Introduction

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 to Chaos 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 told Tape 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 album Ensoulment - 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 the Disinfected 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 releases. Both 1989's Mind Bomb (number four) and 1993's Dusk (number two) made the top five, an improvement on the two earlier albums: 1983's Soul Mining (number 27) and 1986's Infected (number 14). Even Johnson's typically idiosyncratic album of Hank Williams covers, Hanky Panky, made it into the top 30 at number 28. It was all the more disappointing that the sublime 2000 album Naked Self - the most recent original album prior to 2024's Ensoulment (which reached a respectable number 19) - only made it to number 45 and remained in the chart for a single week. His 1993 song 'Slow Emotion Replay', from his biggest hit album Dusk, neatly sums up Johnson's most frequent lyrical obsessions: 'So don't ask me about war, religion, or God, love, sex, or death...'

It's no wonder that Johnson released little new material for the better part of the next two decades, making his small but dedicated following wait. In the first decade of the 21st century, Johnson didn't touch his guitar for seven whole years. However, chart history alone does not do justice to the life and work of a musical creator as complex and conflicted as Matt Johnson.

Johnson was born in 1961, so he was exactly the right age to experience the tail-end of the DIY musical explosion of punk in the mid-1970s. Johnson grew up in pubs with his parents, Eddie and Shirley (of the Blitz generation - not the club, but the Second World War), and three brothers: Eugene, Andrew and Gerard. He and Andrew took advantage of instruments left by guest bands to play at being pop stars. His musical interest was sparked by living above The Two Puddings pub on Stratford Broadway, East London. The place Johnson called home had been notorious for its violence in the 1940s and 1950s, when it was nicknamed the Butcher's Shop thanks to the frequently spilt blood on its white tiles. Growing up, Johnson didn't know that history, but his father, Eddie Johnson, did. He was the landlord of The Two Puddings from the year after Matt Johnson's birth until the pub finally closed in 2000. It was a storied venue that had played host to the likes of The Who, Screaming Lord Sutch (whom Johnson remembered carting a skull with exotic red jewelled eyes around with him), The Small Faces and David Essex, who made his live debut in the pub. As a kid, Johnson was barely aware of who the acts were that his Uncle Kenny (Eddie's younger brother) was signing up to play. From his bedroom, he could hear the glorious noises they made, and wondered - as he drifted off to sleep - what it might be like to be them...

Johnson grew up in an environment in which music was all pervasive, and storytelling was an everyday working-class art form (his father, Eddie, was a frustrated writer - Johnson would publish his memoir Tales From The Two Puddings when Eddie was 80). Not allowed in the pub or out onto the Stratford streets, Johnson and his older brother, Andrew, lived in an imaginative world they conjured up in the back yard. The younger Johnson soon joined Andrew at the local school where he was terrorised by aggressive dinner lady 'Mrs Mac' (commemorated in his 2007 song). His younger brother, Eugene, joined the family in 1965, and by 1973, the quartet of brothers was completed with the arrival of Gerard (born on 1 January 1973, and hailed on the BBC's Nationwide as the first baby born since Britain entered the Common Market). Three of the brothers - Matt, Andrew and Gerard - would all work together in several artistic pursuits, from music and art to films.

There were other homes (a brief stint in the Suffolk countryside) and other pubs (the haunted 17th-century The King's Head in Ongar, where Johnson attended the local comprehensive). He remembers the first record he ever bought - T. Rex's 'Ride A White Swan', released as a single in October 1970. More interestingly, given his eventual musical evolution, Johnson also recalls buying 1974's Snowflakes Are Dancing, Isao Tomita's second album of electronic soundscapes (based on composer Claude Debussy's 'tone paintings') - a sophisticated taste for a 13-year-old.

Johnson's ambitions to make music emerged around the age of 11 in 1972, helped along by a friend from Ongar, Nick Freeston, who had been given a drum kit for Christmas. Johnson had an old acoustic guitar, and he 'appropriated' the family reel-to-reel tape recorder. They were joined in their musical endeavours by a third member, Russell Ball, who, due to his eccentric appearance and proficiency at school, was known as 'the Prof'. Their first efforts consisted of reproducing tracks from The Beatles' album Help. They called themselves Roadstar.

By 1974, the Prof was gone, replaced by Brett Giddings, who came with all sorts of exciting new equipment and even some musical competence. As Johnson recalled to biographer Neil Fraser: 'With Brett we went from playing these rather weedy acoustic versions of Beatles songs to playing things like 'Smoke On The Water', 'Black Night' and 'Rebel Rebel', and thinking 'This is great!'' They were joined by a fourth member, Matt Bratby, who had his own bass guitar. Around this time, Johnson got more serious about his musical proficiency and started piano lessons.

'[Roadstar] was my first band. That was a really important part of my life, and they were great guys - there was great camaraderie. The band was a wonderful creative outlet.' The long hot summer of 1976 and the arrival of punk did little to change Matt Johnson's prospects. Roadstar quietly fell apart as its various members left school and found jobs. For Johnson, too, school soon came to an end, and his indifferent academic performance meant his employment options were few. Working from a book titled So You Want To Be In The Music Business?, which big...