The The was always a personal project for songwriter Matt Johnson. Started in 1979, when Johnson was a teenager, the post-punk outfit became central to the political and personal pop of the 1980s. Never a singles band, despite a few minor hits, their albums were successful: Infected in 1986 reached 14, followed by 1989's Mind Bomb at number four and 1993's Dusk at number two. Band members included Johnny Marr and DC Collard, with other collaborators including JG Thirlwell, Jools Holland, Neneh Cherry, Zeke Manyika, and Sinead O'Connor - a Who's Who of 1980s independent pop.A reluctant live musician, Johnson created Infected: The Movie instead of a world tour in 1986. The Mind Bomb band, including Marr and Eller, launched the 1989-90 The The vs The World tour. Johnson appeared to retire following 2000's Naked Self, although he kept busy, with a sideways move into scoring movies. It wasn't until 2018 that The The returned to playing live and this was followed in 2024 with the new album, Ensoulment and its accompanying tour, almost a quarter of a century after the band's last recorded music. In recent years, Johnson has been busier than ever with podcasts, an Official Bootleg series,and other idiosyncratic projects.
The AuthorBrian J. Robb is the New York Times and Sunday Times bestselling biographer of Leonardo DiCaprio, Johnny Depp, and Brad Pitt. He has also written books on silent cinema, the films of Philip K. Dick, Wes Craven, Laurel and Hardy, the Star Wars movies, Superheroes, Gangsters, and Walt Disney, as well as science fiction television series Doctor Who and Star Trek, and Depeche Mode for Sonicbond Publishing. His illustrated books include an Illustrated History of Steampunk and Middle-Earth Envisioned, a guide to J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings (Winner, Best Book, Tolkien Society Awards). He is a Founding Editor of the Sci-Fi Bulletin website and lives near Edinburgh, UK.
If given his time over again, musician and songwriter Matt Johnson may have chosen a more user-friendly band name for his musical endeavours over the next 45 years. As it was, aged just 17 in 1978, Johnson – at the urging of his friend and early collaborator Keith Laws – chose The The, a name that would confound search engines in the 21st-century internet age. Even Johnson’s actual birth name doesn’t help much. In a pop music context, there is Jamiroquai’s keyboard player, Matt Johnson, and another independent UK- based singer/songwriter also named Matt Johnson! Beyond music, Johnson shares his name with a Canadian actor and film director, an author of paperback thrillers and a Welsh broadcaster!
Asked about the band name in 2006, Johnson was philosophical. Talking toChaos Control, he rather wearily noted: ‘It has been raised before and, of course, I have thought about it and received numerous complaints about it, too. Obviously, I cannot change the name of my band at this late stage, but what we have tried to do is to get Sony [owner of the back catalogue] to contact various online retailers to tweak their search engines to accommodate the name. Some have responded to this. It also depends on how you type the name: The The, “The The”, ‘TheThe’.’
On the other hand – as so often in his lengthy (and, perhaps, underproductive) career – Johnson took a perverse delight in being difficult to find. ‘It does make it harder to find unauthorised recordings, bootlegs, [and] free downloads of The The, which I’m quite happy about’, he candidly admitted. ‘Also, in the internet age when people are becoming increasingly spoilt and expect to find anything [and] everything they want instantly, maybe it’s a good thing that The The has gone back to being the underground, word of mouth band it always was? Maybe it’s good for people to have to dig around a little to find the things they want rather than having everything served up...?’
Back in 1979, when Johnson was just a teenager, such future concerns were far from his mind. His musical experiments began with reel-to-reel tape, that most analogue of mediums. He began working with overdubbing, combining his vocals with his self-taught musical abilities (‘I’ve always been reluctant to describe myself as a musician in a lot of ways’, he toldTape Op), in the basement of his parents’ pub, The Crown. He quickly turned that experience into a professional opportunity when he secured the position of ‘tape op’ – a tape operator, or more formally, ‘an apprentice sound engineer’ – at De Wolfe Studios at the heart of London’s Soho, not too far from that city’s own Tin Pan Alley, Denmark Street. Eager to impress, Johnson was given permission by his bosses to use his downtime to work on his own music, utilising the studio’s equipment.
Across its history, with various combinations of members, The The have never been a chart-storming outfit. By 2024, as the band embarked on their first tour since 2018, accompanying new albumEnsoulment – the first for 25 years – the band had racked up a mere 52 weeks in the top 75 singles chart, with only seven of those reaching the top 40. The two highest chart hit singles were theDisinfected EP (1994), which reached number 17, and the band’s political anthem ‘The Beat(en) Generation’, which reached number 18. Between them, those two records only troubled the singles chart for nine weeks. ‘Heartland’, the third most-popular single, made it to number 29 and spent 11 weeks in the charts.
It was a different and more successful story with album re
