He appears to have some self-awareness. On Part of the Band, released two years ago on the 1975’s latest record, Healy sings, “Am I ironically woke? The butt of my joke? / Or am I just some post-coke, average, skinny bloke / Calling his ego imagination?”
In a lengthy New Yorker profile published while he was dating Swift, Healy was asked if he had been deliberately baiting the tweenyboppers and left-wingers (he once recorded a spoken-word track with Greta Thunberg) that forms the bulk of the 1975’s fanbase.
“A little bit,” he replied. “But it doesn’t actually matter. Nobody is sitting there at night slumped at their computer, and their boyfriend comes over and goes, ‘What’s wrong, darling?’ and they go, ‘It’s just this thing with Matty Healy.’ That doesn’t happen.”
“If it does,” he went on, “you’re either deluded or you are, sorry, a liar. You’re either lying that you are hurt, or you’re a bit mental for being hurt. It’s just people going, ‘Oh, there’s a bad thing over there, let me get as close to it as possible so you can see how good I am.’ And I kind of want them to do that, because they’re demonstrating something so base level.”