The The: C/D, S&D

great post. Perfect is his best bad but truly great song

heh thanks for the recommendation. I will look it up

i feel like all great songs that i connect with are similarly flawed? now I know how God felt when he created that world while on that bender. 4AD was a weird label in retrospect. how do you compute modern english, cocteaus, the the, red house painters in one accounting book? that's just straight-up, buttoned-down madness.

Pixies, Throwing Muses, Wolfgang Press ...

yah, the list goes on. wherefore, Ivo? What is your throwing muse?

make sure you hear the ten-minute 45 of Perfect - it's utterly transcendent and one of the best ways to start the day ;)

this is my jam:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGoFClbrZS0

Del, I can't tell if you're quoting some goofy Amazon review or are sincere. But that record is damn near 'perfect'.

http://www.huckmagazine.com/art-and-culture/film-2/matt-johnson/

So is "The Inertia Variations" 3CD set all or mostly instrumental?

Seems to be a mix of covers by others, instrumentals, soundscapes, interview snippets and spoken word bits

https://www.thethe.com/radio-cineola-trilogy-new-boxset-announced/

holy crap that looks amazing im super stoked to see this!

and it genuinely pains me to see him speak about singing and playing his old stuff like this... the last tour was just so so so amazing

I've never forgotten seeing him perform on the Dusk tour. They started with "Sweet Bird of Truth", and after an extended intro, Johnson suddenly appeared out of *nowhere*, rasping "Six o'clock in the morning..." - really thrilling stuff. And meanwhile, Johnny Marr is at the side of the stage, all "Don't mind me, I'm just the guitar player." Good times.

i saw the tour with the auteurs supporting.
(not that they completed the tour of course !).
i loved the dual microphone thing : normal vocals o the right hand side, and then the distorted vocals on the left.
dont think we had marr on guitars by that time as it was quite a while after Dusk, but it was still very intense and absolutely fantastic.

as much of a fan of The The i am, this boxset does not interest me in the slightest.
i love the 2017 RSD single, its definitely classic The The, and so i want a lot more, but spoken word pieces/demos/instrumantals etc just do not interest me in the slightest no matter how gorgeous the packaging is.

of course this all makes my one missed opportunity to go into full on fanboy mode all the more painful.
many years ago, i was in london for a rare 'event' (freelance hellraiser at bigsexyland as per sorted out by our very own doran), and the day after i was very hungover so ended up going for hair of the dog with a couple of extras.
i then spotted matt over the other side of the beer garden.
my knees started to shake, and i told the crew i was with re my hero worship.
they egged me on.
a little later, i saw matt then head to the bar for more drinks (or so i thought), and after some more nudging, i eventually thought 'f*ck it .. ' and headed in the direction of the bar.
only to find out he had not gone to get more drinks, but left the pub.

really looking forward to the upcoming shows.

Saw him tonight. Singing along to Love Is Stronger Than Death, Dogs of Lust, Slow Emotion Replay, the whole side a of Dusk actually, Armageddon Days, This Is the Day, is so so Classic. The sound was a bit too low, the beginning was a bit uncertain, he is not the biggest name in Denmark so having him on the main stage meant a lot of people were confused, but I'm so so happy.

Awesome. who is in the band?

I honestly don't know, not much information in the festival program. Perhaps other reviewers knows, I'll keep you posted. The keyboardist really ruled on Uncertain Smile.

this is the band lineup now: https://www.thethe.com/comeback-special-lineup-revealed/

no johnny marr unfortunately but a good sampling across the eras.

Earl Harvin rules.

re todays statement.
what a fucking hard thing to have to deal with.
and what a beautifully worded statement.

???

yeah, what?

A Statement from Matt Johnson: pic.twitter.com/ZmGyo7eeYa

— THE THE (@thethe) June 2, 2018

thank you ned.

wow. heartbreaking.

Official live album/DVD out October:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4W_pLvLUS4

Curious, I just checked in with his social media and ... still anti-vaxxy. Sad.

World tour to be announced, surprised as I thought his health was very bad

https://www.thethe.com/ensouled-world-tour-2024/

Huh. Didn't Johnson have a voice destroying throat infection or something? Also, didn't he have a bad case of COVID conspiracy brain?

dunno, I missed all of that (the covid thing; saw your previous post). I did think his voice had been destroyed though.

Would it fucking kill him to put out some new music or just release some of the scores of unreleased albums he made during the 80’s/90’s?

tbf he fucking released like seven new albums and dozens and dozens of other new compositions and an unreleased album from the 70’s between 2010 and 2020 without fucking dying, and given what happened last time he tried to put out unreleased music from the 80s and 90s he actually might not fucking be fucking able to

"This is the Day" is one of the top five songs to open your veins to. Had he done nothing else, that song would cement his place in the pantheon.

he's collecting money from Guardians of the Galaxy so likely doesn't feel compelled to over-release things that musically might not measure up

Dusk is still one of my fave albums of all time

It’s a shame he’s devolved into a “do your own research” internet weirdo but maybe he was always that way. I have no desire to see him again saw the 93 Dusk tour and there’s no way he can match that 30 years later. Would buy a vinyl repress of Dusk though.

"Dusk" tour was incredible, I remember it better than I remember the two "NakedSelf" shows I saw (which were also good). Wasn't able to see the last tour, but the concert film is pretty good!

Some decades ago I interviewed Matt Johnson. Don't remember much about it, but as a gift the publicist sent me a cool autographed promo photo. I always meant to get it framed, but kept forgetting, and every time I remembered I meant to do it I for the life of me could not find it. On multiple occasions I more or less went through every single place in the house, every closet, every receptacle for accumulated clutter or stuff I'd collected (I found six old issues of Slash magazine!), every shelf, every storage bin, everything, everywhere, I just couldn't find it. I was so stumped I started to suspect I *did* bring it somewhere to be framed but then forgot to pick it up, but that's not like me.

I had resigned myself to never seeing it again for so long that I once again forgot it ever existed. But yesterday, putting away some plates ... I found it! After 20 years!! Like, hanging with some plates and a couple of candle holders in this dining room dresser thing we have. But why was it there? Matt Johnson, why were you hiding with some plates and a pizza serving platter and some seldom used candlesticks? What were you thinking, you jerk?

Anyway. Now I've found it, and it was like this latent psychic burden I'd just gotten used to carrying suddenly lifted. Have you ever wanted something so badly that it possessed your body and your soul, through the night and through the day?

Lol

haha amazing

Yes, my mom told me years ago that when she was a young 'un she and a friend went to Sun Valley ski resort and were lounging in the outdoor pool when who should saunter by but Farley Granger, matinee idol of the day, whose PR person saw a good photo op and took a picture of him and his adoring "fans." I scoured the internet for years, looking for images from those old movie magazines (it wound up getting printed in one of them) to no avail. And then! When I was clearing out my parents attic to move them into their retirement community I opened a box and lo and behold, a perfectly preserved 8x10 glossy of the pic which I of course had framed forthwith, and post to social media every Mother's Day.

Whoa, from "Strangers on a Train"? That's cool.

New album! An actual album of new songs, not a soundtrack or a reissue. And tour dates! All at thethe.com

First single sounding pretty good. The The are still a band for whom the word "brooding" might have been coined:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biD-AmPI-Y4

Tour months, not tour dates.

"The album also marks the return of co-producer and engineer Warne Livesey, who previously worked on landmark THE THE albums Infected (1986) and Mind Bomb (1989)."

This is great news. In addition to being Johnson's two most brilliant collections of songs, those are two of my favourite *sounding* albums.

These look remarkably like tour dates to me xp:

https://www.thethe.com/tour-dates/

Not sure about that new single but I think this, only from 2020, was just wonderful

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HQ33Jq3-KE

The dates 404’d from the home page this morning (but I got them from his email, and they’re playing six blocks from me, whee)