”

He withdrew from the music industry and got into local activism. And being Matt Johnson, he didn’t do it by halves.

“I was heavily involved for seven years. I’d go to meetings and stand on street corners handing out pamphlets, trying to save old neighbourhoods. I’m a conservationist. I love old buildings and I think local history and architecture should be preserved. And obviously money gets in the way of that in a city like London, where the developers are very, very powerful and they’re able to have a malignant influence on local politics and planning processes.”

As the years went on, it looked like The The would become a thing of the past. Johnson was still producing music, but it was for documentary soundtracks, most of them for his filmmaker brother Gerard and his former partner, Swedish documentarian Johanna St Michaels.

When he was introduced to The Inertia Variations, an epic poem about indolence and failure by English writer John Tottenham, he felt like it could have been written about him, “because I was in a period where I’d lost my mojo. It made me laugh. It made me cry. It really touched me deeply.”

Here’s a sample: “You would think by now that people would know better than to ask me what I have been doing with my time. And you would think by now that I would have come up with an answer that would silence them.”

St Michaels received funding to make a film called The Inertia Variations about Johnson and his battles with creativity. While they were making the film, Johnson’s elder brother, Andrew, whose distinctive artwork adorns many The The records, died from a brain tumour at the age of 57.

The death of Johnson’s younger brother Eugene in 1989 had marked the beginning of his slow retreat from The The. Andrew’s passing had the opposite effect, pulling him back in. He wrote and recorded We Can’t Stop What’s Coming, an almost Zen-like rumination on embracing change, even if it’s painful.

“Eugene’s death affected me and my family so much, and it slowed my career down,” he says. “I think I was suffering from undigested grief. But when Andrew died, I wrote that song, and it was the first time I’d really sung in years. That feeling, of singing again, of expressing myself, it was so inspiring. As sad as it was, I was singing exactly what I felt and what I believed. I felt alive again. And I thought, ‘This is what I should be doing.’”

The new album exhibits all the Johnson trademarks – Kissing the Ring of POTUS speaks to the corrupt power of our modern empires; Some Days I Drink My Coffee by the Grave of William Blake is damning about his own country, “this greedy unpleasant land (that) wraps itself in the flag”; I Hope You Remember (The Things I Can’t Forget) is about technology taking over our lives.

Surprisingly, for someone who dwells on the darker aspects of the modern world, Johnson is more of a glass-half-full guy when it comes to the future.

“I have a great belief in human nature,” he says. “Unfortunately, we have a tiny percentage of psychopaths that have made their way into positions of power and are desperate to hang onto it. But most of the people I come across in my day-to-day life are regular, kind, decent people, and if they’re given access to accurate information, they do the right thing.”

There are also moments on Ensoulment that reveal a softer, more vulnerable Matt Johnson, none more so than Where Do We Go When We Die?, which is an elegy for his father, Eddie, who died when Johnson was just a week into his comeback tour in 2018. It’s a plainspoken and heartbreaking song about packing clothes and books to take to the charity shop, and relatives talking about films, football and the weather to avoid the elephant in the room.

Johnson’s most enduring song remains This Is the Day, from 1983. It’s a song of hope for a better future, and he still gets messages from people saying it has lifted them out of terrible times, or they’ve played it at their weddings. And it recently reached across the decades to connect with the man who wrote it. He and his brother Gerard are currently readying their late father’s home for sale and made some discoveries while packing it up.

“We’ve been going through boxes of old photos and many other things I hadn’t seen before,” he says. “In there were letters my late brother Eugene wrote to one of his girlfriends, and letters she wrote back to him. I sat there reading these letters and I was crying.”

He was crying not just for the memory of his brother, but because in This Is the Day he wrote the line: “You’ve been reading some old letters, you smile and think how much you’ve changed – all the money in the world couldn’t buy back those days.”

“I wrote that song when I was 21, and that’s a strange lyric for a 21-year-old to write. Reading those letters brought Eugene vividly back to life in my mind, but it also brought back who I was back then. My life was about to change massively. I signed to a major label, I was able to afford to buy a flat, I got to tour the world, I fell in love for the first time.

“I would also go on to make a lot of wrong decisions for all the right reasons and turn down a lot of big offers because I respected myself and stuck to my principles. And there would be a period around Infected (1986) when I went off the rails, became a naughty boy and was a bit obnoxious.”

He pauses for a moment.

“But I think the person I have become is OK.”

Ensoulment is released on September 6. The The play Melbourne’s Palais Theatre on November 16 (sold out) and 17; Sydney Opera House, November 21-22; and Fortitude Music Hall, Brisbane, November 23 (sold out) and 24.