The The – 10 of the best

1. Uncertain Smile

In 1979, Matt Johnson placed an advert in NME looking for likeminded fans of the Velvet Underground, the Residents and Throbbing Gristle to form a band with him. The The started life as a duo, then a four-piece, then a singular entity with a rotating cast of musicians that has included Johnny Marr, Simon Fisher Turner and Gail Ann Dorsey. (“I like to think of the The as a fluid thing,” Johnson told Melody Maker in 1993. “People can work with me, then stop for a bit, then work again.”) His own commercial breakthrough came with Uncertain Smile, reaching No 68 in the charts in 1982, and it represented an even bigger breakthrough for him as a songwriter: it ushered in a rich period of cerebral pop songs that married evocative lyrics with saleable melodies. Recorded for the album Soul Mining, this great song became a classic thanks to a staggering extended piano outro by Jools Holland. The former Squeeze man apparently turned up to the studio in summer dressed in full leathers and riding a vintage Norton motorbike. Once inside, he hammered out the improv on a baby grand in one take – but for a drop in at the end – before promptly leaving. “Me and [producer Paul] Hardiman were just … well, you know when you’ve got something,” Johnson told the Quietus when Soul Mining was reissued in 2014.

2. This Is the Day

As well as new wave, post-punk and the other usual tags, the The were given their own genre: existential blues. Johnson was never quite sure about the epithet, but he had to concede the opening line of This Is the Day (“Well, you didn’t wake up this morning / ’cause you didn’t go to bed”) was reminiscent of blues legend BB King. Despite the gloomy opening gambit, This Is the Day is unusually optimistic in places; or at least the titular carpe diem is, abetted by a chipper accordion and fiddle transposed over a shuffling, lo-fi beat. “[It] centred around someone I’m sure loads of people can identify with – living in the past, clinging to memories, wallowing and wasting his life away,” Johnson told NME in 1983. “Then this voice of hope thrusts out within him shouting, ‘Yeah, this is the day everything’ll change.’ It’s cynical in the sense that there’s a danger of him just dreaming about doing something and not actually doing it, but the mood it’s in is almost pedantic, it sort of rouses hope. Maybe it’ll make people get off their arses and go and live a bit.”

3. Sweet Bird of Truth

In 1986, Johnson moved away from the personal musings of his early 20s and focused much of his opprobrium towards the Thatcher administration, creating the masterpiece Infected in the process. John Lydon said it was the most spiteful record he had heard in years. On the song Sweet Bird of Truth, Johnson presciently nodded to the troubles in the Middle East around the same time Sting was rhyming “precedent” with “president” on The Russians. There is a strong Tom Waits influence on Infected – particularly Sweet Bird of Truth – and Johnson asked Waits to produce the record. Waits invited Johnson to New York for a week, but he didn’t commit to the job. “We played a lot of pool – he thrashed me,” Johnson told Uncut. “He wasn’t drinking at the time, just soda water and bitters. But he had a big thing going on. He had just fired his manager, he was living in the Chelsea Hotel, just finishing off Rain Dogs.” It is fascinating to speculate on how Infected might have sounded with Waits at the helm, but the record certainly didn’t suffer without him.

4. Infected

To select one or two songs from the near-perfect Infected seems churlish. It is heartbreaking to leave out Heartland, with its iconic lyric, and Slow Train to Dawn, a thrilling duet with a young Neneh Cherry, but the title track gets the nod because it still sounds incredibly alive 30 years on. The bass hammers down sporadically onto a Technicolor drumscape, with Johnson’s lascivious and distorted vocals all over the space that’s left, and that is before the main refrain arrives; the chorus is a sensuous, soulful barnstormer with a hook to hang your hat on. “Infect me with your love” is a lyric that would have carried an element of danger in 1986, with HIV very much on people’s minds.

5. The Beat(en) Generation

“When you cast your eyes upon the skylines of this once proud nation / Can you sense the fear and the hatred growing in the hearts of its population?” Today, the song couldn’t sound any more current if it tried. “The beaten generation,” sings Johnson in the chorus, “reared on a diet of prejudice and misinformation”. It was released in 1989 at the height of the poll tax riots, but it could so easily have been written about the Brexit campaign or the rise of Trump. The Beat(en) Generation was the first song from Mind Bomb to be released; Armageddon Days Are Here (Again) had been first choice, but with its “Islam is rising / The Christians mobilising” lyric, it was deemed prudent by the label to delay it given the controversy that was raging following publication of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses . Perhaps The Beat(en) Generation was the better track anyway.

6. Slow Emotion Replay

The band Johnson put together for Mind Bomb, featuring Johnny Marr, James Eller and David Palmer, was carried over for 1993’s Dusk, and tellingly the music epitomises cohesion even if the lyrics are filled with more existential dread than usual. The sessions for Dusk were overshadowed by the death of Johnson’s brother Eugene in 1989, which he wrote about explicitly on the track Love Is Stronger Than Death. Elsewhere, the bereavement was less pronounced, although the lyric on Slow Emotion Replay – “Don’t ask me about war, religion or God, love, sex or death” – was ironic given these are the grand themes the The usually address. “Everybody, knows what’s going wrong with the world,” he continues, “but I don’t even know what’s going on in myself.” With a soulful harmonica sliding in and out of the blue notes and a heart-bursting chorus with a forlorn lyric, Slow Emotion Replay exemplifies what the The do best. Marr’s guitar too, is subtle and scintillating in a Smiths way.

7. Shrunken Man

The album NakedSelf, released in 2000, went largely under-promoted due to changes at the Universal Music conglomerate. “To fully list all the cockups that have utterly undermined and ruined the release of NakedSelf would take all day,” said a frustrated Johnson on his blog. “Suffice to say it has been the most disastrous episode of my entire career.” NakedSelf is an underrated and underappreciated work that took longer to come to fruition than some albums, because Johnson had relocated to New York and had just become a father. The pick of the songs is the understated, atmospheric Shrunken Man, which has a wonderful arabesque riff between verses that weaves in and out of your mind like a cobra being charmed (the ascending line also has the grandeur of a lost James Bond theme). NakedSelf fulfilled Johnson’s contract with Sony, and when he moved to Interscope things were yet worse still, precipitating the The’s long estrangement from the music industry.

8. Pillar Box Red

Pillar Box Red is a lesser-known vaudevillian ballad from 2002 that descends in scale while a vertiginous signature melody strikes over the top, making it sound like the soundtrack to a French detective series. “I paint my lips a pillar box red,” sings Johnson sotto voce, with a supporting female vocal less pronounced still. “It reminds me of the country where I was born and bred.” He actually grew up above a pub in the East End among a close but extended family, and in the promo video he is back on the premises of a local boozer, providing the entertainment with an acoustic while punters chatter among themselves. “The sarcasm / The bitter remarks,” he laments, “that pierce the chest and wound the heart.” Whether he is in character or singing from personal experience, it’s a beautifully realised song.

9. DJ Food – Giant

On Record Store Day in 2014, the The released a 12-inch recording of the song Giant from Soul Mining. It is backed by a big-beat DJ Food cover of the song featuring vocals by one Matt Johnson. Strictly Kev of Ninja Tune asked Johnson to participate on a version of the song, and the pair became friends in the process. “Years ago, he asked me to sing on a new version of Giant and it remained a work in progress for many years,” Johnson told the Quietus at the time. “I actually prefer my vocals on his version to my original version – they’re much better.” The updated take on a lo-fi indie classic, originally featuring emphatic, exotic percussion by Zeke Manyika, adds to the spirit of the original, looping percussion in a way Johnson did in 1983. The DJ Food version is a revamped and panoramic banger that improves the fine original in every way.

10. Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven (But Nobody Wants to Die)

Disenchanted with the music business, Johnson has reinvented himself as a go-to man for soundtracks, creating the label Cinéola to release film scores and spoken word releases. Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven (But Nobody Wants to Die) was featured in the film Hyena, directed by his brother Gerard. It is an ambient, plaintive piano piece that follows a simple three-chord structure, with vocals that almost heave a sigh of despair. “I revived the old Terry Riley machinery, the Time Lag Accumulator,” said Johnson about the recording procedure. “I used to play around with tape loops when I was younger, around Burning Blue Soul [1981], and I decided to bring that technology back for this as I thought it would build up these strange, quite dense soundscapes.” His soundtrack work is delightful, but one misses his biting lyrical commentary and searing insight. Following the 2017 Record Store Day release We Can’t Stop What’s Coming, there is word that a new the The album is in progress, which is great news – the world needs Matt Johnson more than ever.