There's not many people who can write an album that serves as a harrowing commentary on the "sexual, spiritual, political and economic malaise of 1980s Britain" and emerge the other side with their reputation enhanced and credibility undiminished. Matt Johnson is one of them. The The's 1986 Infected album, along with the equally brilliant Soul Mining album of three years previous, copper-fastened Johnson's reputation as an intelligent and acerbic chronicler of prevailing socio-political mores. He's a sort of English version of Cathal Coughlan, if you dig the parochial analogy.
With a Stone Roses-like attitude to recording albums - Johnson frequently goes AWOL for years on end - he's not the sort of artist who needs desperately contrived PR ruses to maintain a "profile", opting instead for what these days seems like the quaintly anachronistic method of producing quality work.
When Johnny Marr (having got bored playing with Bryan Ferry and Keith Richards) hopped on board the The rantmobile at the end of the 1980s, it seemed like the band were teed up to enter the portals of the Hall of Fame - but the resulting album, Mind Bomb, imploded from the sheer weight of bombastic overload. The world was slowly changing from the harshness of the monetarist 1980s into the more touchy-feely (let's ditch Clause 4 and all our principles while we're at it) 1990s.
Not that Matt Johnson gives a flying folk song: now back with a brand new album, he obviously hasn't got the Changing Rooms people in to do a makeover on his ideology. On one of his pet concerns - the pervading westernisation of the world - he says: "it's a wonderful, terrible time at the moment. There's so much going on in the world, with genetically modified books, and animals and human cloning, and global corporatisation - and with all of this comes the blurring of ethical lines. "Personally, I think free market economics have caused as much devastation in the world as bombing raids from B52s." Roll over Britney Spears and tell Christina Aguilera the news - that is, if you're not too busy appealing to the base elements of the market with your new video.
And just don't get him started on new technology. In an era when chart-topping acts are mere ciphers, with the background noise that qualifies as their new single being produced by flicking switches as opposed to actually writing something, Johnson is an eloquent refusnik: "This new album is totally stripped down and that's because in music today, the possibilities are endless and it's easy to get swept away in a tidal wave of technology and lose sight of what you really want to express," he says. "I wanted a thick, fluid, slightly discordant sound laced with strong melodies and harmonies. It was crucial to start out with strict parameters - for instance, no keyboards, samplers, sequencers - or even harmonicas."
Neither is he enamoured of how record companies are morphing into stock exchange entities. "I was with Sony for 17 years and we had a good relationship, but the last album I did for them, Gun Sluts, they took one listen to the demos and they freaked out and told me I was being too aggressive. "Looking around me now, it seems as if the shareholders and the accountants have totally taken over and they decide what music to release. It will help, though, that the Internet will help empower musicians as it frees them from that sort of control - also there's a lot of cheap recording equipment around."
When he releases singles now, Johnson goes against the grain by refusing to stick a bunch of remixes of the same song on the B-side. For example on the Sunken Man single the B-sides were made up of three other acts he admires (John Parrish, industrial band Foetus and the Belgian band Daau) covering the song. Asked for his dreamteam of people he'd like to see covering his work, he replies: "John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Hank Williams."
The new album, Naked Self, comes complete with all the usual caustic tales of apocalypse; but in there, also, are some melodic ballads. "I'm not all dark and angry," he says. "Songs on the new album like Phantomwalls and The Whisperers are very different. This part of me is often overlooked, but I hope not for much longer."
Naked Self by The The is on Nothing Records. The The play the Olympia, Dublin next Tuesday night.
