1. Matthew Timothy Healy was born on 8 April 1989 and is an English singer-songwriter and record producer who is the lead vocalist and principal songwriter of the pop rock band the 1975.
70 Facts About Matty Healy
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Matty Healy is recognised for his lyricism, musical eclecticism, provocative onstage persona characterised as performance art, and influence on indie pop music.
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Matty Healy is the recipient of four Brit Awards, and two Ivor Novello Awards including Songwriter of the Year, and has been nominated twice for the Mercury Prize and Grammy Awards.
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Matthew Timothy Matty Healy was born on 8 April 1989 in Hendon, north London.
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Matty Healy is a son of actors Tim Healy and Denise Welch; they divorced in 2012.
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Matty Healy's maternal grandfather was a drag queen, and younger brother, Louis, is an actor.
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Matty Healy lived in Melbourne from the ages of two to four but spent most of his early years living on a cattle farm in Hedley on the Hill, Northumberland.
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Matty Healy's parents were working actors of stage and television for much of his childhood, with his mother becoming a celebrity figure in his teens.
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Matty Healy himself had no interest in acting but did appear as an extra in his parents' television shows including Coronation Street, Byker Grove and Waterloo Road.
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The first guitar Matty Healy ever played was used by Dire Straits to record "Romeo and Juliet".
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Matty Healy got his first drum kit when he was five, and started doing karate by seven eventually earning a black belt by his teens.
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Matty Healy has remembered this aspect of his childhood as "exciting" rather than "distressing".
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Privately educated at Lady Barn House School and King's School, Macclesfield, Matty Healy was expelled from the latter for starting a fight club.
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Matty Healy won a King's School talent contest at age 12, with renditions of songs by the La's and Oasis, and told a local newspaper he hoped "to be a pop singer" when he grew up.
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Matty Healy then transferred to the local comprehensive Wilmslow High School, where he met and befriended his future bandmates.
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Matty Healy obtained GCSEs in Music and English, subsequently attending music college for three months before dropping out.
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Years later, Matty Healy called school "a tedious imposition, getting in the way of me being a pop star".
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In 2002, at the age of 13, Matty Healy was recruited by Adam Hann to be the drummer of a band he was forming with Ross MacDonald at Wilmslow High School.
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Matty Healy eventually met George Daniel who took over as the band's drummer.
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Matty Healy recounted that the final name came from the scribblings found on his copy of the novel On the Road by Jack Kerouac that were dated "1 June, The 1975".
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Matty Healy directed the music video of Pale Waves single "Television Romance", which he co-produced.
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In 2019, Matty Healy received a Grammy Award nomination for Best Rock Song for "Give Yourself A Try" from their third studio album, A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships.
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In October 2021, Matty Healy guest-opened for friend Phoebe Bridgers at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles on her Reunion Tour where they performed the first live duet of the 1975 "Jesus Christ 2005 God Bless America".
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In 2022, Matty Healy wrote and produced, with Daniel and Jack Antonoff, the 1975's fifth studio album, Being Funny in a Foreign Language, which gave the band its fifth consecutive number one in the UK.
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Matty Healy embarked on a world tour entitled At Their Very Best, to support the band's new album.
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Matty Healy co-wrote an unreleased song with Lewis Capaldi for his Broken by Desire to Be Heavenly Sent album, and he worked with Taylor Swift on some material for her 2022 album, Midnights.
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In 2023, Matty Healy provided additional vocals and drums for the Japanese House singles "Sunshine Baby" and "Boyhood" respectively.
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In 2013, Matty Healy listed his ten all-time favourite albums for Louder Than War.
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In 2020, Matty Healy recorded a podcast series interviewing his musical heroes; he had conversations with Stevie Nicks, Brian Eno, Steve Reich, Kim Gordon, Mike Kinsella, Conor Oberst and Bobby Gillespie.
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Matty Healy has cited the Blue Nile as his "favourite band of all time", and Talking Heads and Sigur Ros as influences.
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Matty Healy has been influenced by literary figures including Joan Didion, Jack Keruoac, Seamus Heaney, and Arthur Rimbaud, describing Rimbaud's work as "dense and revolutionary".
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Matty Healy has discussed how stand-up comedy is the biggest influence on his songwriting.
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Matty Healy possesses a tenor vocal range, with a rasp from his cigarette smoking.
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The New Yorker stated that Matty Healy has a "shape-shifting voice" where "he croons and wails and screams and murmurs, shading his delivery with a variety of personae".
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The lyricism of Matty Healy is known for its wit, humour, and self-awareness.
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Pitchwork stated that Matty Healy "is cursed with a self-awareness that can turn a simple idea into a galaxy-brain diatribe".
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Matty Healy has stated that he used to consider himself a beat poet, before describing his job as "curating my life through music".
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Matty Healy often writes about the millennial generation, masculinity, current affairs, as well as his own life and relationships.
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Matty Healy is known to write songs using typewriters as well as pen and paper for the "commitment that goes with the ceremony" of writing.
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Matty Healy has invited both male and female members of his audience to kiss him during his performance of the song "Robbers" and, on one occasion, sucked a fan's thumb.
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The Guardian said it sparked conversations regarding consent, fantasy and art in 2022, and noted that Matty Healy asked for fans' permission first.
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Matty Healy has influenced numerous music artists and has inspired several singer-songwriters with the Chicago Tribune describing him as "one of the younger generation's most influential artistic leaders".
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Matty Healy changed so much about who I am, how I write music.
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Matty Healy has mentored artists such as No Rome, Beabadoobee, the Japanese House, and Heather Baron-Gracie, and co-produced their early works.
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In 2023, Nashville-based singer Knox released the pop rock track "Not The 1975" inspired by a woman commenting "That's cool but you're not Matty Healy," after telling her he's a musician.
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Matty Healy identifies as a liberal and a traditional progressive, and has been outspoken in his support of progressive issues since the start of his career.
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In 2017, Matty Healy publicly encouraged voting Labour despite saying he does not know "how to use [his] 'platform' in order to incentivise democracy".
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In June 2019, Matty Healy won Ally of the Year at the Diva Awards for using his platform to promote LGBTQ rights.
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Matty Healy has criticised the transgender laws of Mississippi calling it "bullshit" in an onstage speech during their Still.
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Matty Healy has been outspoken about women's rights, particularly as it relates to the music industry.
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In 2018, Matty Healy apologized after stating that "the reason misogyny doesn't happen in rock and roll anymore is because it's a vocabulary that existed for so long that it got weeded out".
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Also that year, Matty Healy denounced Alabama's anti-abortion laws during a concert in the state.
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Matty Healy was not raised in a religious household and identifies as an atheist.
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Matty Healy is a patron of Humanists UK, a charitable organisation that promotes secular humanism, human rights and represents non-religious people.
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Early in his career, Matty Healy had been known for his ever-changing hairstyles and fashion which included wearing his collection of vintage shirts, and skirts on tour.
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Matty Healy has described this period as him having an identity crisis, and his style as "sexually confused Edward Scissorhands".
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Matty Healy has built a reputation as an unusually candid interviewee.
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Matty Healy has been described by The Times as "the first, and last, great frontman of the social media era".
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Matty Healy first used the online pseudonym Truman Black as a teenager to prevent fans of his parents messaging him on Facebook, and later used it as his handle across his public social media accounts on Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr.
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Matty Healy deactivated his Twitter account in 2020 because he no longer wanted to participate in the "culture war" and wanted to take a more considered approach to his public statements.
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Amid online criticism that his tweet was self-promotional, Matty Healy apologised and deactivated his account.
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Matty Healy partnered with Amnesty International to raise awareness of various online petitions.
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In January 2023, a video of Matty Healy performing the band's song "Love It If We Made It" went viral.
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Matty Healy appeared on the leftist irony podcast The Adam Friedland Show in February 2023.
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Matty Healy agreed to be a guest partly to provoke a reaction from his fanbase.
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Ice Spice would later recall that Matty Healy has personally apologised to her multiple times for his appearance and they remain on good terms.
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Matty Healy joked about watching internet pornography in which black women are "brutalised", supposedly from the controversial website Ghetto Gaggers.
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Matty Healy had been in a relationship with Australian model Gabriella Brooks, and English singer FKA Twigs.
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In 2019, Queerty reported that Matty Healy had come out as an "aesthete".
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Matty Healy has been nominated twice for the Mercury Prize and Grammy Awards.