A brilliant show : The 1975, at the O2, reviewed

The great country singer George Jones was famed not just for his voice, but also for his drinking. Once, deprived of the car keys, he drove his lawnmower to the nearest bar. In the very good Paramount+ drama about Jones and Tammy Wynette – entitled George and Tammy, so there’s no excuse for forgetting – Michael Shannon, playing Jones, is asked time and time again why he keeps on making such a mess of his life and his career. ‘That’s what the people want from me,’ he shrugs in reply.

That came to mind watching the 1975’s return to British arenas, in a tour grandiosely and amusingly billed as ‘In Show and In Concert – The 1975 At Their Very Best’. Matty Healy, their 33-year-old frontman, is the 1975’s George Jones – he’s gone through rehab for heroin, he’s broken down on stage, he’s had a habit of getting himself into the kind of situations from which it can be hard for pop stars to extricate their careers without damage.

But his problems have, if anything, only deepened the bond between Healy and his fans (and, perhaps, convinced a few of the critics who were snooty at first about a mere pop group to take him seriously). But what to do when you’ve kicked the heroin, made your most focused album yet and still some people come to your gigs expecting you to screw up or be screwed up?

The 1975’s answer was to make breaking down the point of the first half of the show. The stage was set as an apartment: the band members entered through a ‘front door’ at the back of the stage; the supplementary musicians and drummer George Daniel were positioned in individual ‘rooms’ upstage, the front three – Healy, guitarist Adam Hann (no relation) and bassist Ross MacDonald – in the downstage ‘living room’, bedecked with standing lamps and soft furnishings.

That first half consisted largely of the newest album – Being Funny in a Foreign Language – as Healy gradually acted out his own disintegration.